Guest Post : US Co-signer : From an American's perspective

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I was searching for US cosigner and was finding some hard facts from the process. It is very difficult task to find yourself a cosigner unless you have a close relative/friend who is ready to be your cosigner. I realized that the American mindset regarding finances is something I need to understand and that would give me a clear picture of why it is to so hard to find a Co-Signer. So I asked my dear friend and admissions consultant Grayson Leverenz to share her thoughts about this. Specifically I asked her to give the American's angle of this issue. She was kind enough to readily agree to help me on this topic. I am posting her thoughts as a guest post so that it will help my readers who are in the same boat. Hope you enjoy reading this post and benefit from it just the way I did. I would like to say my heartfelt thanks to Grayson Leverenz for this post.

How to Find a Co-Signer

Image Courtesy : http://www.flickr.com/photos/innovision/ / CC BY 2.0

By: Grayson Leverenz 

Now that the application process is over for most future members of the Class of 2012, it’s time to focus on funding your MBA in the USA. Limited options for no co-signer loans have a lot of international students seeking co-signers with US residency to help fulfill their MBA dreams. Finding a co-signer is hard. There’s no other way to say it.

Americans love to take risks when we are in control. We will gamble significant sums of money if we have control of the outcome. The perfect example is we have no problem taking out loans for our own education; we’re confident we’re going to succeed and be able to pay them back. The tricky part in American culture is that we’re not so trusting when someone else is in control. That’s the cultural reason why it’s so hard to find an American co-signer.

Now that you know why it’s so hard, let’s talk about what you can do.

1. Explore local options first.

If you plan to use your MBA in the USA to return to your home country and help improve the world through business, your community may be willing to support you. Talk to your local bank about loans. HSBC India has loans for Indian students; other options may exist as well.

2. Approach potential co-signers as if you were an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs take business plans to meet venture capitalists. You can do the same thing when approaching co-signers. Spend some time writing a business plan for your education. Map out your goals for your studies, your internship, and your post-graduation employment. Highlight your motivation to succeed, and how you plan to be accountable for your loans. Trust is the key component to getting someone to co-sign your loan, and walking in with a business plan is an impressive way to introduce yourself to co-signers.

3. Start with friends and family that have legal residency in your target country.

We talked about trust being crucial to finding a co-signer; logically, people that know you will trust you more than people that don’t. Tap into your network of friends and family to identify people that can help. Share your business plan with them, and find out if they can help.

3. Contact alumni that have been well established for 20+ years to build relationships and ask about co-signing.

The key here is finding people that are well established. Recent graduates have loans of their own, often in excess of $100K. While they may really want to help, the risk would most likely be too much to take on. However, if you’re approaching well established alumni, they will be at a point where they’re more financially stable. They may also be looking to mentor young minds. That would be a double win to find a co-signer and a mentor!

4. Be bold and contact business superstars.

There is a saying in the US that the most beautiful girl never gets asked out because guys are afraid. The same thing happens in business. There are people in business who seem untouchable. Who are the superstars in your industry? Pick a few and reach out to them with an email. Take a mentor approach with these leaders. Finding a mentor is a win by itself, but with the right relationship in place, they might just turn into a co-signer.

Good luck!

Grayson Leverenz founded MBA in the USA to help international students learn, succeed, and have fun during their MBA. You can read more on her blog. You can also follow her on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.  

Search on for U S Cosigner

Hi all, its been pretty silent from my end. I was taking time to decide between Olin and Tepper. Given my goals in Technology and experiences with Tepper adcom and alumni, Tepper felt like the best fit for me and my goals. So here I go.. Tepper it is..

But with this decisions come tons to things to do.. Tepper has no loans without U S Cosigner. I don't have any immediate relative who is an US permanent resident or citizen. So I am trying to find a potential US Cosigner in my personal network. I hope to find one who will play a pivotal role in my MBA dream.. Will I find one ??

MBA Financing: Alternatives to traditional MBA loans

Financing your MBA needs lot of research and effort. In this post I would like to share information about alternatives to traditional MBA loans and private vendors. These are called social networking loans or peer to peer loans. (Forbes featured a related article titled "An Alternative To Student Loans." )

Person-to-person lending (also known as peer-to-peer lending and social lending) is, in its broadest sense, the name given to a certain breed of financial transaction (primarily lending & borrowing, though other more complicated transactions can be facilitated) which occurs directly between individuals ("peers") without the intermediation/participation of a traditional financial institution. Organizations which facilitate such loans connect people who want to loan money with people who want to borrow money. Loan rates are usually fair and are fixed for the life of the loan. Here are some sources of P2P lending for your MBA

• GreenNote 
• Prosper 
• LendingClub 
• Feed My Future

Lookout for these options when planning your finances for MBA. 

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Financing your MBA - What, When, Why and How ?

Courtesy : Simon Howden

As its been said multiple times, MBA decision can be one of the most important decisions in one's life and it doesn't stop there. As every applicant is aware, the MBA process starting as soon as from the GMAT time is highly expensive. One needs to really put some sincere effort towards planning his/her finances for MBA. People usually tend to postpone the finance planning till the last moment of MBA application process as the pressure of other aspects like school selection, essays, recommendation, interviews gobble up the major share of applicant's time. But this may not be the wisest thing to do as there are lot of financing options available which needs to exercised at a much earlier stage of application process.

I just finished reading the E book - Financing your future by Accepted.com and found it useful for planning our finances for MBA. The book has a lot of information about the types of financial assistance available to applicants. Not only that, it also goes on to the way in which applicants can win those scholarships by aptly planning for it. In this post I am gonna share few useful pointers for applicants to help in their finance planning.

Takeaways from the E book - Financing your future

•  Start planning early. Never ignore the financing part. Parallel the financing research with your school research. Many schools offer merit based, need based and special criterion based awards. Make sure you know what your target school has to offer. E book offers a really well planned timeline for the financing part and also offers great insights on type of awards available to students and the differences between them.
  
  
• There are a lot of external funding available for MBA students. For example Forte Foundation offers fellowship for women students, The consortium offers the Consortium Fellowships for minority students. These prestigious fellowships go beyond the financial aspect and offer  professional mentoring and networking opportunities to selected candidates. So keep your eye open for such tremendous opportunities. You can also search for scholarships in external online databases on Scholarship-Experts and Fastweb.
  
  
• Treat the scholarship application process (if any) with utmost sincerity and diligence as the efforts can pay rich dividends. While some scholarships have a elaborate application procedure which includes essays, SOPs and recos, some school scholarships doesn't need any extra application but will be decided based on the merit of the application.
  

Things I wished to see in the E book

While the book has some very useful resources for domestic applicants, it would be more useful for international applicants if the book adds some more dedicated resources for international applicants.

MBA applicants should also research for school specific financing information which is available on school websites or by contacting finance office. Let me know how you planned your MBA financing and any other sources which you found helpful.

PS: Thanks to Accepted.com for providing me with a copy of this e book. You can check out more about the book here.

US B-schools offering international student loans

This very useful article was posted in clear admit blog. This offers quick view of available no-cosigner loan options on a school-by-school basis

Link : http://blog.clearadmit.com/2009/05/school-by-school-international-student-loan-scorecard/ 

Make the best use of it..




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