Consumer complaint received 2022-08-26
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Received bad information about your loan
Company: Navient Solutions, LLC. (PA)

My husband and I had two federal XXXX  school loans beginning when we both graduated in XXXX and XXXX respectively. These loans ended up being changed to different repayment plans several different times over the years in an ongoing effort to both afford the payments and get them paid off as efficiently as possible ( keeping interest we pay over the life of the loan down ) as we worked and raised our family. I have an XXXX XXXX XXXX. degree and a XXXX XXXX XXXX in the XXXX XXXX XXXX. I have worked in the XXXX  XXXX, XXXX  ( for a XXXX  XXXX ), and have run my own business for 22 years. I currently have a XXXX score of XXXX. I'm not naive or unskilled in managing money. I am quite confident in my administrative and bookkeeping skills. Well ... ..when I would responsibly call in to my servicer ( Sallie Mae , then Navient ) over the years to find a better deal and keep it a federally owned loan, they purposely misinformed me, lied and steered me into loans that not only WERE commercially owned ( which I told them repeatedly I did not want ) but that screwed us over in terms of how much interest we were paying over the life of the loan. And it happened right over the phone. Extremely dishonest and confusing for borrowers what was actually happening until it was already done -- over the phone. The original consolidation loan amount on our two loans was a little over $ XXXX, and 23 years later we're still paying $ XXXX  monthly and have over $ XXXX ( and 5 years ) left on the two loans and have paid out {$11000.00} in interest on top of {$17000.00} in principal on the first loan ( {$29000.00} in payments for original loan of {$22000.00} ) and {$4700.00} in interest and {$7000.00} in principal on the second loan ( {$11000.00} in payments on original loan of {$9100.00} ). So we've paid {$41000.00} in payments for an original loan balance of just over {$31000.00}. We were purposely misled and it was all so confusing when I would call, and they would just change the loan type over the phone by saying we'd be " saving $ -- -- in interest by switching to this loan '' and would get a rate decrease etc and my mistake was trusting them to be honest with me in trying to help us not pay out so much more than we needed to. We were capable of paying out more to shorten the life of the loan. We only needed one pause on payments due to a job loss back in XXXX when we struggled financially for a couple of years. After Biden 's announcement this week on loan forgiveness, I confirmed that we have federal FFELP loans ( commercially owned ) and that's why we had to pay every month during the federal student loan pause during the pandemic, and why we can't get our loan forgiven under the Biden plan because it's commercially owned -- but that there will be an IDR adjustment made to hopefully help people like me and my husband who were basically swindled and steered in the exact opposite direction than we told our servicer we wanted to go with our loans. So, yesterday I applied to consolidate our Navient owned loans into a federal IDR loan so that maybe we can have some relief in the upcoming IDR adjustment to help account for what these servicers have done to us financially. They essentially took advantage of our trust and robbed us. We expect to pay some interest on a loan, but this has been ridiculous. I emailed Navient today that I applied for IDR loan yesterday ( spouse co-signed ) and that I expect them to process it expeditiously ( within 10 business days, as the Rep told me ). Thank you for listening to our story.