Consumer complaint received 2018-04-28
Company: Navient Solutions, LLC.
State: DC
Product: Student loan
Sub-product: Private student loan
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer
Sub-issue: Received bad information about your loan

Complaint:
On XX/XX/2018, I applied and was approved for a refinance of two private student loans through XXXX. In all of the application and disclosure documents, I was told that I would receive a 0.25 percent discount in my interest rate if I enrolled in automatic payments. 

Immediately upon receiving access to my online account with XXXX ( on or around XX/XX/XXXX ), I enrolled in automatic payments to take advantage of this discount, which would reduce my interest rate from 4.83 to 4.58 percent. 

On XX/XX/XXXX, I logged in to my XXXX account to check the status of my refinancing and called XXXX customer service with a few questions. I noticed that in my online account information that this 0.25 percent discount did not appear to have yet been applied to my loan. I told this to the customer service agent, who said she would look into it. 

At first the XXXX representative said that my loan was not eligible for that discount. I told her that this was inconsistent with the information I had received, including in the Final Disclosure notice that I received when executing the loan documents. This notice read in a section called " reference notes '' : " You can take advantage of a 0.25 % interest rate reduction by setting up and maintaining active and automatic monthly ACH withdrawals of your loan payment. '' She looked up this document on her computer system and concurred that the document included such a reference note. 

I responded that I wanted this discount to be reflected on my loan as soon as possible and that I would take further action if interest was accrued to my loan balance at the non-discounted rate. She said that she would submit a case in her system and that I would receive a letter from XXXX within two weeks notifying me of their decision. I expressed surprise that they could not apply the discount immediately, as the case was so clear cut. 

As of XX/XX/XXXX, more than two weeks later, I had not received this letter and no such document was available in the Inbox of my online account. My online account summary now said that my loan had an interest rate of 4.58 percent, the discounted rate. The summary also showed that I had already accrued interest of {$130.00}. So I contacted XXXX customer service again via its online chat function to see how this interest was calculated, using the discounted or non-discounted rate. 

The XXXX representative told me that this interest was calculated using the discounted rate. I was pleased by this response, but requested they send me a document showing that this was the case. He said he would e-mail me such a document within 2 days, but that it would be available immediately in my online account Inbox. 

The document was not available immediately, so I logged in again today, XX/XX/XXXX, to see if it had arrived. It had not. However, my Inbox did now show my first Billing Summary document for this loan. The document shows that interest has accrued to my loan using the non-discounted interest rate of 4.83 percent, directly contradicting the information I had received from the XXXX representative the day prior. 

In summary, it is my belief that XXXX has engaged in deceptive practices and used bureaucratic obstacles to deny me this discount during at least the first billing cycle of my loan, despite me raising it with representatives of the company on multiple occasions and demonstrating to the company that it is clearly a part of our agreement. No customer should be reasonably expected to contact a lender multiple times to prove and receive the benefit from a basic term of their loan agreement.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation