Consumer complaint received 2021-06-01
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Received bad information about your loan
Company: Navient Solutions, LLC. (MA)

I am contacting you because I noticed that Navient has significantly extended the payoff date of each of my federal loans ( and significantly increased the total payoff amount of each of them ) after I opted in to the COVID-19 administrative forbearance. After deciding to take advantage of the administrative forbearance in XX/XX/2021, I noticed that payoff schedules for all of my loans were significantly extended, resulting in much larger total payments. For example, there is one loan for which I should have 18 more months left of payment ( or 24 months if I include the forbearance period ) and for which I owe around {$2600.00}. However, my account now reflects that I have 32 more months of repayment resulting in a total of nearly {$4600.00}. Another one, in which I should have 12 more months of repayment ( 18 if counting the forebearance ), now shows a payment schedule of 25 more months. The total balance on that loan should be around {$2100.00} but the new payment schedule would have me paying {$5600.00}. 

Similar discrepancies are reflected on all of my federal loans serviced by Navient. There is no reason that this should be the case given I was paying all of the loans consistently up until XX/XX/2021, had already paid off interest on the affected loans, and those loans have been on a 0 % interest rate for over a year now due to the COVID-19 emergency relief measures.

I requested that these errors in my estimated payoff schedules be corrected and received three different responses from three different Navient representatives. None of the responses is satisfactory. I spoke to one specialist on the phone who stated that my loan terms had changed since I had changed my payment plan ; however, my payment plan has been the same for several years. Another specialist who replied to a written complaint said that Navient would not be able to update my account and reflect the proper payoff schedule while my loans were in the administrative forbearance. This doesn't make sense as it would mean that Navient effectively stops servicing the loans by providing up-to-date information on their status during this period. And a final one indicated that postponing my payments would inherently extend my projected payoff date, resulting in a higher payoff amount. However, that response doesn't explain why the loans would be extended for multiple times longer than the requested forbearance period, with the result being several thousands of dollars inexplicably added on to the total amount due.

I wanted to report my concerns around this development since the inaccurate information impacts my eligibility for an employer-paid loan repayment program that I participate in. I also recognize that I am uniquely able to track these bizarre changes because of the record keeping that I do for that program. I suspect that other borrowers would not have historical information about their loans that would enable them to see how dramatically and arbitrarily their payoff estimates have increased just by moving their loans into the administrative forbearance from one day to the next.