Question:
Dear Steve,
I finished school in 2004. My 2 student loans totaled about $25,000 at the time. They were both with Sallie Mae. I did a lot of deferring and barely paid anything for a long time (not sure how long).
A couple of years back (maybe 3 or a little more) my loans were transferred over to Navient. my 2 loans which had payment of $76.00 a month with Sallie Mae jumped to $209.00 a month with Navient.
I called Navient and no one could give me a straight answer as to why it had jumped so high, got another deferment to give me time to figure out next steps, then after deferment was done ignored the loan for several months.
Now I received an email from Navient stating they would again defer all that I was behind. I did that. Now my payment has jumped to $310.00 a month. Not sure how to handle this. I feel like something is definitely not right. How should I proceed.
Thanks in advance,
Sherri
Answer:
Dear Sherri,
Every time you defer your loans the balance will increase and become less affordable. Between the lack of payments and the interest being charged on the unpaid balance, this is only going to get worse. Navient was sued over the issue of not providing good advice to consumers and Navient’s response, “it’s not our job to provide good advice.”
If you are counting on the Navient debt collector to provide you with sound financial guidance about how to best deal with your loans, you will be disappointed.
It’s not clear if these are private or federal loans. Regardless, the loans, if unpaid and out of deferment, can eventually also be charged additional collection fees and penalties which can explode your balance as well.
The first thing to do is gather some good information so you can get to the bottom of this. I would suggest you ask for or login and get a statement on your account so you can clearly see how the payment and balance changed so much. Without that clarity all anyone can do is just guess what happened.
The next step will depend if this was a federal or private loan. Come back here and post a comment to let me know and I’ll help you from there.
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Question asked.