Navient: Like Sallie Mae, But Somehow Even Worse
Written by Ashley Kelmore, Posted in Random
As I mentioned in a post a couple of weeks ago, the Mister and I recently paid off all of our major student loans. It took a couple of tries due to the amounts owed, but we did it, and we reveled in checking the site after the amounts cleared out bank: $0 owed. Then yesterday we noticed that Navient still automatically debited the Mister’s loan payment. He signed in and saw a negative balance on one of his loans for that amount, and also noticed that instead of a zero balance on his other loan, he has a positive balance of $.43. That’s right. Forty-three cents. When he called, they explained that since it takes two days to process, they keep charging that interest. So basically it’s an impossible task to pay off a loan early; every time you pay, there’s a two day lag where you’ll accrue interest.
The woman he spoke with said they would ‘write off’ the $.43 (how generous!), and would turn off the automatic debit for the other loans. First off – how can an auto debit still happen when you have a zero balance? That’s just … what? You don’t owe anything, so there shouldn’t be anything for them to take. Or if there are still a few cents, shouldn’t it just take that? Second – they said we’ll get the money back … in 30-45 days. Will they be sending us interest on that? My guess is no.
Given what the Mister experienced, I decided to sign in and make sure my loan showed a zero balance. Nope. I still owe $.83. What. The. Hell. I have no patience with student loan companies, so instead of calling I sent an email asking for explicit instructions as to how to pay off that eighty-three cents, as well as a letter showing the loan is paid in full, along with a guarantee in writing that they have cancelled the auto-debit on that account while maintaining the auto debit on the one loan we have left. I … do not have high hopes.
This is kind of amazing. Imagine if we didn’t have the extra money that they took from us for that auto-debit? What if that had overdrawn our bank account? Or if we hadn’t checked on the accounts to make sure they still showed a zero balance (which they actually did a week ago), and thus never sent a payment, and ended up getting penalties and credit dings for late payments? I mean, student loan companies are already the worst; it’s kind of amazing that they find new ways to screw with their ‘customers.’ Given this latest development, we’ve decided to hit the savings and just pay off the final small loan. It’s not worth it anymore. I’d rather have less of a cushion than have any part of me relying on Navient to do its job.
Ugh, their whole idea to rebrand to a new company is not going so well for Sallie Mae. We are dealing with some issues with Navient, which is how I stumbled on your blog… including now having negative balances, so I guess we’ll be waiting a few months to get our money back!
Ooof – sorry you’re dealing with that. We did get our money back within about a month, so at least they were good for that. Good luck!!
I just experienced something similar. I refinanced my (Navient/Sallie Mae) private student loan with Citizens Bank in December of 2014. It’s customary to borrow in excess of the total principal balance, in order to ensure you cover any accrued interest and effectively completely pay off the loan. A couple of weeks after Citizens disbursed the money, Navient sent me checks on each of my student loan accounts, informing me that I had over-paid them. Awesome! My credit report showed my Navient accounts as being closed with $0.00 balance. Awesome! I logged into the Navient website to get my 1098-E for 2014. On the screen, staring me in the face, is a $0.01 balance due February 5, 2015. When I called them, they said it was accrued interest. Yep, after being refunded by Navient for overpaying my loans and having the accounts reported as closed to the credit bureaus, they somehow still try to claim that I owed them money. HA! The CS rep said he would put in a special request to have the $0.01 balance removed. How nice. The only thing I can surmise is that they did this in hopes that I would not catch on, then try to assess late fees on a bogus balance. After all, who in their right mind would log back into an account that (a) resulted in a refund to the borrower for OVERPAYMENT and (b) has been reported as CLOSED to the credit reporting agencies? I can’t tell you how relieved I am to be severing my business ties with this company for good.
I’ve heard from a few people who have had these experiences. I have to say we did get letters with the correct amounts refunded, but yes, I think there is something off about their system. I wonder what happens to people who don’t pay such close attention!
Navient is very good about giving you 10 days from the date of their letter to respond. But then they hold their letter for five days before mailing it and it arrives on day zero, no time to respond without penalty. Their correspondence shows a PA address but is postmarked Florida and 5 days later than the date on their response.
Then their is their policy on how they handle you information. They feel that they have the right to use or sell your information to include your social security number as it suits their business model.
Yes, the federal government and state governments need to enact laws to reign them in. At this time only a couple of states have done anything to protect citizens against business like Navient
They have a calculator now to allow you to see what your exact payoff will be once processed. I did this, but not have a negative balance of a few pennies. Don’t really care, I just want them closed. Gone!
I have been paying 120.00 a month since January of 2010. A few payments have been more than that. my loan amount was 7500.00 total. It is showing currently 7457.97 as my balance. HOW???????? this is criminal that they can do this! so now if i use my tax return to just pay it off, i will have paid over 14,000 which kills me!
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