Consumer complaint received 2018-02-14 00:00:00
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Trouble with how payments are being handled
Company: AES/PHEAA
State: VA

Complaint narrative:
This is a long read but please bear with me as the details are important. 
1 ) My federal student loans were transferred from XXXX XXXX XXXX to XXXX XXXX XXXX in XX/XX/XXXX. I am on the income driven PAYE plan and also enrolled in public service loan forgiveness. I recertified my income and payment amount in XX/XX/XXXX with XXXX XXXX. We made one payment, under this new certification, of {$130.00} to XXXX XXXX before the loans were transferred to XXXX. I only transferred them because we enrolled in the PSLF plan. 
When the loans were transferred to XXXX XXXX, they told us that they would honor the recertification payment amount of {$130.00}. We have documentation of the payments made in the amount of {$130.00} to XXXX XXXX and they were on time payments. 
They gave us a due date on the XXXX  every month. We knew this payment would be increasing over the years so we wanted the due date to be moved to the XXXX of every month. We called and asked XXXX XXXX if we could change the due date to the XXXX every month. We made our payment on XX/XX/XXXX in full. We called on XX/XX/XXXX to change the following month 's payment to the XXXX  and every month thereafter. It would be XX/XX/XXXX for the first higher payment amount based on the website payment. However, the notice we received now says that it goes into effect on XX/XX/XXXX. This inconsistent information is exactly why we are complaining. 
The complaint is that they are now charging a higher payment and no one said that our payment would be higher simply by changing the payment due date to the XXXX. We feel that they are abusing their power and unfairly charging us a higher amount even though we have recertified and 12 months have not passed. We are only in month 4 and they increased our payments. We had no change in family size or income. They claim that the system recalculated the payment amount when they changed the due date. They refused to manually change the payment back to the original amount of {$130.00}. We feel that they are unfairly charging us a higher amount of monthly payments before we actually recertified. Their system is recalculating payments and is against the department of education 's guidelines for recertification and payment changes. 
2 ) When the loans were transferred in XX/XX/XXXX, it immediately went into forbearance which we did not request. We asked to make a payment in XXXX but the lady on the phone told us we were not allowed to make a payment because it wouldn't count. This is all recorded over the phone. Now, the notices show us as missing a payment but this is simply not true. The loan said it was in forbearance. We can easily pay the required amount but we were directly told to not apply a payment until they could remove the forbearance status. Any and all mishandlings related to this forbearance need to be cleared. We obviously don't want to be in forbearance if we're trying to make the 120 qualifying payments as quickly as possible.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation