So enough with victimizing. Let's be really hard and critical on ourselves when it comes to our choices to get us into the mess of excessive student loan debt. Did we take out the loans for our education? Check. Did we sign the papers claiming we will repay our loans? Check. Did we miss payments only to watch the interest rates on variable int. rate loans increase to arbitrary figures and in turn multiply our loans by a factor of 2 within a couple of seasons? Check.
Some of us then got back on track and resolved to pay every penny and then some on the required monthly payments. I've been on this plan for months, almost 36 of them to be more precise. My $405 is deducted from my bank account each month automatically. Finally some extra income comes in, and in line with my determination to be debt-free as soon as is humanly possible, I ask Sallie Mae staff (in Calcutta or so) about the possibility of paying extra on the private student loan (currently just over $13K.) They say the first time I speak to them to make an online payment in the desired amount following up with an email specifying the exact loan group to which the payment is to be applied. I do exactly that with a test amount of about $18.
I wait until the next payment cycle and realize that though my additional payment did not reduce my automated debit monthly payment, it did get distributed to not just the private loan, but the FEDERAL loans as well. This annoys me and a series of phone calls ensues, none of which end up resolving anything to my liking. I get instructed to not do online payments because their "system" is not set up to handle anything other than (what basically translates to) weighted distributing of paid amount to all loan groups. Instead they tell me to mail the check and write on the check the loan group number to which the payment is to be applied.
I suck it up and do just that the following month, this time with a test amount of about $57. I see the payment post to my private student loan, as requested, but only until the next monthly payment cycle during which, low and behold, I see the same "distribution" take place. Furious at this mindless cattle-molding, I invest minutes from my cell phone to call them and leave absolutely zero room for misinterpretation of my intentions. I even copied the check prior to sending it, and had intended to do the same for every subsequent accelerated payment check.
The person I talk to via phone assures me they will fix the problem, although it takes them no less than 4 restatements of my request to finally nail it down to every detail. At this point my payments are adjusted in the records per each loan group, but the outstanding balances (ie. the most important set of numbers in the whole equation) are at this point anybody's guess.
Sallie Mae is a dirty thief like that, and for that they should be sued. There is no way in hell they can justify the blatant sabotage of my pristinely fair-game attempts to pay off the loans quicker, and if indeed that is how they want to play the game, they can bet their entire assets that I will be out of this bullshit country before they can say "settlement." As for the rest of y'all, it's your life and your game.
My tolerance for torture is quite inversely proportional to that of a typical God-fearing, mindless-law-abiding inhabitant of the US of A.
Thanks for reading.
There are no rewards for playing by their rules. In the beginning of my debt peonage, I foolishly thought it would be good to make the payment a few days early, and had my interest rate increased because I was outside of the defined payment period. I don't, however, blame all or any of this on myself; I could not, after all, have done much to politically change the education financing system, let alone the gross inflation of housing prices or depressed wages while I was in high school. And it is something much bigger than just ourselves, than just the time we've been alive; it is the political legacy of the past forty years that put us where we are, as far as the increase in corporate power and the transformation of higher education (and everything else) into big buisness.
