Consumer complaint received 2015-07-27
Company: AES/PHEAA
State: WI
Product: Student loan
Sub-product: Non-federal student loan
Issue: Dealing with my lender or servicer
Sub-issue: Trouble with how payments are handled

Complaint:
American Education Services is scamming XXXX of Americans out of their hard earned money. First let me say that none of my student loans were ever explained to me by my financial aid offices at the University XXXX at XXXX, University XXXX at XXXX, University XXXX XXXX or XXXX XXXX University. I was told that these were the only means of financing my education and that everyone had loans because the loan repayments were so easy and the cost to borrow the money was so cheap. Now I am riddled with student loan debt I do not understand. My federal loans seem to work just fine, I have set them up on automatic payments and I can see each month that the principal is reduced. My private loans, XXXX from AES specifically, are a much different story. AES has returned my payments on several occasions XXXX weeks after the payment was made and told me that my checking account does not exist just so that they can charge me a late fee, I resubmitted the same information about my account to them and the payments was processed without any issues but with the added late fee. My principal balance is XXXX times the amount that I borrowed XXXX years ago and they are applying 100 % of my payments to interest only despite that fact that I am not on an interest only repayment plan. I sent them a message through their email service in XXXX asking them why this was happening and I was told that I had made my last interest only payment that month ( extremely convenient ) and that my future payments would go towards my principal but alas even today my payments are being applied only to interest on my loans which never seems to go down. I took out approximately {$44000.00} from them around 8 years ago and today my balance is over {$65000.00} despite me paying over {$500.00} a month. In addition they purchased my loan from XXXX and despite paying nearly {$900.00} this year on that loan only {$110.00} has been applied to the principal. At this rate I will never pay off these loans, I will have a payment for the rest of my life. There is no light at the end of the tunnel with this company, they are not honest or they are incompetent but either way they need to be stopped. Knowing that I will never stop paying them as long as I live and knowing that because of the federal protection this bank receives on their private student loans I will not be able to rid myself of this bad debt in my lifetime, I am hopeless. I will spend the rest of my life handing over {$6000.00} a year ( that means I have to make {$12000.00} just to pay them off ) to an immoral company who is being protected by the same government who already takes a XXXX of every dollar I make. You have created this website to give people a voice and I suspect that this is all this website is intended to do by letting people write down their terrible experiences and feel like they have been heard. I am submitting this assuming that nothing will ever be done to this company and that should let you know how desperate I am.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation