Consumer complaint received 2022-10-28
Company: Navient Solutions, LLC.
State: NY
Product: Student loan
Sub-product: Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Struggling to repay your loan
Sub-issue: Can't get other flexible options for repaying your loan

Complaint:
It's hard to describe just how miserable Sallie Mae/Navient has made me, but I will do my best. 

In XXXX of XXXX, I was still newly married, but I had no job. My wife had just begun her career as a nurse, and we had our first child on the way. With financial pressures building up, I responded to an offer that I had received in the mail from Sallie Mae. Promising the convenience of lower payments, interest free deferments, and generally a much simpler process for paying our student loans, we immediately moved forward with consolidating our loans together. My wife had graduated from college with {$31000.00} in debt, and I was struggling to pay the balance from my year and a half in college, which amounted to {$26000.00}. This was without even having a degree to show for it. 

We did our best to make our payments ; There were times when we had to use the deferments due to economic hardship. I was either unemployed or underemployed for most of my twenties. But we did make payments, a lot of them. 

However, the payments, along with our other consumer debt, drove us to bankruptcy in XXXX. Every one of our credit cards was paid off because of this, and our total settlement fee was around {$2500.00}. What I noticed as I was going through our paperwork, that a portion of our settlement went to all of our creditors- including Sallie Mae.

This seemed odd to me, since our loan with Sallie Mae was not discharged. It was our largest debt, and the payment had ballooned to more than our mortgage, as did the balance of the loan. But Sallie Mae STILL got almost half of our entire settlement for our bankruptcy. 

With capitalized interest, our student loan was increasing despite every payment that we made, and the payoff date kept moving further and further away. As of this writing, our payoff date is now XXXX of XXXX, when my wife and I will be almost XXXX  years old. That means the loan itself will be XXXX  years old by the time it is paid off - the same age as my oldest son, who by then will have been out of college for close to 13 years. 

I'm sure my story is not unique. What happened was Sallie Mae ( and Navient ) were deceptive and predatory, coercing my wife and I to sign on to a loan that is impossible to pay off, and when we were under extreme duress to the point of bankruptcy, they took money from our settlement payment even though they were not being discharged like every one of our other debts. 

The fact that we are supposed to pay for a loan until our children have graduated from college themselves, is robbing us from being able to plan for our future, but also makes it difficult to make ends meet some months. We were lead to believe that they were going to make our lives easier ; instead, they have chained us to a loan that is sinking us financially. A choice I made when I was XXXX should not affect my life until I am nearing XXXX age.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation