Unsurprisingly, Navient is still lying to borrowers despite the ongoing lawsuit (for misleading borrowers) from the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.
I was talking to a fellow resident last week. She has almost a half million dollars in student loans from medical school and has been repaying in IBR. She recently got married, and her husband, also a resident, thankfully doesn’t have any student loans himself. Unfortunately, this also means that next time she recertifies her income, her payments are going to basically double thanks to the addition of his additional income. Once he becomes an attending, they would go up even further.
Given the possibility (and desirability) of public service loan forgiveness for her given her long training and very high loan burden, which would result in more money forgiven than she borrowed in the first place (due to negative amortization during residency), her goal should thus be to minimize payments in advance of this goal. I recommended she switched to Pay As You Earn (PAYE) to reduce her payments now and file her taxes separately from her husband next year (they weren’t married for tax purposes this year).
And here comes the lie: she called Navient for guidance, and the customer service representative told her she was ineligible for PAYE because she held a loan from 2009.
Anyone who knows anything about federal repayment programs or has the capacity to do a simple Google search would know that the limitations for PAYE eligibility have nothing to do with the year 2009. They are the following:
To qualify for the PAYE Plan you must also be a new borrower as of Oct. 1, 2007, and must have received a disbursement of a Direct Loan on or after Oct. 1, 2011. You’re a new borrower if you had no outstanding balance on a Direct Loan or FFEL Program loan when you received a Direct Loan or FFEL Program loan on or after Oct. 1, 2007.
So, nothing before 2007 and at least something after 2011. In other words, 2009 was a great vintage for PAYE. Full bodied and expensive with more than a hint of scut.
The lawsuit alleges that for years Navient engaged in a series of illegal and deceptive practices, including providing borrowers with incorrect information, processing payments erroneously, and failing to address customers’ complaints.
Sounds familiar.
As always, it’s difficult to know if the servicer customer service reps are willfully ignorant or malicious, but they are routinely wrong (and seemingly proactively so).
My advice to anyone ever calling a servicer with a question is to already know the answer before you ask it. Find some official government verbiage to back up your interpretation. You should be looking for confirmation, not advice, and if the answer you receive isn’t the answer you’re expecting, find out exactly why. If the person you’re talking to doesn’t know, then get them to give you to somebody else.
3 Comments
Lol they definitely lie to intimidate their customers and extort extra payments. My servicer told me a year or two ago that I was delinquent and called me while I was at work pretty much every day for two weeks, but their website consistently said I had a balance due of 0. Eventually they stopped calling me altogether when I insisted they stop using that phone number. Of course, the next bill came on time and I paid it on time, and the balance due updated once more to 0. Now two years later I stumbled on this because once again I received an email about not having made a payment, in spite of their website showing it clearly from two days ago.