Well….did anyone even doubt they would win this for a second? With all the money they dumped on both parties the government should be giving them a receipt for this contract. When Sallie said they were bringing jobs back to America around the time the Obama administration started talking about the reform it should have taken about a second to figure out what was going on.
A terrible disservice was done to the American people with this because the chance of Sallie Mae being chosen with the interest of the American consumer/students is non existent. I am severely disappointed in the American government.
I would rather have a servicing company run by Charles Manson.
Time for Sallie to dump a little marketing money onto the public again. This contest is to submit a 30 second video clip with interesting ways you are saving for college. The contest is from June 15th to August 1st. The grand prize is $5,000 second place is $1,000 and then 8 $250 finalists. This has unlimited entries.
I may submit that I am saving for a masters by paying down my outrages 13% Sallie Mae loan and paying extra so I actually touch the principal and watching Sallie like a hawk to be sure they apply my payments in a manner that helps me get out of debt as opposed to the default whatever makes Sallie more money and keeps me a slave longer.
I just got off the phone with Sallie Mae and it is almost a lost cause to try to understand their billing system. I always thought that your payment to a billing group was broken into correct proportions and applied to the loans that make up the group. My mistake.. apparently this is a pool of money where they can do whatever they feel like (and makes them the most money in the long run).
I have been making extra payments to my highest interest loan for almost 2 months now (10$ 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.
Al Lord (or dark lord Al) met with a reporter to explain why they are not fighting the Obama administrations aspiration of cutting companies like Sallie Mae out of the loop in student loan lending. Sallie Mae is proposing to bring 2,000 jobs back to the US in blatant attempt to appease the Obama administration into negotiations for a student lending deal. Everybody understands that is a huge cost saving to have call centers over seas… so why else would they be doing it? I can see a scene like from the Grinch who stole Christmas where they measure his heart and it breaks out off the scale… sha right. How is that personal 18 hole golf course Dark Lord Al?
I am really struggling with this one… I am a pretty active investor and the recent come back in the financials has got me looking for investments. Since I look at Sallie Mae on a regular basis (because of my hatredfor them) I keep fairly up to date as to what is going on. It appears to me that the stock is probably going to come back strong in the next few years after the nose dive over the last two years. Looking at the chart for Sallie Mae you can see a huge run up in the last 10 years. Our post industrial society is in a place where we need more and more education and the demand for financing to fill the gap will be high. Also the demand for education increases in a recession because people are looking to obtain new skills.
On the other side being in debt to Sallie Mae I see how they are making their profits. I have read plenty of stories that are sickening describing the lengths that they will go (such as lobbying government to strip away all consumer protections). I know that every month I stuff money into a cannon and fire it at Sallie Mae and some months none of it even lands in the area of principal so I know they have got to be making sick profits and it makes me want to invest in them to perhaps recapture some of my personal losses at their hands…. it seems like twisted logic as I type this …
I don’t know where I am going with this , I personally blame government more for the Sallie Mae/student loan situation as Sallie is just doing their job (to make shareholders profits). Government is the one that is giving Sallie Mae the rubber stamp to do whatever the hell it wants.
But nothing can really be done until it is more clear what the student loan structure is going to be like going forward. Sallie Mae is not raising a big fuss over proposed changes so it makes me think they have an angle… and with their contributions and lobbying I am sure they do.
Here is a disturbing video of someone on YouTube explaining his Student loan situation. My favorite quote from this video is “This past week Sallie Mae tried to get me, cause.. I’m like bitch these loans are in forbearance..”. Then he appears to go on to admit to that he committed fraud on his mother to get more money to pay for extra stuff while attending college. I for one think that Sallie Mae is evil and the student loan system is a scam but I also think people should pay their loans back.
A while back I decided that I would be sending an extra 10$ and assign this extra payment to 1 loan (specified in the memo on the check per Sallie Mae instructions). This one private loan is for a smaller amount but in order to milk me the hardest and longest the interest rate is jacked up to 13.75% where my other private loans are 8.75%. Now the first thing you learn about getting out of debt is you target the highest interest rate first. So sometimes they apply it correctly other times they don’t. Below is a screenshot of the correct payment sent for $10 of witch $2.30 is applied to principal and $7.70 is assigned to interest. This payment is simple and exactly what I would expect when sending an extra payment to one loan as I specified.
Now this week (and earlier weeks also now that I look closer) my payment is applied completely different. the 10$ 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 $2.66 respectively (interest of course).
So the result is that each extra payment is split up in such a way that it is applied to my lower interest loans and all to interest none to principal instead of the intended payment to the one high interest loan.
Is this on purpose? I would have to say so because of how they apply payments. Their default is to do whatever will keep you in debt longer and generate more profits (such as paying extra and Sallie just applies it to the next payment).
Well after 1 year of having my email address that proclaims my love of Sallie Mae they finally locked my account and made me change my email address.. I can’t help but think it is somehow related to posting a picture of my email address on the internet. I fear they will spam me again…relentlessly. It made me chuckle to myself and feel a little better every time I logged into my student loan account.
Over the past month I made 4 additional payments of 10$ each to one specific loan (the one with the highest interest rate). I think to be more consistent I should pay the same amount at the same time and I will be scheduling that with my bank.
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 am testing the micro payment method of cutting down loan debt and have sent Sallie Mae my extra payment (with loan # and PAY to PRINCIPAL/CAPITALIZED INTEREST specified). With all the history in Excel I can find some other interesting data that Sallie does not feel the need to provide to the consumer in its reporting. For example I have totaled up all my past payments and on my private loans after about three years I have sent in payments equaling about half the principal yet I have barley even scratched the surface of the outstanding balance. It is nice to see this as a little extra motivation to send in extra payments to get out from this burden as soon as possible and to educate myself, something Sallie definitely does not want.
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.
