Being organized offers real benefits — no more hours spent looking for misplaced financial aid forms, wage and salary statements, or school transcripts. It’s a real time-saver and well worth the time it takes to set up a system that works for you.

Here are some tips for getting organized:

1. Get a desk or set up a cabinet or drawer as your “desk.” This is where you’ll keep stationery, bills to be paid, and documents to be filed.

2. Get a file cabinet or metal file box. This is where you’ll keep the papers and documents you don’t use often.

3. Set up a folder system for your desk. Keep the following folders:

• Bills to be paid
• Documents to be filed

4. Keep the following folders in your file cabinet or box:

• Bills paid (by year)
• Canceled checks and bank statements (by year)
• Tax returns
• Financial aid documents (including promissory notes for loans)
• Academic documents (including standardized test scores, transcripts, academic
recommendations, copies of diplomas and certificates)

• Job placement documents (including resumes, test scores, and job recommendations
from former supervisors)

• Insurance policies (e.g., automobile, health, life)
• Automobile documents (including servicing receipts)

5. Keep hard-to-replace documents, including your passport and birth certificate, in a bank safety
deposit or another safe location.

6. Get a loose-leaf notebook. Record semi-permanent information, including:

• Your monthly budget
• Credit card account and telephone numbers
• Names and telephone numbers of your “advisers,” including your faculty adviser, financial aid counselor, club advisors, and loan officer

7. Sort through and dispose of the documents in your file or box periodically. How long should you keep documents? Use the following list as your guide:

• Keep 1 – 3 years: Bills and expired insurance records.
• Keep 4 – 6 years: Tax returns, bank statements, and canceled checks.

Note: Keep canceled checks indefinitely if you may need them as a proof that you made a payment. Although credit card statements and telephone and utility bills show when a

payment was credited to your account, insurance companies and landlords do not send a confirmation of payment. Hold on to that check if there is any chance you’ll need it as proof  of payment.

• Keep until all education loans are fully repaid:

Financial aid documents, promissory notes, disclosure statements, account statements, etc.

• Keep indefinitely: Academic records and job placement documents (except those related to jobs you rejected or for which you were not interested)

That’s all there is to it! Good record-keeping skills last a lifetime and minimize the frustration of hunting for documents and information.

But that actually may be one good thing to come out of the scandal. The advice about deciding whether and with whom to consolidate hasn’t changed. It’s just become even more relevant.

“The current scandal reinforces the need to be a savvy consumer and examine carefully any offer you receive no matter where it comes from,” said Lauren Asher, associate director of Project Student Debt and the Institute for College Access and Success.

Indeed, says publisher of StudentDebtsRelief.com, “even when a school’s preferred lender list is unbiased, you still have to identify which loans are best for you.”

The question of whether to consolidate your federal loans depends on the type of loans you have, their rate (variable or fixed) and your goal: Do you want to reduce the interest you pay long-term? Lower your monthly payment? Pay just one bill instead of several? Get better discounts?

It also depends on whether you’ve already consolidated the loans in question before. By law, you may not consolidate the same loans twice.

Here’s what to consider if you have:

Stafford Loans

If your Stafford loans were issued before July 1, 2006 they are variable-rate loans.

What determines the change in the variable rate every July is the yield on the 3-month Treasury bill during the last T-bill auction in May. Currently, the yield is very close to where it was a year ago. So if the 3-month yield doesn’t move much between now and the end of the month, payments on your Stafford loans are not likely to go up much, if at all, after July 1.

So there’s little reason to consolidate if your sole goal is to lock in a lower rate this year.

But there is one exception: if you’re still in your so-called grace period, defined as up to six months after your graduation. That’s because you still are enjoying the “in-school” rate, which is about 0.6 percentage points less than it will be when your grace period ends and you go into repayment.

Consolidating before your grace period ends lets you to lock in that lower rate. Technically, you may lose out on some of your grace period because you will need to begin repayment within 60 days of consolidating.

But if you apply for consolidation before July 1, a lot of lenders can set it up so that the clock on that 60 days doesn’t start until close to the last two months of your grace period, Richard said.

There’s also little reason to consolidate if you want to lock in a lower rate and you got your Stafford loan after July 1, 2006. That’s because those loans are fixed rate loans at 6.8 percent and won’t change.

Whether you have variable or fixed rate Staffords, however, you might consider consolidating if you want to reduce your monthly payments. You can do so by combining your loans into one loan and extending the repayment term.

But by doing so you greatly increase the amount of interest you’ll pay. By changing your repayment term from 10 years to 20, you’ll cut your monthly payment by a third, but you’ll double the amount of interest you pay long-term, Richard said.

A 30-year term is even more expensive. Say you have $20,000 in fixed-rate Stafford loans. Asher notes that you’ll pay $7,619 in interest on them over 10 years. But if you consolidate and extend the repayment term to 30 years, you’ll lower your monthly payment by $100 but you’ll end up paying $26,935 in interest.

Besides rates and monthly payments, weigh discount incentives when considering consolidation. Many lenders offer breaks if, say, you direct debit your payments or pay on-time for 36 consecutive months.

Compare not only consolidation discounts offered by different lenders, compare them to the discounts you’re currently enjoying.

Sometimes, Richard said, “discounts for consolidated loans are inferior to those on unconsolidated loans.”