They can't Slow down in the Louisiana area.. because if you do you will be back in Tornado/Hurricane season again. When one of those hits the price of the Building Materials in the AFTERMATH usually shoots up 10-20% at the local retailers for materials. I know the feeling about the loans... I used a credit union & got a Home Equity loan for my build at 6.75 % because they don't issue Construction Loans. It was a Owner Build house with Architect Assistance from my uncle who is Licensed in Virginia. The house turned out great & now I am getting a Refi for a 4.5% 15 year Note to pay off the loan & pay off my CC for items necessary to the build but not counted during the construction. Trust me..whatever your budget is ADD 20%-25% to the Cost!You will not get the same discounts that the Builder's gets. The Inspectors will cite all kinds of arcane CODE stipulations that MUST be fixed BEFORE you can proceed to the next step. Plus some of these contractors have 1 price for YOU to do your job (generally MORE) then what they will charge builder Bob to do the job. Your only building one house; builder Bob may be building 10, 20 or more... Now with my appraisal I did go up in Value but because rates in my area have depressed its not as worth as much as the "actual Cash" we have put into this project! However this is a 'permanent investment' for us (and possibly our parents) ; we thought about this home long and hard & plan on being here the rest of our lives. This is not a 'flipper' for us.. In the end we did get enough Value to exceed the equivalent of a 35% DP on our Final Appraised value once the improvements were made. But we told our Credit Union about the Cash reserves we had to make the loan work from the beginning..and we put off doing certain things like putting the Steam room/ Steam door in.A Tiled Shower will get you past your final inspection. All Paint & Trim work was done after the final inspection too. We learned a lot about building from this experience and we got a lot of sweat equity from doing things ourselves!

I would go to graduateleverage.com and see what they say. I don't know if you are aware that our illustrious Congress has allowed student loan rates to rise to almost 7%. You may already have a lower rate. There are calculators and assessment tools on their website to help you decide if you already have a better loan package. Good luck. I'll be in the same boat next year, only my loans will be almost $90k! Here is a link that might be useful: Graduate Leverage

My husband and I are in the same boat. We both graduated 7 yrs ago and had 2 loans each. We are both down to 1 loan each. Just last month both our loans went from about 4% to 8%. GRRR! We do get to declare the interest paid on our taxes but 8% is a bit higher than we are used too. The only thing I could think of is the things that Gloria mentioned and that we are also just chipping away at it slowly. Alot of my friends have paid theirs off already but they had less of a loan and only one person (husband or wife) had loans so it was half the amount as us. Hey, at least I know other people are in the same boat now. I feel like ours will never be paid off. However I know that I wouldn't be where I am today if I didn't have those loans! We could pay off one of our loans but then we would have no savings and we feel that a "rainy day" savings is far more important than being loan free. -renee

This won't be any different than any other loan. Contact your Farm Credit lender and arrange a meeting. They can explain the process. It's always a good idea to have a lender in the wings while you start your land search.