For anyone looking for a quick update on the “poster child for student loan debt” (thanks to our friends at USA Today) with respect to paying back some of these loans, there’s not much to tell.
I began making my monthly payments to the rotten, poor customer service folks at NJHESAA in July. And while I will always repeat that they are the worst company I’ve ever spoken to on the phone (and that includes when I called Hewlett Packard and was transferred to India to talk with “Mike” and I couldn’t understand him), I will give NJHESAA credit for one thing – they did process my loan consolidation correctly.
That’s more than I can say for our friends at Direct Loans (a federal agency). I submitted my loan consolidation application for the 25 year term and they sent out a bill for the 10 year term! I don’t really know how you make that ridiculous of a mistake, but when I called to advise them of their mistake – wow! It was a whole dog and pony show! What bothered me the most was the woman’s response to my statement of, “Hey, this is wrong. You’re charging me more than double the monthly payment that I signed up for. I have the regular monthly payment that I can give you right now, though.”
Her response was, “No. You have to pay the full amount that we charged you. I’ll go in and fix the loan for you for next time, but this time you have to pay the full amount.”
Well that’s a little uncalled for, if you ask me. Think about it in terms of logic. Company A made a mistake and sent a flawed statement to Consumer B. Consumer B sees the mistake and contacts Company A to alert them. Company A recognizes the mistake and fixes it for future statements. Company A still requires that their original, flawed statement be paid (or folded back into the principal of the loan).
How ridiculous is that?
Anyway, the update is that I’ve started making payments on those two loans. I’m going to start paying back the CitiBank loan at the end of September and I’m hoping that I can pay it off in huge chunks (since it’s a much smaller loan). More updates as they come…or at least when they’re interesting!
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