Consumer complaint received 2017-04-26
Company: AES/PHEAA
State: CO
Product: Student loan
Sub-product: Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer
Sub-issue: Received bad information about your loan

Complaint:
On  XXXX   XXXX  I received an email from FedLoan Servicing stating that " A new message is waiting for me to view. '' This email said : " A new message has been placed in your FedLoan Servicing paperless inbox. To access this message, select " Go T o Paperless Inbox '' bel ow and sign in. Or go to Account Access at MyFedloan.org to view your paperless inbox. '' Eventually I 'm not sure when I first did this I logged in and saw I had a message with the subject " Information Regarding Your Student Loans. '' I clicked the link and a file downloaded with an obscure filename, it was " {  XXXX  } .pdf. '' It was n't until I noticed my payment was about to go up in  XXXX   2017  that I revisited this " Information Regarding [ my ] Student Loans. '' When I finally opened the obscure PDF, I learned that the " information '' was that my income based repayment plan needed to be recertified or it would expire. Failure to recertify my income would result in being placed on an  Alternative Repayment Plan  with my servicer. The full text of the letter is attached.     The notification given to me about this change in repayment status was not appropriately or completely communicated to me and has resulted in real financial and emotional harm.       1. FedLoan Servicing failed to send notification of my need to recertify in a meaningful way. They needed me to take specific action by a specific deadline but all that was communicated by email was that they had " information '' for me. The servicer should have indicated they needed action in the subject of the original email, and again in the " paperless inbox '' after I logged in to their website.
2. The notification sent did not completely lay out all the consequences of my failu  re to act. Failure to recertify my income would result in a higher monthly payment, yes, but it will also result in the interest capitalizing onto my principle. This will have a dramatic effect on the amount owed, a direct financial harm to me as a consumer. Because FedLoan Servicing was not forthright about the consequences of my inaction, they should credit my principle with the amount of interest that capitalized.      3. The information in the letter downloaded from myfedloan.org 's " Paperless Inbox '' contain ed conflicting and misleading information. It said that payments made on the " Alternative repayment plan '' will not count to ward the Public Service Loan Forgiveness ( PSLF ) p rogram a program I currently qualify for. But when I called to submit this same complaint to FedLoan Servicing they told me the payment *would* count toward the repayment because my payment plan is a " standard 120 month repayment period. '' This is despite information on myfedloan.org showing a repayment term of 132 Months under my current plan. At this point I do not know what is right and who, if anybody, I can trust at FedLoan Servicing to give me accurate information about the status of   my loans.
4. FedLoan Servicing has still not confirmed that the interest on my loan will capitalize or when it will capitalize. I will have no way of knowing if or when   it will happen until it does. This means, I have no way of taking any action I could to mitigate the consequences of my failure.     I spoke on the phone with  XXXX , employee ID  XXXX , about this complaint and was informated FedLoan Servicing could do nothing to help me resolve this problem and that the content and delivery of these notifications happens based on Department of Education regulations. He could not tell me what these regulations were so that I could read them and offered no resources for better understanding the problem.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation