Loan Consolidation Wars
I received a phone call from the Connecticut Student Loan Foundation last week, from a woman named Anne, telling me that my consolidation app with another company had been denied. Hmm. That's odd, I thought. Why would it be denied? As a graduate and a consumer in a capitalist market, I ought to be able to consolidate with whomever I choose, right? Not so, Anne told me, when we spoke on the phone this morning.
"What you're going to have to do is cancel your application with NextStudent [the company with which I wanted to consolidate] because of the "single-lender" rule. Once you've done that, you can consolidate with us, with last year's interest rates," she said.
She seemed nice enough. But things seemed a bit fishy--after all, I had gone into to speak with a finaid expert at school and he hadn't said anything about this single-lender rule. And NextStudent had processed my application without mentioning it. If they knew it wasn't going to fly, why would they bother with such a time-consuming process?
I called up Megan, my advisor at NextStudent, to figure out what was going on. It turns out the single-lender law is no longer in place as of June 15th, and the reason the consolidation was taking so long was because CSLF was refusing to release my loans to them! The reason? They wanted to verify the date on the application to make sure it wasn't signed before June 15th. The only thing I had to do to continue my consolidation with NextStudent was to get them to send the app with the date I had signed it (sometime in August). Because I had begun my application with them before interest rates shot up this summer, I would be able to keep last year's rates--plus the deals NextStudent was giving me--without going through an entirely new app process.
Did Anne mention to this me on the phone? No. Did she knowingly mislead me into thinking I had to cancel my app with another company so that I would consolidate with CSLF instead? Yes. Honestly. The things some companies will do for profits sickens me.
"What you're going to have to do is cancel your application with NextStudent [the company with which I wanted to consolidate] because of the "single-lender" rule. Once you've done that, you can consolidate with us, with last year's interest rates," she said.
She seemed nice enough. But things seemed a bit fishy--after all, I had gone into to speak with a finaid expert at school and he hadn't said anything about this single-lender rule. And NextStudent had processed my application without mentioning it. If they knew it wasn't going to fly, why would they bother with such a time-consuming process?
I called up Megan, my advisor at NextStudent, to figure out what was going on. It turns out the single-lender law is no longer in place as of June 15th, and the reason the consolidation was taking so long was because CSLF was refusing to release my loans to them! The reason? They wanted to verify the date on the application to make sure it wasn't signed before June 15th. The only thing I had to do to continue my consolidation with NextStudent was to get them to send the app with the date I had signed it (sometime in August). Because I had begun my application with them before interest rates shot up this summer, I would be able to keep last year's rates--plus the deals NextStudent was giving me--without going through an entirely new app process.
Did Anne mention to this me on the phone? No. Did she knowingly mislead me into thinking I had to cancel my app with another company so that I would consolidate with CSLF instead? Yes. Honestly. The things some companies will do for profits sickens me.
posted by the Assistant at 2:08 PM
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