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Delaying student loan payments with deferment or forbearanceIf you have student loans and you can t afford to make your monthly payments, youmay want to consider delaying your repayment.The two main ways to delay payment on your student loans are through deferment and forbearance.With both methods, you are basically putting off making payments on your loan. The differenceis that deferment can cost less than forbearance.First let s look at deferment.You may have the option to defer your federal loans if you re back in school, in the military,or if you ve become unemployed and have a financial hardship. These aren t the onlyscenarios--you can take a closer look at studentaid.ed.gov to see which situations qualify.In any case, let s start with a standard ten-year repayment plan, where you ve gotthirty thousand dollars in loans, with fifteen thousand subsidized and fifteen thousand unsubsidizedat a four percent interest rate. On a standard ten-year plan, you would be paying aboutthree hundred five dollars a month.If you re not sure what subsidized or unsubsidized loans are, we talk about this in more detailin another video.But getting back to the chart, let s say you decide to continue your education andwill be studying full-time. Since you won t be making an income during this time, youdecide to defer your loans for the first year.So during this year, you don t have to make monthly payments. But your subsidized andunsubsidized loans will behave a bit differently. Interest won t accrue on your subsidizedloans, because the government will pay the interest on these for you. So at the end ofthis period, you ll still only owe fifteen thousand dollars, with no interest. However,interest will accrue on the fifteen thousand dollars of unsubsidized loans you have, whichmight work out to be around six hundred dollars over the course of a year. And that six hundreddollars gets added to the principal on this loan so that extra 600 begins to accrue interestas well.Now, you do have the option of paying the monthly interest while you re in school,but for this example, let s say you don t. Your year is up and you ve still got fifteenthousand dollars in subsidized loans and fifteen thousand six hundred dollars on yourunsubsidized loans leaving you with a balance of thirty thousand six hundred dollars.Now if you get on a ten-year plan, you re going to pay a slightly higher amount, thanin your original ten-year plan perhaps around three hundred ten dollars a month.What s that look like over the next ten years? You may pay seven thousand one hundredeighty dollars in interest over the life of the loan in comparison to the six thousandfour hundred fifty dollars on the original non-postponed loan.Next, let s look at forbearance. There are two types of forbearance: discretionary andmandatory.You can apply for a discretionary forbearance from your lender if you have a financial hardshipor suffer from an illness, but it s up to your lender to decide to grant it to you.If...