@calyx I do think I will try for this angle, just not sure who to contact first...the student loan servicer, or the collection agency (#2) that now holds it? When you rehabbed, do you remember if you got the "you completed rehab!" letter from the collection agency, or from the loan servicer? I am trying to figure out who should have sent me this documentation, if it ever existed.
@sabii, I actually completed 9 months of payments to the first collection agency, and after those completed, they sent the loan back to my school/the student loan servicer. I know it's kind of confusing to keep up with since there's so many entitites involved. They forced me to do payments that were 2.5 times more than the original loan payment. When you say to get my bills from collection agency #1, do you mean call/write them to request my monthly statements in writing? I do have monthly statements via email. Actually, let me post the text of one of those (anonymized).
You have authorized Collection Agency #1 to process a credit card payment in the amount of $100.00 on (date). The payment will be applied towards your outstanding balance. You may stop the deposit of this payment by contacting our office either orally or in writing prior to the scheduled date of the deposit. Should there be a remaining balance and you decide to pay it in full, you may call or send an email to our office. Payment may also be made on our Internet website at http://www.westealmoney.com. Additionally, you may view account information at our website by selecting the "Check Your Balance" option.
Collection Agency #1
Lying Rep Name
Phone number
lyingrep@westealmoney.com
This communication is from a debt collector and is an attempt to collect a debt. Any information obtained will be used for that purpose.
State Permit Number 123
Is that typical language for a rehab payment statement? This was all brand new to me so I didn't know what to expect. They did not try to collect money from me after they sent it back to my school/the student loan servicer. Basically the timeline was this:
Fall 2010 begin making payments
Fall 2012 go back to school full time; loan goes into deferment
Spring 2014 graduate
Summer/Fall 2014 begin making payments regularly
Fall 2016 become unemployed due to life change and move
Fall 2016-Spring 2017 make sporadic payments but fall further and further behind (my other loans were on IBR with $0 payment at this time).
Late Spring 2017 move to home state, procure a job finally.
Summer 2017 Loan goes into default without me realizing it (I am fairly certain it defaulted after 120 days, four months, instead of 180. Wish I could find my statements from that time frame).
Mid-late summer 2017 Collection agency #1 calls, tells me to pay in full, pay in 3 payments (or something like that), or consolidate. I make it clear I will not consolidate all my loans for this one tiny one. I go home, do research, find out about rehabilitation, next time I talk to rep I tell her I want to rehabilitate. She is not happy. She tells me I have to divide the full balance into 9 monthly payments to rehab. I tell her that's not how it works. She is not happy. I state how much I can pay. She says she will have to talk to the school.
Fall 2017 after some back and forth she finally "talks to my school" and says they are insisting on a payment of either $100 or $150 but would prefer $150. I feel backed into a corner but want to get this over with so I agree to the $100. I am pretty certain that she had me give her my account information for electronic withdrawal. Payments start in October.
June 2018 final payment is made, I am excited because once it's out of rehab I can apply for loan forgiveness due to my profession. Something about it on Credit Karma changes but I don't remember what. I wait a few months knowing it takes time but never hear anything. Life happens and I forget about it for a while (dumb move!).
Spring/early summer 2019 I check Credit Karma, see late payments on this account and that it's still noted in collections. I am curious what's up so in June I:
1. call collection agency #1; they state they gave it back to my school a year ago almost to the day
2. contact student loan servicer via live chat. They state loan is with collection agency #1.
3. contact my school via the alumni liason who forwards my question to someone who forwards it to someone else who has someone respond telling me they don't deal with the Perkins loans. After some back and forth, this person contacts the student loan servicer directly.
4. a supervisor from the student loan servicer emails me to say they don't have the loan, it's with collection agency #1
5. a few days later, Monday of July 4th week, she calls to say they found my loan and I need to call to set up a payment plan
6. two days later (I believe) another rep calls and says the same thing
7. the following week on Tuesday, I call and speak to the rep who looks through the notes, sees the payments but nothing about rehabilitation, calls it "disturbing" and sets me up on a monthly payment plan. When discussing amounts, I said I thought it was supposed to be what I used to pay; she says that because the balance is $1400~ they will want more than my old payment but I tell her I had done rehab, she looks and sees the payments, and sets me up on the old payment plan of $40/month. I schedule a payment for the following day and then for the first of each month following. She tells me I'll get a statement in the mail and a letter about completing rehab.
8. a couple weeks later collection agency #2 sends me the first letter about the debt and says I have 30 days to dispute it
9. another letter arrives a few weeks later that is basically a bill/invoice for the full amount
10. another letter saying they've tried "many times" to contact me arrives and tells me I can consolidate the loan if I can't afford to pay in full
11. I email the supervisor from the student loan servicer twice, and email collection agency #2 (this was last week)
From the very beginning of this fiasco, when that first rep from that first collection agency tried to jerk me around, I started keeping notes because I wanted to contact the Ombudsman because the whole thing seemed so mismanaged and shady, and I wondered how many of my fellow students had they bilked with that "divide it into 9 monthly payments" thing (my school is a private school without a ton of funding so most students leave with crippling debt; mine was in the $35k range from there with the maximum academic scholarship they offered; most students were not as fortunate). I had wanted to complete the rehab and get it back into repayment before opening that can of worms. Now I wish I'd just gone for it.
Regarding my other student loans: approximately $60k (just barely under that, now) left of Stafford and Direct loans, a mix of subsidized and unsubsidized; the highest interest rate is 6.8% and the lowest is around 3.5 or 4% (can't remember off the top of my head). I have two different servicers, one from undergrad (who sold a couple of the biggest loans to another servicer) and then from my secondary degree who are all with that second servicer (the same one who bought a few of my loans from undergrad). The first servicer I'm on standard repayment, the second servicer I thought I was on standard repayment but I logged in the other day and it said IDR; I used to be on IBR but don't think I qualify anymore. The payments come out to around $600 a month which is around 20, maybe almost 25% of my take home pay monthly (I'm paid hourly so it varies a bit; it'd be close to 25% of a tighter month). I'm married though, so my husband's income would count towards calculating my payments. It hasn't been a hardship to make the payments, I just can't go crazy with other spending, you know?
Guess I need to contact the DoE this week and see if they know what the heck is going on with this loan. Sigh.
