The auto dialer of the dammed be on trial? I can see Sallie Mae finding out what type of degree you received and harass accordingly… perhaps scaling it back a bit for Lawyers. If this is a class action sign me up …
Seattle lawyer sues Sallie Mae over collection phone calls – Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle):
I asked why they refuse to apply my payment as I request (as they insist I do each time I make a payment and I send them a form email a few times a week).
This is the response I got.
Here is my recent payment history
Loan Summary 1-03 (clearly showing nothing from the monthly payment on 10/27)
These people are a complete joke… Looks pretty obvious to me that they are full of it.
I have had 1 singular billing group ever since I have been on Sallie Mae to apply my extra payments the way I want… I state in an email sent to them at least once a week to apply anything extra to a specific loan number and there is always extra sent. This last payment the loan number I specify for extra payments did not receive one dime from my monthly payment. …
Upon looking closer it appears they have just decided to remove my loan from my billing group. I swear if somebody told me all the things a company would do prior to this I would be skeptical. They seriously just do whatever the hell they want…. I can’t even believe it …
Why is it when I send an ELECTRONIC payment from Citibank to Sallie Mae does it take as long as sending a physical check to them if not longer. Isn’t the whole point of electronic payments is that it clears faster? Something does not smell right here…..
I sent me electronic payment on 10/24 as well as Citibank sending them a physical check on the 23rd. Both payments cleared on the 28th. This is like the story of the tortoise and the hair except they finish at the same time. As of 10/30 neither payment has posted to my account.
Why oh why would it take so long?
Here is my theory …. They calculate the interest that you are paying on your outstanding principal on a daily basis and if you are sending a payment that will lower your outstanding principal that would mean less money on subsequent interest calculations. While my principal would only have dropped 85$ for the last couple of days that they were calculating interest I can’t figure out what this translates to but I am guessing a couple of cents a day right? But let’s think about that.. A few cents extra per payment (variable because allot of people have way bigger loans than I do) * per "customer" * number of months the loan is active. As you can see this could be a big number of "free" money.
While looking into the impact of the money that should have come off my principal I found this Accrued Interest Calculator utility on the Sallie Mae Website witch I had not seen before. It is under the customer support > Calculators > Interest Accrual Calculator. Currently mine is at $7.07 per day so I would have to do the differential whenever they decide to finally apply my payment.
(now 5 days since payment has cleared my bank)
(now 6 days and have been placed in the cursed auto dialer from hell)
Checked payment history and the 10$ physical check has posted to my loan beating the ELECTRONIC payment that was sent 1 day later.
(now on the 7th day it posts)
However they back dated this to October 27th (before it cleared my bank) like nothing ever happened. How can I keep track of these loans when they just change dates?
How did this impact me? well what about the dollar amount that was supposed to be applied to principal? did they base the payment to principal off of the 11/4 date or did they go back and apply it to the amount that was outstanding as of 10/27 that date they are now claiming the payment was applied to my loan?
Either way the 86$ that was applied to my loan reduced my daily interest from 7.07 to 7.06 so for those 6 days that they sat on my payment for no good reason logic would say that they at least pocketed .06 cents on top of what the the larger payment to principal would have lowered the daily interest….
I found a press release that says Sallie Mae has 10,000,000 customers so a potential .06 cent “mistake” per customer in a month = 600,000$ or 7.2 million a year. I don’t know.. it is so hard to keep track of what they are doing you seriously have to take screenshots of every page every day because they just change dates and numbers.
Sallie Mae has seemingly deliberately messed up my weekly 10$ payments for the last month. I have an email template that outlines how I want them to apply the payments and a few days ago they sent me back emails saying that they could not find my account (even though they sent the email to the email that they have on record). I have been sending emails to them using this method since April of this year so who knows what kind of game they are playing this time…
My response was to send the nastiest email I have ever sent , laced with the foulest language you could think of. I did not even feel the slightest bit bad. This company goes so far out of their way to waste my time they deserve a special hell….
So I checked my account today and all transactions for the last month have been corrected. So the moral of the story is that Sallie is a dirty dirty girl and she likes the dirty talk .
It seems like there is some fuzzy logic in regards to how payments in billing groups are applied and I have absolutely no idea what the hell they are doing. Here is the question I sent them and the example I use is so simple a toddler would be like … yeah they doing crazy stuff with your payments.
Can you please send me details on how your billing groups work?
let’s say I have 4 loans at 25$ a piece per month.
Rolled those into a billing group so now it is 100$ a month
Now let’s say I make an extra payment to 1 of those four loans (if you can manage to read the memo on the check).
So for this given month I owe 25$ / 25% / 25$ / and 0$
Since this is in a billing group I still send my payment of 100$
How is it that the you do not apply the payment as if the extra payment never took place? I am expecting that payment of 25$ to STILL BE APPLIED to my loan as it normally would.
I don’t know of an easier scenario… please explain how your billing group works and how you can decide to redirect funds allotted for a specific loan #.
I put the memo on the check… They still apply the payment wrong.
I send them an email a few times a week telling them how to apply the payments.. They still do it wrong.
So help me god if I get put in the auto dialer again because they can’t read or have a collective IQ of 4 I may just freak out……
I pay about 100$ over my minimum payment every month and they do everything they can to not apply my extra payments to my highest interest loan ( they want to milk it for 30 fricking years…and I only owe $1100 on that loan # @ 13.5 %.)
All I can do now is write government officials and with Sallie Mae’s high campaign contributions how effective do ya think that is going to be?
I know you are here… How sad it is that your company is so pathetic that sites like these exist all over the place eh? So why don’t you do something useful (instead of surfing Sallie Mae hate sites) and instruct your payment processors to read the memos on the checks or get rid of your BS policy to apply payments however the hell you want unless I send a special email to you every fricking time I send a payment in eh? Or stop asking me to enroll in your auto payment plan every time I log in to the website.
Sallie Mae is a crap company and I am very disappointed that my government is endorsing and enabling this behavior.
You could have not put me in your Spanish inquisition style dialer program when it is YOUR mistake that that miss applied a payment. Even though it was YOUR mistake you still refused to remove me from the auto dialer system Satan himself designed.
Jackass…
While attempting to make extra payments to principal it is clear that Sallie Mae cannot follow directions. They are currently at about at about a 70% fail rate in following the memo on the check that tell them how to apply the payment. I have to email them every time to have them correct the issue and they send me a response like this:
Thank you for your inquiry and for your business with Sallie Mae.
We received a payment in the amount of $370.00, which posted to your account effective June 18, 2009. We have reapplied this payment per your specific request.
A detailed email must be sent with each payment when you want a payment to be specifically applied.
If we may be of further assistance, please visit our Web site at www.salliemae.com.
Sincerely,
Customer Service
Why will they not just note that I want anything extra to be applied to my higher interest loan number? Is this the type of customer service that landed them the government contract?
My solution is going to be to automate Microsoft Outlook to send them an email every day requesting any extra from my payment not be held for the next bill and be applied to my high interest loan immediately. I know they will not be happy about it but hey if you go out of your way to make dealing with your company a pain in the ass I can do the same.
By the way this email address is where I send with questions and I usually get a response in a couple of days… ( good enough for government work right)
internet-bss@salliemae.com
The day that it was announced that Sallie Mae had been chosen to service the government loans (big surprise there) they also announced that they would be introducing a new payment option based a customer being deemed to be experiencing financial difficulties. The customer’s payment is capped at 15% of discretionary income and can be extended to 25 years. . After 25 years of repayment the balance will also be forgiven. The press release states that this was authorized by federal law to begin on July 1stThis can help students with the government loan debt but does nothing for any private student loan debt.
In regards to this repayment plan Albert lord (the CEO of Sallie Mae) is quoted in the press release as saying “Sallie Mae is committed to providing students not only with the resources needed to invest in higher education, but also with the tools to help them succeed afterward,”. So if he truly believes this he will be applying this to private loans also right?
The root cause of this problem still exists. The main problem is that people are going to school for $40,000 then when they are done with school all they can find is a minimum wage job in their selected field. The scenario I keep hearing about is culinary school. Some type of risk assessment needs to be done to see if you will be able to pay back student loans otherwise this has just become a subsidy to the crooks that push culinary degrees.
Sallie Mae has a calculator to see if the program would help you but the link is broken..