My experience with Sallie Mae:

[murielm99]

I have a student loan that I am paying off. I owe less than six thousand dollars on this loan. For the past eight years, I have made payments to Citi. Now, all of a sudden, it has ben transferred to Sallie Mae.

The first month I had to pay, they told me I was late and I had an $8.00 late fee. That did not seem right. I had mailed it in plenty of time. I thought maybe there was a mix-up because it was the first month of paying to Sallie Mae, so I paid the late fee the following month.

The next month, I mailed the payment on the 5th. I should have mailed it sooner, since the due date was the fifth. But it should have arrived there within two or three days. I received a letter from Sallie Mae on the 28th, and dated the 20th. They told me that my loan payment was fifteen days overdue. My bank told me that the check had cleared on the 14th!

I called Sallie Mae. They told me that I owed a forty dollar late fee for the first payment, and $50.02 for the second payment. I argued with the lady, and got the late charges removed.

I went to my credit union and got a small loan today. I will have this loan paid off in two years, which is less time than the Sallie Mae loan would have run. The payments are smaller, too.

This is the only dealing I have had with a large bank lately. I bank at our small, local bank. We also use the credit union for all our farm business. We have gotten vehicle loans there, too. I am glad there was an alternative to this sucky experience.

[loyalsister]

1. I've had bad experiences with them, too

Payments are late and they seem to be dragging their feet processing paperwork for alternate arrangements.
They did offer to bring my account current IF I sign up for automatic payments. Right.

[truedelphi]

2. Thanks for giving people the heads up on Sallie. Here's something

You might take advantage of:

I had a small student loan, that was like $ 1700 back in the early eighties. I would get it almost paid off, down to the last 6 or 7 hundred bucks, then something would happen, and then by the time I could get back to paying the student loan off, it would be back up to nine hundred.

Finally I just borrowed the whole amount needed to pay the thing off.

A friend had told me to keep everything relating to the final pay off, as I would be contacted by the bank that held the note later on. Probably in six months to three years after the full repayment.

Sure enough, almost six months to the date of the payoff, I got a formal letter from the bank that held the student loan. They wanted the six hundred dollars.

I called and told them they'd made a mistake. They said they saw no repayment in full. Luckily I could send them a copy of the check - and immediately thereafter they "uncovered" their mistake.

But if I hadn't kept a copy of the certified check I had sent, I may have had to once again pay them six hundred dollars.

Oh and during the years of my paying off this debt, I sometimes would be contacted with formal letters by credit collection places. Sometimes those people were demanding seven or eight times the amount that I owed. Those were complete and total scams that I ignored.

[murielm99]

3. Thank you for telling me that!

I just put a copy of the check and all the loan paperwork in a file folder for myself. I will hang onto everything, just in case Salie Mae decides to get nasty about things. I usually do keep good records, but it sounds extra important in this case.

[truedelphi]

4. It really is. the same friend said when it happened to him,

It was about eighteen months down the road. So make sure you keep it with other things that are always handy. Like your tax forms.

[exboyfil]

5. I remember playing dodge em when I was trying

to pay back my student loan in the 1980s (trying to find out where to send the payments). I never had any late fees, but it sure seemed like they were making the whole process unnecessarily difficult. Because of the difficulties and the desire to get out of debt I paid off the loan early.

I am still appreciative of the $7,400 I received in student loans to complete my engineering education at Purdue. In hindsight because my dad had a period of unemployment, I probably could have qualified for a Pell grant at least one year, but I had no one guiding me at the time.

[themadstork]

6. They love doing this

They will cash my brother's checks and then harass him two weeks later claiming to have never recieved payment.

Shameless crooks.