Hi guys, I am just posting this as a warning to anybody that lets Auto Pay pay their student loans or other loans each month. I am a Navient customer and I use Auto Pay in addition to extra monthly payments. When I pay extra, they give you the choice to have that payment extend your due date or to have the next Auto Pay be deducted as normal. I always choose the latter, as I am trying to pay these loans off early. Additionally, I pay all my extra money to my highest interest loans, hoping to pay them down faster and save some money.
However, a month or so ago I noticed that after making extra payments, my Auto Pay was NOT being deducted normally. It was being deducted for the full amount, but with a HEAVY weight on my LOWER interest rate loans. My HIGHER interest rates loans were receiving almost no money paid towards them.
Here is two photos of the issue, the first indicating what SHOULD happen (from correspondence they sent me) and the second indicating what is actually happening. You can see that my higher interest loans (loan 1 and 2) are receiving almost no money, and I think something like $0.16 is being paid towards principal. Had I not caught this, I basically would have never paid these loans off.
I called customer support and they agreed it DEFINITELY is an issue and they re-applied the payments that had errors. They said they would talk to the technical support team and see what the issue was, but their explanation was that even though I selected the correct choice when making extra payments, the system was reverting that choice to the one that essentially says extra payments SHOULD affect auto pay deductions.
Edit for clarity: Navient fixed past payments when I called last, but I checked my account this morning and it is still happening, so it looks like they're not paying enough attention to an issue that could cost their customers a lot of money in the long run.
Bottom line/TL;DR: Keep an eye on your loan statements and make sure the correct amount is being paid, or you might end up paying your loans off forever!
Submitted January 05, 2017 at 06:19AM by trizzytraut http://ift.tt/2iEviNS
