Consumer complaint received 2023-09-26
Company: MOHELA
State: FL
Product: Student loan
Sub-product: Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer
Sub-issue: Trouble with how payments are being handled

Complaint:
I and my wife have Direct federal loans for graduate school with MOHELA. Earlier this month I logged in to confirm auto payment was setup and the amount was correct, and it was the same as it was when we last paid in 2020. On XX/XX/XXXX I received an email they had " updated '' our XXXX plans. The letters in their system both show XX/XX/XXXX but if you open it, it is dated XX/XX/XXXX. They had us both set at the exact same rate which was double what it was before. Her repayment starts on XX/XX/XXXX and mine on XX/XX/XXXX. 

Upon looking into this, what happened to me ( and essentially EVERYONE in this situation, if you look on their XXXX or for example this XXXX XXXX : XXXX : XXXX ) is they processed every conversion from REPAYE to SAVE as if they were a single borrower with a family size of 1, yet used the married AGI for income. You can easily show this by entering the information in the studentloan.gov sites calculator as if you had that AGI but were single and getting the number they came up with. 

On Monday XX/XX/XXXX I spent XXXX hours and XXXX minutes on hold, only to have the guy tell me I was in the wrong department and he had to transfer me. He refused to answer more questions about which department, what option I did wrong, etc. I sat on hold another XXXX minutes before having to leave. On Tuesday XX/XX/XXXX, this morning at XXXX XXXX, I was able to get in pretty quickly, have the staff agree it was a mistake, recalculate it themselves and come up with an amount closer ( XXXX still XXXX $ higher each, when this plan is supposed to be cheaper, despite the AGI for our family essentially being the same ). Because this is so soon before our payments are due, they also were putting us into a forbearance to avoid next week/week after payments at the much higher rate. 

We are both on Public Service Loan Forgiveness plans, and per their site here : https : //studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/public-service # qualifying-payments administrative forbearance for collecting supporting documentation should count as qualifying payments, however MOHELA was saying they wouldn't. 

But for the actions of MOHELA in both A : not properly calculating the amounts and B : not attempting to do this until 11 days ( XXXX business days ) prior to the due date, I would have made a payment and gotten PSLF credit. I don't feel we should be penalized/negated due to their mistakes. 

Furthermore, after all of that hold time, there is acknowledgement on my account that an IDR recalculation was submitted, but not on my wife 's. Neither have anything about forbearance and both still show we are paying the ~double price next month. I'm hoping with time this corrects but I really don't want to have to call back. 

MOHELA is clearly not ready for payments to restart, as demonstrated by the dozens of people replying to my comments on reddit in the exact same situation, not to mention the hundreds of other posts I saw on their and XXXX saying the same.

Company public response: Company believes it acted appropriately as authorized by contract or law
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation