OCCUPY STUDENT DEBT

Student debtor stories submitted by the 99%

Classic Sallie Mae Negotiations

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Options Sallie Mae has given me in order to pay my loan:

1. Borrow from friends and family - $60,000 + 18 percent interest by the way.

2. Take out another private loan and use it to pay the current private loan.

3. Fill out a bunch of applications for credit cards, and pay the loan with those. (My credit score is below 500 due to Sallie Mae - so I either can’t get a credit card / or can get me one with an interest rate of 35 percent or higher)

4. Intentionally hurt myself or fill out a false accident claim so I can cash in on a settlement. (This is an honest to god suggestion from a Sallie Mae employee.)

5. Don’t pay my rent or buy groceries for the month. But pay my phone so Sallie Mae can continue to call me ten times a day.

6. Sell my car, all my personal possessions, and clothing so I can bring my account current and at least get just a small fraction the interest out of the way.

7. Quit college now and take up two or three jobs. Yes, Sallie Mae asked me to do the right thing and give up.

8. Ask neighbors, people I don’t know around me, if they would be willing to pitch in and help me out. Other wise Sallie Mae would call them and do it for me.

9. Garnish my wages. My wages are student loans.

10. Call me ten times a day. As if in between hours I’m some how going to magically have sixty thousand dollars.

11. Got to love the forbearance fee. In all honesty I’m still paying considering my interest is compounding during the times the forbearance is in “effect.”

Al lord, seriously? I get it. Who doesn’t want a nice yacht, a mansion and their own personal golf course. But what is that going to mean ten years from now when you need a doctor, and there aren’t any because you pissed on all of them? What about science breakthroughs? Your yacht isn’t going to build itself. How are you going to purchase the latest high tech car or gadget when America’s engineers are all stuck working retail? Pilots. Whose going to fly you in your private jet to your favorite vacation spots around the world? YOU? There are only a small handful of people like you out there right now, Al Lord. You could do so many great things with your money and your choosing not to. The American people don’t want to be filthy rich, they just want their shot. America possesses a vast range of diverse and talented people that could change the world as we know it. Al Lord, your not one of them. Its a travesty that some one that has nothing to offer gets to make the decisions.

I graduated a state college with a bachelor’s degree in 1994. When I graduated, I was $37,000 in debt. Some of the loans were Perkins, low interest loans at 5%. A few were at the federal rate of 8.5% and the rest were called SLS Loans and they were at 12.5%. Almost immediately after I graduated I received a call from Sallie Mae, and was told that if I consolidated my loans, that they would average my interest rate at 9.5%, but that I would be able to refinance the loans at a lower rate should the federal rate go down. The job market was tight in the area of the country that I lived in, so I took the income sensitive option to repay my loans. After a few years and a layoff, I found that I now owed almost 75k in student loans. I contacted SallieMae and requested a refinance so that I could lower my interest rate down to the 3% that it was at the time. I was told by them that the only way that I could possibly refinance my loans was to take out more loans, but that they would use a weighted average to determine my interest rate. Meaning that I could lower my rate to 9.4% if I took on more debt.

I paid what I could over the years, but in 2005, I landed a really good position where I had a lot of capital to take care of my debt. The problem is that by that time my debt was over $100,000. I contacted SallieMae and told them that I would like to make them a cash offer of 65,000 dollars to forgive my debt. That was everything that I had saved up and was ready to give it all to them to forgive my debt. I was told by a supervisor at SM that since I could not discharge their debt through bankruptcy that they would apply the 65k to my debt, but that they did not have to negotiate with me.

It was at this point that I decided to default on my loans in the hopes that I could get to the guarantor to make a compromise, only to find out that SallieMae purchased the guarantor USAF. Not only that, but the company that has hunted me for the past 6 years is Pioneer collections (they go by a lot of names now) is also owned by SallieMae. I am now a second class citizen. I pay all of my bill but for one. They can garnishee my wages without cause, they can attach my social security. They have even called my neighbors to tell me that there Is an emergency so that they could get my contact information. It has cost me jobs, I cannot get a home loan, so I am stuck in the house that I purchased before I defaulted. My insurance is more expensive. I cannot even get a car loan.

I now owe more than 225,000 dollars on a 37,000 debt. Right now, I see no way out, except death. Not that I am going to kill myself, but that Sallie Mae Will follow me to my grave. I hope they send people to carry my casket.