Sallie Mae Fail

If you do a search on the web on Sallie Mae’s customer service you will get a ton of results telling you how bad it is. It’s true. I know because I had the misfortune of having to call them yesterday.

As previously mentioned our student loan payments are crazy and I was hoping to get the payments deferred or temporarily halted in order to pay off the credit cards and then focus on the student loans. However, I have some of those nasty little buggers called private loans. Oh how I loathe thee.

In order to defer private loans you have to pay a fee. Um, riiiiiiiight. However, I knew this already. And that was not what I wanted to do. Instead, I wanted to change my payment plan. See, Sallie Mae has (had) this nifty little thing where once you logged into your account you could select  ‘Lower Your Payments’ under ‘Repayment Options.’ From there you could see something like this (click image to enlarge):

And if you click on ‘lower your payment amount you would get a break down of something like 100 payments at $xxx.x, then 48 payments of $xxx.xx, then 12 payments of $xxx.xx and one payment of $xx.xx. It would tell you the end amount you would have paid them. So, it was a great way to see which way was the least interest paid and so on. It showed you this for your current plan and for the available repayment plans in case you wanted to change things.

I know this because I had looked at it last month. And of the 4 repayment plans I could change to there was one that would lower my private loan payment from $305.01 to $189 and some change AND it only added like $2,000 to the end total. After some thinking I decided I wanted to change to that plan. But I did not know which plan that was. I went back to the Sallie Mae website and saw this instead (click image to enlarge):

Hrm. I hoped it would be fixed in a couple of days and waited. I continued to get this message and called them yesterday. What a mistake!

To start, I got someone that barely spoke English and had a hard time understanding me! I kept having to repeat myself and rephrase things so that she could understand. Once I finished explaining my needs to her she tells me this -

Private loan payment plans can only be offered once. I see you have had all of the plan before so I cannot change your plan.

What?!? The Sallie Mae page plainly states that you can change payment plans at any time.  (click image below to enlarge)

There it is. Plainly stated in English. Looks like I can change my payment plan daily if I want. Of course, there is part of a sentence in there that gives me pause, and likely gives them a way out of changing payment plans…

“…and all eligibility requirements are still met. “

Note how in the image above there is no link to see what those phantom eligibility requirements are.

So, now I am thinking maybe I should change plans. Maybe those wanker private loans should be first on the payoff list, even though the interest rates are only 7%. The relief of not having to deal with them any longer seems almost worth it. Then I would only have the federal consolidation loan left with them. And now, I say a silent thank you to EdFinancial for having the remainder of my student loans.