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.
They finally made me change my email address.
April 28th, 2009Micro Payments: first month thoughts
April 23rd, 2009Over 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…
Extra 10$ Student Loan Payments
March 28th, 2009I 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.
Upromise Video contest
March 25th, 2009Upromise, a part of Sallie Mae has started a contest for 10,000$ towards education called “tuition tales”. The contest is for people to enter a 30 second video clip on one of three categories (saving for college, in college now & paying it back). The prizes are for 10,000$ and various runner up prizes like 250$ gift cards. Man there could be some funny entries poking at the whole student loan establishment so I will start jotting down some ideas. The contest ends May third. 10,000$ would be a nice chunk out off the student loan yoke.
More info on the contest can be found HERE.
3rd year Student Loan progress
March 20th, 2009This is the smallest loan I have with Sallie Mae. When I first started paying this back the interest was over 18% now it is at the incredibly low (sarcastic) rate of 13.125. I have not been paying much more than the minimum, maybe a little here and there but I have recently found that that did absolutely nothing due to how Sallie Mae handles the payments.
This is a sub loan as they are grouped together and disbursed when I pay them. They call them billing groups. So after a few years I have made no dent in the principal. What really gets me is looking at the payment history and seeing 0’s in the applied to principal column (which includes the capitalized interest I believe so that seems a little misleading). So kids… this is what happens then you get a private unsubsidized loan and don’t make the payments when you are going to school.
Sallie Mae Email address
March 19th, 2009About a year ago I could not get into the Manage Your Loans website without a email address on file. Since there was no way I was going to give them a real address and I had to have something to put in their system I made up a nice one for their records… I make up email address all the time because.. seriously everyone wants your email address and it is almost never a benefit to you to hand it out. Unless you like to get junk mail or spam from a company like Sallie Mae. All you need to do is put “something”@”something”.com and it will pass almost every checker that makes sure it is a valid email address. Here is mine.
Oh and NO I do not want to enroll
March 16th, 2009Typical of Sallie Mae, they ask me to enroll in online billing ( I refuse to give them my email because they have lost all email privileges as far as I am concerned) or Automatic debit (they also don’t deserve access to my bank account info because they are untrustworthy) every time I log into their website. They must think I will eventually fold and change my mind. No this will not happen. By Sallie Mae asking me every time this makes me think it benefits them in some way so I am even more unlikely to do it. In fact this makes me hate this company even more its all the little things that add up to this crappy company.
Default: the student loan documentary
March 14th, 2009I came across this trailer. A few things I did not know on the list of protections that student borrowers are not entitled to. Some of these I did know about others I don’t know what they are like the usury laws.
- Bankruptcy protection
- The right to refinance
- Fair debt & collection practices
- Adherence to usury laws
- Truth in lending requirements.
- Statutes of limitations
I will watch it because I am a documentary junkie, but it has a hint of the current leftist music (characteristically at the end when you fall to your knees at the insight they have just provided…how cheesy) so I hope their solution is not to forgive all loans or something that just does not work in the real world or opens a Pandora’s box.
DEFAULT – The Student Loan Documentary from Default on Vimeo.
Sallie Mae and extra payments
March 14th, 2009I sometimes pay a little extra on my student loan and I never noticed this before but what Sallie does is take the Money and hold it for you and then use it to pay next month’s payment. Should you pay them extra again they would hold the larger amount for the next payment. Now times this by how many people would pay a little over not realizing they are playing a little shell game and they could make a ton of money just off the interest of holding your money for you (how nice of them).
I am sending them an extra check this month with the account and specific loan number and instructions to apply to interest & principal. I wonder if they can handle that…
Woman begs for 2 cents to help pay off student loans
March 9th, 2009I have been looking at Sallie Mae student loan complaints for a long time and this is one of the most original. The poster is trying to get people to donate to help get her out of her abusive relationship with "Sallie". I am not sure if the actual .02 cent donation would work out as I am thinking it probably cost some type of fee to accept the 2 cents. She only needs 7.5 million people to pay off her student loans.