Amber called Sallie Mae tonite with much dismay and spoke to Ken.  He said that we should be recieving 2 letters in the next 7-10 days one with the payoff amounts for our federal loans and one with payoff amounts for our private loans.  God help us if someone at Sallie Mae has forgotten how to stamp an envelope.

My next step is to contact my congressman, Mike Oxley, and ask for his assistance.

After that I should involve a lawyer, to communicate with Sallie Mae.

I am going to be Calling Mike Oxley’s office this afternoon to try and get that ball rolling and We are going to try and have an attorney write a letter to Sallie Mae, either one Amber’s parents know or one who is a part of ABLE, which provides income based legal advice in the NW Ohio area.

Thomas Fitzpatrick,

This letter is in response to my wife’s federal loans which your company is currently holding. These three loans are part of a group of loans which we had filed for consolidation in October 2005 and included all of our federal loans. The consolidation went through and payments were dispersed in late December. At some point in this process Sallie Mae became the new holder of three of my wife’s loans. Since these were not consolidated we filed the additional paperwork to add these three loans to the consolidation. The paperwork was received by AES (American Education Services) the company we are consolidating to on February 1, 2006. AES has since sent several requests both via fax and the USPS. I have spoken with both Sallie Mae and AES customer service reps numerous times over the past year and I am still awaiting resolution. This is why I am writing you, as well as the CEO of American Education Services, my state Attorney General, the local Better Business Bureau and my state congressman.

What I want from you as the head of Sallie Mae is to make the necessary connections with American Education services to get these three student loans consolidated away from your company. My wife’s account number with Sallie Mae is ##########, and her Name is Amber Smith . I expect to hear from you or an assistant of yours by March 9th, 2007 regarding this matter. I also expect to have the loans transferred to American Education Services or completely forgiven by April 13th 2007.

You can view more about this process at http://www.imjosh.com/salliemae.

Sincerely,

Josh and Amber Smith

salliemaeblog@gmail.com

One great part of the private loan consolidation with Wells Fargo is that you can choose to have up to 2 co signers which can help you overcome the debt to income ratio restriction which we had run into on prior occasions.

Stay tuned later this week for Open Letters to the CEOs of American Education Services and Sallie Mae regarding our federal loans.

The next time I called was on March 27th and AES generated another request for Sallie Mae during this phone call.

On April 28 I called both AES and Sallie Mae again. At this point AES had sent several fax requests as well as at least one USPS request.

On May 2nd at 2:45PM I spoke with Roxanne at Sallie Mae who told me they had yet to receive a Loan Verification Certificate request. She gave me a fax number 1-317-596-8398 ATTN: Sallie Mae for me to direct AES to send their fax requests to. She could not or would not provide a person who this could be marked ATTN to.

On May 12th I spoke with Rachael at Sallie Mae, after running through my story I was able to speak to Mike a supervisor at Sallie Mae who assured me that he would make the proper connections and get these loans consolidated.

After a busy June I spoke to AES again on July 5th 2006 and they sent yet another request to Sallie Mae for the payoff amounts.

Since this date customer service at Sallie Mae has gone downhill. I no longer speak to anyoen who has a grip on the English language and I am treated rudely because the loans are in my wife’s name, even though I have permission on file to speak with them about these.

It has been roughly a year since we filed the paperwork to get these loans consolidated so I am hoping this blog will document the rest of the process in order to get thee loans consolidated.

In the next few weeks I will be posting the results of my phone calls with Sallie Mae and with AES. I will also be writing several open letters to the CEO of AES, CEO of Sallie Mae, and the Better Business Bureau.

Please feel free to share your Sallie Mae experiences in the comments.

If there is one piece of advice I have for graduates regarding loans and graduation it would be to consolidate your loans as soon as you get moved into your new apartment or back to your parents. In order to get eh best rate you need to consolidate before June 3oth of your graduation year. Unfortunately we did not meet this deadline. However we could still lock in a rate before the next leap in federal loan interest rates.

Flash Forward to October of 2005, our loans have entered repayment and we had recently filed our paperwork for loan consolidation. In between the time we filed our consolidation paperwork and the time that our consolidator (American Education Services) was ready to send the payoff amounts Sallie Mae purchased three of my wife’s federal loans. This shouldn’t have been a problem, however you can easily tell by the title of this blog that it is indeed a problem. At the time these loans were worth roughly $6,500.

We didn’t find out about this problem until Late December 2005 when the rest of our federal loans were consolidated and we received our new documentation and monthly payment information. We also saw the federal loans appear in my wife’s online account with Sallie Mae, who unfortunately hold her private education loans as well.

Well there is the setting roughly a year ago. All of our federal loans other than the three Sallie Mae had purchased were consolidated with AES, which should have given us one vendor and an affordable monthly payment. Stay tuned for the events which have occurred over the past year.