I'm not the OP, but I refinanced with SoFi about 4 months ago and so far I've been very happy. My refi brought my rate down from 7.8% to 4.3% (this is variable but so far hasn't moved- tied to LIBOR). They use TruStudent to manage your repayment of the loan. It was fairly easy to set up autopay and I get email reminders each month about my autopay transaction. They are also supported by Mint, which is nice. I haven't yet started to make extra payments on this loan, so I can't comment about how easy they make that process.
PM me if you have additional questions or are interested in my referral link- it gives both of us a $100 credit if you use it.
Thanks for the input! I will definitely use your referral code once I'm ready to do this.
I have both consumer and SL debt from law school and have been aggressively paying down consumer debt since finding MMM in May, 2013. In May, 2014, I submitted to SoFI for preapproval and was declined. I kept slamming my consumer debt (reduced by about $10k since May) and reapplied about 10 days ago. I was preapproved -- yay!
I am inclined to choose the variable, 10-year repayment scheme at 3.91% with the plan to pay it off in 5 years instead of 10. The variable rate is capped at 8.95% and given that I'm currently paying 7.55% (highway robbery, IMHO) that seems like a risk worth taking. It will give me a base payment of about $1580/ mo but I can add roughly another $1200 per month on top of that.
I think I will wait until perhaps December to do the formal application -- by then I'll have another $5k of consumer debt paid off and I'm hoping to get a slightly better rate from SoFi because of that. I'll keep you posted.
