Unfortunately the Obama student loan forgiveness programs are only given towards federal student loans. Holders of private student loans can have a little relief by getting a private student loan consolidation. This way you can significantly lower your monthly loan payments by combining all the loans into one loan and therefore eliminating the stress of having to make multiple payments every month. While with a private student loan consolidation, you will be able to lower your interest rate, you will also have the chance to budget your money more effectively.

With a federal student loan, one can easily get a nice lower interest rate by consolidating their loans. However, private student loans are much more difficult to nail down. The problem is that it works similar to all other private loans where your credit score plays a significant role in determining what interest rate range you will be able to get. If you have bad credit, it is likely that you will get a high interest rate or even get outright denied for a consolidation loan. Moreover, currently, there are only very few private student loan lenders that are actively offering private student loan consolidation.

As the interest rate on private student loans are based on your credit score, what you could do to get a lower interest rate is to apply for a private consolidation loan. But this is only available to you if your credit score has improved (increased by 50-100 points or more) significantly since you got your first loan.

There are only a few lenders that actively offer private student loan consolidation. Below are the four that are most commonly used:

- Chase private consolidation loan
- Next Student private consolidation loan
- Student Loan Network private student loan consolidation
- Wells Fargo private consolidation loan

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