My comments in blue. Thanks!
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1.- I read somewhere in this thread that some people were able to delete the recurring payment 1 day before the actual date. I just want to report that I was able to delete the recurring payment 3 days before the actual date.
Not only did you read it somewhere in the thread, you read it explicitly in the text of the guidance that you quoted. It reads:
"Note that some people have reported success at deleting the autopay a day before the first autopay was scheduled to go through...."
Some people have also been successful at doing as many as three days before. Some were not.
2.- I was able to set future payments from the savings account to the loan account. You can only set future payments up to 1 year in the future. I set a small payment every 2 months for the next 12 months. 6 future payments.
Yup. The point of making the future payments, however, is as a method of keeping the account active for a full five years. If Alliant stops your future payments after 12 months, then it is not achieving for you the very reason you are doing it.
3.- I believe the system will only allow you to restore the original payment schedule, i.e. start in early 2021 and pay it monthly. I tried to set recurring every 3 months and start in January 2017 with no end date. As soon I selected the loan account it changed to monthly and start date January 2021. Maybe because I just deleted it?, I'll try to set a recurring payment in a few months.
But surely the original payment schedule did not begin in early 2021. It began the month after the loan was opened, right? This is why it had to be cancelled soon after, or else you would have paid off the loan in five months.
Remember that the goal of any automated payment approach, given that we pay the loan down early, is to keep the loan open and avoid inactivity fees. That's the sole reason to do it. These periodic payments need to begin within the first 10 months of the pay down (otherwise a year will go by with no activity) and they need to continue all the way out to year 5 (otherwise a year will go by with no activity).
As per the guidance, you can do this manually or in an automated fashion. The only automated approach I and others found was to push a payment into the loan account from a checking account that has a billpay feature (many/most checking accounts now have that). For example, $2 quarterly. If you have found a way to do this purely from the linked Alliant savings account, and to start the payment a few months after initial paydown, and to make sure that the payments run through the end of the loan, let me know. The checking account approach is pretty painless -- I think everybody reading this thread has a checking account.
