I'm a fan of Suze Orman's lectures when they play on PBS, and she has discussed consolidating loans. There are some good reasons to do it, if you can lump them all into one payment instead of four, for example, and if there is a benefit from the interest rate.

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I just checked with her web site and searched on Student Loan Consolidation. Alas, you just missed a huge deadline. http://bit.ly/9cI1G If you had consolidated before July 1, you could have gotten a rate of 2.875 for all of them. Now, after July 1, the rate has gone up. At the writing of that article, she said:

****But if you do nothing now, or consolidate after July 1, the base loan rates are going to jump up. We won't know the final figures until later in June, but it's likely the in-school/grace period rate will be in the vicinity of 4.5 percent and the out-of-school rate will adjust to close to 5.2 percent.****

Since 5.2 is lower than the 6.9 rate you now carry, I would (personally) look into consolidating the loans that are at 5.2% interest or higher, and leave the lower 3.03% one and any others below 5.2% alone. If they make you combine them all, then do the math and determine if the cumulative amount at the 5.2% rate is better than all of the various amounts you're paying separately. Paying one bill instead of several is desirable, certainly, and the total amount you pay each month might come down. But if you get a lower monthly payment by exchanging that for a higher interest rate over a longer period, then you're not saving money. If the total interest you pay is higher than what you owe right now, then decide if you'd rather have the lower monthly payment and pay it out for longer, or if you'd rather bite the bullet and pay more each month but in toto, pay less.

By way of disclaimer, I'm not a financial advisor, and though I finished college without any student loan debt, I am myself currently managing the payment of some credit card debt. If you are interested in learning some general strategies (consumer protection stuff, not these rip-off companies you hear on AM radio and late nite TV) about bringing your costs in general down, not just your college student loans, then you might want to read some of the articles by Dave Lieber, the Watchdog columnist at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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Make sure that your electric, phone, cable, and other bills are as low as you can manage so you can pay off your student loans faster and save interest over time. If you need help finding good providers, he offers a lot of links to consumer advocacy sites, to state agencies that compare rates, etc. He also has friends, other journalists, who do the same thing at newspapers around the U.S., and I've seen links to some of their pages. So even if you aren't in Texas, there may still be help from a local journalist who has researched this stuff. (Why don't you Google "consumer advocate journalist YOUR STATE" and see what happens?)

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For Lieber's site, visit http://www.watchdognation.com/ You will find a review of Lieber's most recent book, Watchdog Nation, if you poke around his site. I wrote that review last month after realizing I should have tried to do more to help a friend find a good roofer for his house. My review was too late to help my friend, but if you're searching for a source of common sense information on how to deal with all sorts of creditors, than read through his essays that already ran in the paper, or get a copy of his book and read it.

So examine ALL of your payments right now, and decide what to do about those student loans in the context of everything that you're typically paying out. And good luck in not only paying these loans off, but in starting to save for your future!