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Graduation Debt: How to Manage Student Loans and Live Your Life (CliffsNotes)

Graduation Debt is different from the competition because it provides a step-by-step road map for effectively managing student loan debt and having a successful financial life. Yet, it’s completely positive. The focus is less on sacrifice and more on not wasting money, so readers can live better lives while paying off debt.
The book's content is divided into small subsections geared toward those neck-deep in student debt. The brevity of each section makes the book digestible to those who aren’t inclined to focus on their finances. Readers are encouraged to take action steps such as finding long lost student loans that may have gone into default, discovering payment plans they can afford, consolidating loans when it makes sense to do so, saving money on eating out and groceries, improving credit scores, tweaking their debt-to-income ratios that's needed to buy a home, discussing their student loan and non-student loan debt with their significant others.
By the end of the book readers will be on the road to managing all their debt and having extra money for vacations and other fun stuff, too.
How to Miss Student Loan Payments Without Hurting Your Credit
Amazon-exclusive content from the author
Worried your credit will take a nose dive if you miss federal student loan payments? Your credit won’t be dinged if you call your loan servicer and qualify for a temporary payment reprieve.
What steps do you need to get approval for an excused absence from making payments?
1. Write down your monthly expenses and your monthly income on a piece of paper. Your loan servicer is going to want to know why you need a break from student loan payments.
2. Peruse the Department of Education’s or your servicer’s Web site to see if there are special reasons you might qualify for a payment break such as military service or you’re returning to school. You’ll find the words forbearance and deferment. These are the terms used for an approved temporary break from payment. The difference between the two is that in deferment the government will pay the interest charged until your deferment expires.
3. Write down circumstances that apply to you that you found on the same piece of paper as your finances.
4. Find the contact information for all your student loans. If you don’t have your paperwork for all your loan servicers, contact the department of Education or pull up your loan list by logging in to the National Student Loan Data System Web site.
5. Click on each loan that shows a balance in the Outstanding Principal column. Scroll down to the contact chart and write down the name of your servicer and the contact number. Repeat for each loan on which you still have a balance.
6. When you call each of your servicers, tell them you need either a deferment or forbearance. Then tell them your circumstances as to why you need a payment break. There may be a brand new type of forbearance or deferment that may work better for you.
7. Don’t accept more time than the maximum you could need at once, especially if you qualify for forbearance instead of a deferment. Why? Your interest still accrues if you are granted forbearance. For example, let’s say you have $60,000 in student debt at a rate of 5 percent. You decide to take a six-month payment break. Six months later, your loan has grown to $61,500 because of accrued interest and no payments made.
8. Fill out any necessary paperwork asked for by your servicer (s). Wait a week after you submit paperwork to call and verify paperwork has been received.
9. To protect your credit, wait to stop making payments until you’ve received a notice in writing from each servicer with the exact date your deferment or forbearance will begin and end. Call each servicer to verify this date and the date you should start making payments when your deferment or forbearance ends.
10. Keep your loan information in a folder in a place where you will be able to easily find the information later.

Actor who rose to fame in Hitchcock's Rope and Strangers On a Train, but refused to conform to Hollywood pressures

Early on in his career, the actor Farley Granger, who has died aged 85, worked with several of the world's greatest directors, including Alfred Hitchcock on Rope (1948) and Strangers On a Train (1951), Nicholas Ray on They Live By Night (1949) and Luchino Visconti on Senso (1953). Yet Granger failed to sustain the momentum of those years, meandering into television, some stage work and often indifferent European and American movies.

The reasons were complicated, owing much to his sexuality and an unwillingness to conform to Hollywood pressures, notably from his contract studio, MGM, and Samuel Goldwyn. Granger refused to play the publicity or marrying game common among gay and bisexual stars and turned down roles he considered unsuitable, earning a reputation – in his own words – for being "a naughty boy".

He was also the victim of bad luck, notably when Howard Hughes, the egomaniacal owner of RKO studios, took against They Live By Night, shelving it for a year before releasing it without fanfare. While his contemporary Charlton Heston had maintained that it was impossible not to launch his own acting career from two Cecil B DeMille movies, Granger had the far more difficult task of springboarding from his Hitchcock films, where the director had been the star.

Granger was born in San Jose, California, and first appeared on a school stage aged five. A dozen years later he was working in theatres around Los Angeles, when his dazzling good looks were noticed by a local talent scout. Aged 18 he made his screen debut as a curly-haired Russian soldier in Lewis Milestone's The North Star (1943).

Milestone also cast him in the role of a sergeant in The Purple Heart (1944), but by then the real war had caught up with the actor who, following his military service, took a long while to re-establish himself. Ray cast him in the leading role of They Live By Night, as the emotionally unstable crook Bowie, and by the time the film was released, he had appeared in the feeble Enchantment (1948) and the bucolic Roseanna McCoy (1949).

Luckily, he had also been loaned out for the claustrophobic Rope, filmed in 10-minute takes, resulting in an elegantly artificial movie, with the actors even more puppet-like than was usual with Hitchcock. Granger and John Dall were ideally cast as gay students who murder a friend to display a Nietzschean concept of supremacy. Granger played the highly strung Phillip, who cracks under the probing of their tutor (James Stewart). The public were less than enthusiastic. The director Jean Renoir scathingly dismissed the film, adding that it was "a film about homosexuals in which they don't even show the boys kissing".

Moving on, in 1950 Granger starred in the fast-paced thriller Side Street, directed by Anthony Mann, Edge of Doom and Our Very Own, before being rescued from the routine by Hitchcock, who cast him in another movie with a gay subtext, Strangers On a Train. He took the more conventional role of a handsome tennis champion, Guy Haines, mentally seduced by the unhinged Bruno (Robert Walker). Bruno obligingly murders the sportsman's wife, who is holding back Guy's career and social ambitions. When the killer wants repayment in kind – via the death of his own bullying father – matters go horribly wrong. Granger was bland rather than urbane, perplexed rather than intimidated, and despite charm, good looks and an attractive voice, he found his career not taking off.

Instead, routine fare such as Behave Yourself! (1951) and Small Town Girl (1953) followed. Even the sympathetic Vincente Minnelli made little of the star opposite Leslie Caron in The Story of Three Loves (1953). Granger needed to get out of his contract and was happy when he was loaned out by Goldwyn to star in Visconti's Senso. He was intriguingly cast as the embittered romantic Franz Mahler, an Austrian soldier who betrays the married woman besotted with him. She in turn betrays not only her country, Italy, but also those struggling politically against the invading forces. With dialogue by Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles, the film took heady flight into a sumptuous period melodrama. It took many months to shoot and Granger relished new freedom in Europe, buying a house in Rome. Despite this he never worked again in anything comparable to Visconti's masterpiece.

Returning sporadically to the US, he played in The Naked Street (1955) as a hoodlum taken under the overly protective wing of Anthony Quinn, then had a better role as the murderous roue in Richard Fleischer's The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955).

He returned to the stage, acting in The Carefree Tree on Broadway in 1955, and touring with The Seagull, Hedda Gabler and She Stoops to Conquer. Television offered the occasional bit of intelligent casting, including the grasping would-be lover in The Heiress (1961). The role had bee

Gene Kelly, Dancer of Vigor and Grace, Dies

Gene Kelly, the dancer, actor, director and choreographer who brought a vigorous athleticism, casual grace and an earthy masculinity to the high romance of lavish Hollywood musicals, died yesterday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 83.

His longtime publicity agent, Warren Cowan, said Mr. Kelly had never fully recovered from strokes he suffered in 1994 and last year.

Mr. Kelly's highly developed sense of the possibilities of dance on film invigorated classic musicals like "Anchors Aweigh," "On the Town," "An American in Paris" and "Singin' in the Rain."

A gifted dancer with his own vibrant style, he also flourished as an innovative choreographer and director in the 1940's and 50's, the heyday of the big, splashy Hollywood musical.

Mr. Kelly, who could also put over a song in a high, thin voice, brought to his films an inventive technique that enabled him to create unusual and imaginative dance routines that usually arose directly out of a plot or script situation.

Thus millions of moviegoers remember Mr. Kelly dancing merrily in a downpour in "Singin' in the Rain," hoofing with an animated mouse, Jerry, in "Anchors Aweigh," hopping over garbage cans in a sequence in "It's Always Fair Weather" and, with the aid of special process photography, dancing with himself in the "alter ego" number from "Cover Girl."

In addition to his movies, which included "The Pirate," "Brigadoon" and the drama "Inherit the Wind," Mr. Kelly was also a star on Broadway, where he created the title role of the heel as hero in "Pal Joey," choreographed "Best Foot Forward" and directed Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Flower Drum Song."

"I don't really know why I clicked," Mr. Kelly said many years later. "I didn't want to be a dancer. I just did it to work my way through college. But I was always an athlete and gymnast, so it came naturally.

"In the 1930's, when I started, Martha Graham was the only dancer doing anything modern, but she did it all to classical music. I couldn't see myself doing 'Swan Lake' every night, and I wanted to develop a truly American style. The only dancer in the movies at that time with any success was Fred Astaire, but he did very small, elegant steps in a top hat, white tie and tails. I was too big physically for that kind of dancing, and I looked better in a sweatshirt and loafers anyway. It wasn't elegant, but it was me."

Eugene Curran Kelly was born on Aug. 23, 1912, in Pittsburgh. His mother insisted that all five of the Kelly children take music and dance lessons, and in high school Mr. Kelly continued dance lessons while also playing on the football and hockey teams. His education at Pennsylvania State College was interrupted by the Depression, and his first job was teaching gymnastics at a summer camp for boys.

He was later able to major in economics at the University of Pittsburgh and received a degree in 1933, but jobs were scarce and he went to work for a dancing school partly owned by his mother. Two years later, the school was renamed the Gene Kelly Studio of the Dance and soon a successful branch was opened in Johnstown.

Meanwhile, Mr. Kelly directed plays produced locally and formed a dance act with his brother Fred, with whom he performed in a theater for children at the Chicago World's Fair in 1934. In the mid-1930's Mr. Kelly also redirected vaudeville acts that passed through Pittsburgh.

Mr. Kelly did not decide to try his luck in New York until 1938, when he was 27 years old. His first job was as a Broadway chorus boy in 1938's "Leave It to Me," dancing while Mary Martin sang "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," but the next year he won critical acclaim for his featured role as the comic hoofer in William Saroyan's play "The Time of Your Life."

That success led to his being cast in "Pal Joey," the 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical, in which he played the unscrupulous central character so convincingly that John Martin, a critic for The New York Times, said, "He is not only glib-footed, but he has a feeling for comment and content that give his dancing personal distinction and raise it several notches as a dancing art."

Mr. Kelly's ability to meld singing and dancing with characterization and the demands of the play's plot attracted so much notice that David O. Selznick signed him to an exclusive Hollywood contract. At the time, Mr. Kelly was appearing in "Pal Joey" at night and by day choreographing the Broadway musical hit "Best Foot Forward."

In 1941, he left for Hollywood, where he was to bring a new vitality to dance on film and help change the whole concept of movie musicals.

Mr. Selznick had no musicals planned, however, and lent Mr. Kelly to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio mo

According to a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics, an estimated 65 percent of recent college graduates are burdened by student loans. Although the average debt is $19,000, loans can exceed $50,000 and may be much higher for those who attend graduate school, law school, or medical school. Many students, faced with the task of repaying such a large amount of money, become overwhelmed merely thinking about it. But, using this new book, you can learn how to eliminate your student loans and be debt free. In this exhaustively researched book, you will learn everything you need to know about student loans, including grace periods, deferment, forbearance, interest rates, co-signors, exit counseling, prepayment, discharges, cancellation, default, and much more. You will create a repayment schedule; understand the various repayment options, such as graduated repayment, level repayment, income-sensitive repayment, extended repayment, serialization, and income-contingent repayment; and be able to choose the appropriate plan for your unique situation. Additionally, you will learn how to save money through consolidation, how to secure the best interest rate, how consolidating can improve your credit score, how to use lender incentive programs to save money, and how to lower interest rates. Whether you are a current student looking to get a jumpstart on repayment or you are a recent graduate trying to wade through the letters you are receiving from your lenders and consolidation companies, How to Wipe Out Your Student Loans and Be Debt Free will be an indispensable companion.