Consumer complaint received 2017-07-03
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Struggling to repay your loan — Can't temporarily delay making payments
Company: GREAT LAKES (CA)

On XX/XX/XXXX, I started contacting Great Lakes about putting my student loan in deferment. I can not make regular payments and I am in the process of combining 5 student loans into a consolidation status. The consolidation process is long and complicated. Great Lakes it seems did not put my student loan into deferment. So, in XX/XX/XXXX, I contacted Great Lakes on their website and with the following letter : This letter is to clear up the confusion with the status of my student loan. Please put it in deferment and keep it there until further notice. This letter will also provide the reasons for the deferment. I have been on the Great Lakes website where I tried to apply for the deferment. The website asked way too many questions which I do not have time for. I have too many problems and not enough time to fill in the blanks on the Great Lakes website. Here are the issues I am dealing with which qualify me for the deferment : My wife and I have five ( 5 ) student loans which we are trying to consolidate. This has been complicated and very time consuming. We will not make any payments to any of them until the consolidation is complete. Due to my time at XXXX and barely having the financing to graduate, we have accumulated a great amount of debt that we are still trying to deal with even to this day. Right as I was graduating, my unemployment benefits dried up and I did not have an income for a while. Due to this, we accumulated a great amount of debt that we are still dealing with : An IRS bill An EDD bill Paying 2 speeding tickets to a collection agency. Cant driveno job and then no money Pawn shop ( 4 pieces of family jewelry ) Chapter XXXX bankruptcy payments  High cell phone bill High electricity bill Rent increase just recently All this means is that we barely live paycheck to paycheck, our credit is shot and we have aging cars that need a lot of repairs and due to our chapter XXXX bankruptcy, we cant get new ones. Both of  our cars are barely running well, both need brake work, both need major tune ups, both cars have registration that is due in XX/XX/XXXX and XX/XX/XXXX, both cars need tires, both have cracked front windshields and both have high mileage that increases by the day. Both need major interior work which cant be done without money. If for any reason one of our cars decides to break downwe do not have any money or any means to fix it. No car, no job, no money and we could very well be homeless. We are also in the process of taking care of our daughter who has just XXXX XXXX XXXX. She is in school with no income and we have been paying her bills and taking care of her. Things will be better for her once she gets back to school and can get an income. It has been tough taking care of her and keeping all the bills paid. We just recently had to deal with a {$200.00} overdraft on our checking account. A couple had to be paid which overdrew out account. Once payday hit, the {$200.00} was taken care of. But for a couple of weeks, there was no money and times were really tough. What this all means is we do not have enough to pay even our regular bills, have gas in the cars and food on the table. We barely make it from paycheck to paycheck. This will be this for quite some time until debts are paid off and our incomes increase. Our chapter  XXXX bankruptcy is in effect until XX/XX/XXXX so we are stuck with it and stuck because of it in so many ways. So, the reason for this notice is to fix the missing information on your website that is not asked for. I dont have time to collect all the paperwork and information required to fill in the blanks on your website in the deferment section. Please keep my status in deferment and wait for our consolidation company to contact Great Lakes with instructions of our consolidation of all our student loans. Lastly, please update your website to allow more than 975 characters in the contact section for comments. 975 characters is nowhere near enough to get any points across. <P/>As near as I can tell, Great Lakes still has not put my student loan into deferment.