David17

I'm in a similar situation though yours is definitely a different order of magnitude. I'm starting out grad school with $115,000 in student loan debt. I know what you mean when you say you worry about it everyday because I do too. The only thing that you can really do is try to maximize your long term earning potential. If the difference in getting a graduate degree over 20 or 30 years of salary outweighs the added interest on deferring your loans during grad school then do it. DO NOT consolidate your federal and private loans. The federal government does have programs set up where they will help you to reduce your federal loan debt if you can't pay it. The private loans are basically immune from bankruptcy and the only way you get out of them is if you die. After you have exhausted any federal help with your loans then you can consolidate them and that will save you some money on interest. You can negotiate with the companies to get extended repayment terms with lower monthly payments based on what you can afford but that just adds more interest in the long run. What I am planning to do after I (hopefully) find a job is: start repaying as much on the highest interest loan as possible and pay the minimum on the restThe interest rates float so consolidate after I know I've gotten the best interest rate possible and the most federal forgiveness possibleGet as long of a repayment term as possible so that my monthly payments are minimalPay as much as I possibly can over the minimum payments so that I get out from under it sooner but I can afford to scale back if I need to.Every pay raise that I get will go directly into increasing my loan repayments.If you wait to consolidate until you've been paying on the loans for a while you can get a good fixed rate, help from the feds on their loans, and a 30 year term (in addition to maybe 10 years of just paying unconsolidated loans to total 40 years of repayment) so that you can have as low of a monthly payment as possible. This is the only way I've come up with so that the loan payments wont be crushing.