Author Topic: Student Loan Refinance experiences (SoFi vs. Earnest vs. Commonbond)  (Read 7042 times)

bryannu

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As a strong believer of disruptive technologies, I've tried few leading Fin tech to refinance my student loan: SoFi, Earnest, CommonBond and Credible. Eventually I chose SoFi, with 3.5% Fixed for 5 Years.  It’s a great rate and I’m happy to share my experiences.

Background info
Private loan around 90k with interest rate of 5.5% variable from school
Personal Credit: No mortgage or auto loan history. Mainly credit cards, Credit Karma score is around 750+ for both TransUnion and Experian. But Citi Fico score is only around 720

Here is the summary of my experiences:
To begin with, I searched referral links from different companies and then signed up to get a quote. I still think this is the best strategy: when you are considering refinancing your loan, use the referral links from SoFi (http://www.sofi.com/refer/5/104940) and other leading players to set up your account and then shop your rates! It never hurt to get more options.

Here is a quick snap shot about what I got eventually(5-Y Fix rates):
SoFi: 3.5%, 5 days to get final approval, Experian report used, Referral Bonus $100 from SoFi: http://www.sofi.com/refer/5/104940
Earnest: 4.47%, 3 days to get final approval, Experian report used, Referral Bonus $200;
CommonBond: 5.35%, Didn’t finish, Transunion report used, Referral Bonus $200;
Credible:3.99% (conditional approval), Didn’t finish.


Detailed experiences as below:
SoFi: as soon as I submitted my application, it got conditional approval immediately and I provided additional documentations to verify income etc.  With all the documents received, it took 5 days to get a final approval.  With 3.75% without Autopay, 3.5% with Autopay. At the time of final approval, the loan officer actually called me and congratulated on my offer. I might be biased about SoFi, but it seems they offered the least referral bonus for a reason; they give you better rates, at least in my case, the rate I got from SoFi totally out weight the $100 difference in referral bonus. Think about it!

Earnest: this is another leading player in the market.  It’s smooth and indeed they requested lots of information at the very beginning, such as all bank information and login to verify your financial situation and they came back to ask for details about some big transactions. For example, there was a 10,000 cash debit from my account, they asked me why. And I explained that I used that money to repay my student loan. Eventually, they approved my loan very fast, with 5-Y 4.72% fix rate. 

CommonBond: I submitted the application at the same time as others, but never got even conditional approval because I don’t have a paper form of monthly statement. I uploaded a screen shot of my statements online, they kept on bugging me for my latest monthly statement even after I called them and said I don’t have a paper statement. Anyways, they rates aren’t competitive at all, 5-Y fixed 5.35%, pending verification of my documents!!! I didn’t proceed after I learned about the rates.

Credible: it’s a market place to get loans. I submitted the application without consent to do a hard pull on my credit to preview potential rates and I got rates with lowest 3.99% through another bank. But I wasn’t sure about this model, after all, I don’t know anything about the bank before and I saw some reviews about how difficult to work with the bank.  I didn’t proceed further.

Others: I checked traditional banks such as capitalone, wellsfago, their lowest rates just aren’t that competitive at all, so I didn’t bother to apply.

Let me know if you have any questions, happy to answer!

Bryannu
« Last Edit: January 28, 2016, 01:40:47 PM by bryannu »

 

Wow, a phone plan for fifteen bucks!