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Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Flying with student loans, sort of

Didier Weemaels

It is time for me to re-certify for my income based repayment. I am fine with that. What I am not fine with is the confusion surrounding the process. I made my payment on time and clicked the contact us tab to ask how to electronically recertify. What I got in return 5 days later was a very distorted message that was not even remotely related to my question. It really should not be this hard to pay. It really shouldn't. And by the way, why don't college professors get student loan relief? Other teachers do. I just don't understand, but it doesn't really matter. I still need to repayment my loans.

Frustrated, I called the handy 1-800 number and am on hold for about 10 minutes. At least the guy who answered was kind enough to walk me through the process and tell me that I make my payments through one website, but get recertified through ANOTHER one. I wanted to scream. Why is this so complicated? I am honestly trying to pay money back. I am not trying to move my payment date, I am not trying not to pay, and I do not have a sob story. I just want to do the right thing. Apparently I have been to that website before because my email address was recognized. I did not remember my password so I opted to answer the challenge questions. I wrote them so I should be able to answer them, right? Well...I guess I forgot my shoe size because try as many times as I did 7 1/2 or 7.5 was not the correct answer. So I had to verify some stuff and my password was reset.

Now of course the website function I need won't be back up until 8pm tonight. I guess it is down for maintenance. No matter, at least now I know what I need to. Repaying money should not be this difficult especially since there is a high amount of people defaulting on their student loans. Oh well, I will try again.