Local Student Loan Business a Family Affair

With a June 30 deadline looming to lock in lower fixed rates on consolidated student loans, the people at Goal Financial LLC are busier than ever.
The San Diego-based tender specializes in making federal guaranteed student consolidation loans, essentially refinancing multiple student loans at variable rates and converting it to a fixed rate over the full term.
"We had a record week last week and this one coming up we should break that record in terms of loan applications," said Ryan Katz, Goal Financial's chief executive and co-founder.
Three-year-old Goal Financial fielded about $100 million in loan applications for the week beginning June 13, he said.
Coincidentally, Ryan's older brother, Cary, is in the same business. He heads up another privately held student loan company in San Diego called College Loan Corp., which is also seeing a surge in business in recent weeks, driven by the impending increase on interest rates charged for student loans.
Mark Brenner, College Loan Corp.'s president, said with the interest rates on student loans ratcheting up nearly 2 percent starting July 1, many student borrowers are eager to lock in a fixed rate that could save them a considerable amount of money during the life of the loan.
According to a spreadsheet assembled by College Loan Corp., a student borrower with $20,500 in outstanding principal could save at least $2,272 over 10 years, compared with maintaining the variable rate loan.
The savings are even better if a borrower consolidates the loan within six months of graduation, or agrees to have the loan payments withdrawn automatically from their accounts, said College Loan Corp. spokeswoman Tracy Neumann.
As College Loan Corp.'s loan portfolio has expanded, so has its employment. It now has 505 staffers, compared with 450 at the end of 2004, Neumann said.
"We have about 37 openings right now in a range of positions in operations to sales and marketing," Brenner said.
Goal Financial said its loan portfolio today is more than $5 billion, making it the ninth largest of all student lenders. The largest, by far, is SLM Corp., better known as Sallie Mae. The former government agency and now publicly traded firm holds more than $100 billion in student loans.