Consumer complaint received 2019-05-29
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Received bad information about your loan
Company: AES/PHEAA (CA)

The US Department of Education via the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency and XXXX XXXX XXXX have cheated my of 10 years of wages and my future livelihood through false promises, false documents, and misleading statements as well as a 100 % complete and total lack of accountability! 

The loan servicer Penssylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency is a scam! 

They have countlessly kited me and other borrowers, dragging their heels for the sake of passing time ( and accruing interest ). The longer they take to service anything, or respond to emails or calls, the more interest accrues. On multiple occasions, PHEAA rejected my request to be put on different payment plans. Forcing me to change plans this way and then that, capitalizing the tens of thousands of dollars in interest at each instance. 

I have been making payments to my student loans since the age of XXXX. I am now XXXX years of age. They have intimidated me and forced me into agreeing to signing their documents, for fear of default, rising interest rates, bad credit, garnishing wages and garnishing my future social security benefit. They repeatedly capitalize all of my loans, and provide me with little or no statement of information including how many of the original 20 years worth of payments are left until I get my promised writeoff. 

A little timeline : I first took student loans out in 2006 to finance my XXXX education with the promise that my debt would be written off after 20 years of payments. I graduated, moved began working, etc. Later in my life, I decided to do a graduate program, so I needed to borrow more money. Now, PHEAA claims I must pay them for a total of 25 years!!!! This includes all the loans that I took for XXXX! It is absolutely illogical and a scam that PHEAA is now telling me that I have 25 years to pay them off. How can they simply force loans together that were originated for absolutely and completely 100 % different purposes? They can't! But they are doing it anyway! 

After paying my student loans for 10 years, I now have {$140000.00} in government loans, and XXXX in private loans. I have already paid over XXXX in student loan payments. 

My initial cost of tuition for XXXX XXXX XXXX ( which skyrocketed over the 5 years I was forced to stay there ) was only {$15000.00}. XXXX XXXX XXXX also forced me to stay at their school for an additional year, since they made " mandatory pre-requisite classes '' which had not enough seats to support the student body. 

Since completing my XXXX XXXX, I have paid everything I earn toward my student loans. While in graduate school I continued to pay my private student loans, for fear of repercussions and astronomical interest accrual. 

The above points represent only a few of the major issues going on right now in our country. The colleges and lenders routinely flaunted " tax deductions for student loan interest. '' Well, as soon as someone earns XXXX the so-called benefit ( which was never enough to even offset a small % of interest ) diminishes and disappears. So, now that I earn XXXX in California, and take home XXXX with almost no deductions or savings, I get absolutely no tax deduction to help out. At the absolute minimum, ALL student loan interest should be 100 % deductible. Also, the lender/servicer is incorrectly adding the capitalized interest to principle and then underreporting the amount of student loan interest paid! 

Case in point : How could I have paid over XXXX USD to loans for something which the original price was less than XXXX, yet I still owe more than XXXX, yet somehow never paid interest? THIS IS ANOTHER PART OF THE SCAM! 

I have a unique education blend that allows me to 'see ' the/my student loan crisis much more clearly than many student loan borrowers and college goers. My XXXX XXXX is in XXXX, I then studied mathematics followed by earning a XXXX XXXX XXXX. I earned the highest marks ( equivalent to an A ) in every class during my XXXX XXXX. 

I will not give up. I will not stop fighting. I have only just begun fighting. The American people will stand together on this.