Consumer complaint received 2017-09-14
Product: Student loan — Private student loan
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Received bad information about your loan
Company: Navient Solutions, LLC. (NJ)

I have been paying loans for Navient since XXXX for private loans taken out through them. My payment allocation has never been clear and customer service representatives are poorly trained, and can not give you clear answers. I have been told many different things by different representatives. My loan allocations have gone towards interest payments for future months, when I was expecting them to go towards principal. When I had called and asked a representative why that was the case one told me the money was sitting in a pool to cover the minimum interest payments each month for the loan. This is a high interest loan that I was attempting to chip away at, but little did I know I was not covering interest. This has led me to nowhere with my loans. When I spoke to another representative I was told that this was not possible without getting my loans refinanced by another service, then he went and spoke to another rep and explained to me the only way to do this was by calling in to make the additional payment. Earlier this month on XXXX XXXX I had satisfied my monthly payment. I had paid an additional {$100.00} to a loan to knock off principal. After checking today I realized that only {$77.00} of the {$100.00} was applied towards the principal and {$23.00} was applied toward interest. I had asked the rep numerous times if the loan would be completely applied to principal and she reassured me that it would. After calling today I was told that there was some unpaid interest lingering, but there was nowhere to see that I had anything remaining to pay. My minimum payment was {$580.00} for the month and I paid that before paying an additional {$100.00} towards a specific loan. My assumption was that the {$580.00} would cover all interest due and pay some towards principal. The minimum payment for the loan I ended up paying additional towards was only {$1.00}. I have no idea how they came up with that number if I had {$23.00} of interest remaining. I was only able to discover that there was additional interest to be paid because I happened to make an additional payment against that loan. Otherwise I would not have known this.Additionally it seems I was put into some extended repayment plan at some point in the past 9 years. I had called to get a rate reduction, but I was n't really told what exactly was happening. When I spoke to the rep on XXXX XXXX I was told that I would just have to pay extra. I had asked if there was a way I could change up my plan so that my payments were optimal. Right now I am seeing that the pay off date is some time in the XXXX for these loans. This is just unacceptable. A few of these loans are under 5000 and I would 've paid them off right now if my money was being allocated the way I expected it to be. 

The issue with the company is that they try to complicate things as much as possible as obfuscate these sort of things from you to take in additional money. The other issue is that these reps are not trained, most probably intentionally, to provide adequate customer service. I do not think any of these individuals have the financial knowledge to be in the positions that they are in. I always seem to get a run around from these individuals. Unlike banks who staff quality customer service reps, Navient chooses to staff bodies that do not provide advice that benefits the customer.Their practices are unacceptable.