Reader Vanessa is paying her student loans on time. Really, she is. The problem is that she can’t manage the full amount herself right now, so the payment comes in two parts: one from her, and one from her mom. This is too difficult for our friend Sallie to understand, and they keep sending delinquency notices to Vanessa even though the monthly bill gets paid in full. No matter how many times she contcats the company about the problem, no one can figure out how to make it stop.

Addition is hard. Isn’t it? She writes:

I keep getting delinquency notices from them despite on-time payments.

I owe a lot of money in student loans — more than my monthly car
payment. I can’t pay the full amount on my loans by myself. I work in
human services, and despite being in a management position, it is not
exactly the field you get into for the money. My Mom generously helps
me by paying part of my bill to Sallie Mae.

Sallie Mae has been receiving two payments each month totaling the
full monthly amount. One would think that a bank would be able to do
simple addition, but I regularly get delinquency notices saying I am
past due on my bill by some random amount.

This has happened 5 times in less than a year, and I have contacted
Sallie Mae multiple times about the same issue.

Each time they bring my account up to date, but they don’t fix
anything, and nobody can tell me why this keeps happening to me. One
agent suggested that I made a payment on only 1 billing group, but I
consolidated my loans and there is only 1 billing group to pay on.

More than being an inconvenience, I worry that this may affect the
credit scores of both myself and my cosigner. I also want to be able
to remove the cosigner from my Sallie Mae account eventually, which
requires a certain number of consecutive on-time payments. Sallie Mae
has not answered my concerns whether these false delinquencies will
affect my ability to remove the cosigner in the future.

I wonder if anybody else has had similar issues with this. I also hope
that if you can post my story, perhaps someone at Sallie Mae can
actually fix the issue once and for all.

If you have experienced the same problem, please let us know here in the comments (or by e-mail, and we’ll connect you with Vanessa if you want.) If regular customer service at Sallie Mae can’t help you, consider calling their customer advocate unit: at least you won’t encounter any phone trees there.

UPDATE: Vanessa let us know in the comments that she has indeed called the customer advocate unit, and they were able to help her. Yay!

Customer advocate works!!

This is the OP, they contacted me last Friday (this was sent in a couple of weeks ago) and the woman I spoke to was actually knowledgeable, and explained the issue.

She separated the repayment into two billing groups, and the consumer advocate representative I spoke with also told me that she will be monitoring my account to ensure the payments are correctly applied, so there won’t be any more delinquency notices.

I was pleased with the solution offered, anything is better than being told by the regular customer service I need to call them every month to hold their hand in processing multiple payments.

Let’s hope that this solution works!

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