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 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.

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 .

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 #.

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

I have been making extra payments to my highest interest loan for almost 2 months now (10$ a week) and I take screenshots almost every day of the website status so I can catch their little "changes". Now what I am seeing is that because I am making these extra payments on that loan  when it comes time to make my big monthly payment they will not apply a proper amount to this loan. In the past every month this loan would receive 18-20$ (split between interest and maybe interest if I am lucky). Now this month the accrued interest on this loan is almost nothing and the payment was cut from ~20$  to 2.32$ the.. exact amount of accrued interest. This means that they have robbed me of about 17$ that would have gone to my principal.

They really did not have an explanation for how this payment conveniently got dropped to only cover interest. to sum it up they will apply your payments however they see fit and if it is in their benefit to apply nothing to principal on a higher interest loan then they will do whatever they can to have that happen. I requested that all extra money is applied to this one loan no matter what in an email… I hope they can handle that.

Sallie Mae is counting on you not  to keep an eye on what they are doing. My advice is to watch them very close.

Now this week (and earlier weeks also now that I look closer) my payment is applied completely different. the 10$ payment was split across all loans for a completely different result.

Below is the intended loan and $.50 was applied to it (all interest).

Next private loan come up with $2.44 (all interest)

The last private loan come up with $1.86 (all interest)

Then my two government loans getting $2.44 and $2.66 respectively (interest of course).

So the result is that each extra payment is split up in such a way that it is applied to my lower interest loans and all to interest none to principal instead of the intended payment to the one high interest loan.

Is this on purpose? I would have to say so because of how they apply payments. Their default is to do whatever will keep you in debt longer and generate more profits (such as paying extra and Sallie just applies it to the next payment).

To say that the way Sallie Mae’s website shows you what is happening with your money is complicated when you pay them is an understatement. Frankly there are so many items that show up in the 5 separate payment histories that my head starts to hurt ( Again I think this is by design).  I found this area for payment history (combined) and it shows the 4 10$ payments I made and the interesting item to me is that I usually make a payment of ~370$ for my bill and historically from this screenshot about 150$ makes it to principal. This month 233$ of my 370$ payment was applied to principal…that is 83$ more than normal… Me being a stock market dabbler that is the equivalent to me buying stock for 40$ then selling it in less than 30 days for 123$ because the original 40$ went into the loan as normal but then I got the bonus of the extra principal of 83$. Frankly I need more consistency  to gauge this because I have seen some weird stuff in my account over the last couple of weeks and I don’t know what is going on.  I would love to get an explanation as to why only 25$ out of 370$ was applied to principal last October…

I will still be watching them because I have to start tracking what the balance is after a transaction such as the 10$ payment because they don’t provide that, perhaps they would like to keep that a mystery. My suspicion is that they are still going to take it off the next months payment but we will see.