The Sallie Mae Trap

The new Sallie Mae website is missing one piece of information that used to be prominent…Interest Accrued. The old login page had this information front and center and every time you logged in you would see just how much you owed them in interest since the last time you paid them.

Now the number is hidden and I cannot find it.. Why would this number be hidden? .. simple out of sight out of mind. Now the only way you can do it is knowing what day your last payment was applied and using the "accrual calculator" to figure it out. This number was important to me to get an idea of what would be going to my principal, something Sallie Mae clearly no longer finds important.

** just found it somewhere.

Only if you pay your bill through their website will you see this information. People who just send a check you will need to pretend like you are paying through their website using the “pay now”.

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.

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 .