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TG Updates

Shoptalk Online 483, December 9, 2008

TG Updates

TG offers tool for calculating the daily interest on student loans

Helping students and families understand the cost of borrowing is a priority with TG. To educate students and borrowers about loan costs, TG offers a number of tools, including online calculators. Recently, TG unveiled a new calculator that illustrates how the number of days between a borrower's last payment, the interest rate, and the principal loan balance affect the amount of interest that accrues each month on a borrower's loans.

Available through TG's college and career planning site, Adventures In Education (AIE™), this calculator offers a simple interface for estimating daily interest. A borrower enters the loan principal, the number of days since the last payment, and the interest rate, and then clicks the "Calculate" button. The calculator will determine the interest rate factor and display the estimated interest amount due each month. Borrowers can experiment with the "Number of days" field to see how making payments earlier results in a lower interest accrual.

Keep in mind that TG's calculator is provided for estimation purposes only. If a borrower is seeking details about individual loan payments, repayment schedules, alternative payment plans, and other repayment options, he or she should contact the loan holder for more information.

TG's other loan calculator tools
AIE offers a variety of different calculators, including tools that allow students to project monthly loan payments once they graduate; to gauge EFC, or the expected family contribution from students and/or parents; or to determine what they can expect to take home in pay given a certain salary level. You can find a complete list of AIE's calculator tools at www.aie.org/Calculators/index.cfm.

Find out for yourself
To use AIE's daily interest calculator, visit www.aie.org/Calculators/daily_interest_calculator.cfm. Explore the rest of AIE by visiting www.AIE.org. If you have questions or need more information about the site's content, contact TG's communications team at (800) 252-9743, ext. 4588, or send an message to communications@tgslc.org.

Join the dialogue: TG presents webinars on List Assist^SM, ECASLA

TG will offer two webinars in the remaining weeks of December: a product training on TG's new lender list survey tool, List Assist; and an instructive overview of the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act (ECASLA). Here's a description of each webinar along with its scheduled time and date.

List Assist (Wednesday, December 10, 10 a.m. - 11 a.m., CST): List Assist provides an automated, online process for creating and managing surveys, or Requests For Information (RFI). Using List Assist, schools can generate and share surveys. Lenders can streamline their RFI process and save submitted responses for future use. For registered lenders, List Assist offers a resource for managing multiple survey responses and tracking due dates. Find out more about how you can use List Assist by listening in on this product webinar.
Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loan Act (ECASLA) Impacts (Monday, December 15, 2 p.m. - 3 p.m., CST): Participants will hear an overview of the programs created to combat the lack of liquidity in the financial markets, including the Loan Participation Purchase program; the Loan Purchase Commitment program; the Short-term Put program; and the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Conduit program. This program is intended for the school FFELP community.

To register
Listen in and ask questions by registering to attend the webinars at http://tgslc.na4.acrobat.com/f79913243. Please note that, on first logging into TG's webinar tool, users will be asked to create a password that can then be used for all future TG webinars.

For help
If you have any questions regarding the upcoming webinars, please contact Lisa Felder, external product training coordinator, at lisa.felder@tgslc.org. If you need technical assistance with TG's products, please contact the TG product support team at (800) 332-1455, or send an to product.support@tgslc.org.

Loan counseling resources available on TG Online

TG is pleased to announce the availability of additional resources for schools to assist in implementing the new loan entrance and exit counseling requirements instituted by the Higher Education Opportunity and Access Act (HEOA).

Created by the NCHELP Program Regulations Committee, these documents reiterate the pre-HEOA counseling requirements and clearly outline the new and revised requirements. As a reminder, these changes were effective upon enactment of the HEOA, August 14, 2008.

Accessing the resources
The two documents, titled "Entrance Counseling Requirements" and "Exit Counseling Requirements," are available on TG Online under "More Resources" at www.tgslc.org/policy/index.cfm and www.tgslc.org/council/index.cfm.

More information
For questions about loan entrance and exit counseling, contact TG customer assistance at (800) 845-6267, or send an message to cust.assist@tgslc.org.

With TG's support, Mapping Your Future® premieres TEACH Grant exit counseling

TG and Mapping Your Future (MYF) announce that MYF now offers TEACH (Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education) Grant exit counseling, bringing the total number of available sessions within Online Student Loan Counseling (OSLC) to eighteen.

The TEACH Grant exit counseling session provides information about the terms and conditions of a TEACH Grant service agreement, as well as the rights and responsibilities that apply if the TEACH Grant is converted to a Direct unsubsidized Stafford loan.

To experience TEACH Grant exit counseling from the student perspective, follow these steps:

Go to the MYF home page at MappingYourFuture.org.
Click the "Complete Online Student Loan Counseling" link on the left side of the page.
Select "TEACH Grant exit counseling."
Choose Texas as your state.
Select MYF Demo School as your school.

OSLC is a free service, provided by guarantors from around the country that sponsor MYF, as well as many others that support the organization. Counseling sessions do not contain material that identifies them with any specific guarantor or lender.

More information
A school with an existing OSLC account that would like to add TEACH Grant exit counseling to its participation categories should contact the MYF customer care staff at feedback@mappingyourfuture.org. A school that does not have an OSLC account should complete the school submission form at mappingyourfuture.org/oslc/schoolsignup.cfm to request participation.