You’re taking time off from school

If you were expecting to start making payments on your loan within the period of extended forbearance, your first payment won’t be due until January. Usually, interest accrues during a grace period, but if your sixmonth grace period overlaps with the administrative forbearance period, interest won’t grow.

Use this time to find out who your servicer is and what your first bill will look like.

If you think you can’t make your minimum payment come January, you can apply for an incomedriven repayment plan to cap payments at a portion of your income (it could be zero if you don’t have a job). Apply for incomedriven repayment at least two months before repayment starts.

Federal loans typically have a grace period of six months after you leave school. If you have student loans and last attended school in the spring, your payments would start to come due this fall. The extended forbearance period would delay your first payment until January.

When you resume classes, you can defer payments until you finish school as long as you are enrolled at least half time. But student loans get only one grace period; you won’t have another after you graduate

Student loan borrowers with the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program or Federal Perkins loans not owned by the Education Department don’t have access to the automatic forbearance.

To take advantage of the forbearance, you’ll need to combine your loans into a federal direct consolidation loan. Consolidating loans will cause any unpaid interest to capitalize, or be added to the principal balance. Contact your loan servicer to determine how consolidation will affect the total repayment amount, interest rate and loan balance.