Tag Archives: student loans

National Student Loan Service Centre Rant

22 Sep

Never have I been so angered by a company as I have been over the years by the National Student Loan Service Centre, which for anyone outside of Canada or lucky enough to not have Government Student Loan debt within Canada is the evil entity that you have to deal with when paying back your student loans.

They are ridiculous.

The amount of times they have made errors when dealing with my file that have negatively impacted me and instead of correcting the error, or even just saying sorry (and meaning it) I have to redo a bunch of paperwork I already properly filled out and resubmit it even though I submitted it on time originally aaaaand then I have to hope they decide to be lenient because now I am submitting paperwork late and they could decide to penalize me for it.

Seriously, ridiculous!

The latest in the saga of my dealings with NSLSC started a couple weeks ago, well, I suppose it actually started a month or so ago but I didn’t know about the screw up until a couple of weeks ago.

See, I can’t afford to make the full monthly payments on my student loan so every six months I fill out a form for Repayment Assistance. Basically I am telling them I am still too poor to make payments, they counter with a demand for proof of income, I send them pay stubs, they grudgingly agree and lower my monthly payments, and for six months things are ok.

The last time they assessed me I unfortunately had a month where I racked up a lot of overtime at work so the pay stubs I sent them showed my monthly earnings as far greater than they normally are. When they sent me my letter saying what my monthly payments would be they were waaaay higher than anything I could hope to afford so I called them and tried to explain that the pay stubs they had showed overtime that I don’t normally get. I told them my hourly wage and how many hours of work I get a week and requested they please base my monthly payment on that information, I even wrote them a letter explaining this in detail. They were less than helpful…which is my nice of way of saying the lady on the phone was a bitch who wouldn’t let me finish a sentence, constantly talked down to me and basically said I was on my own.

Where they find these people I don’t want to know!…Actually, yes I do, so I can cut off their source of staffing!

So I tried making the stupid high payments and couldn’t. I called in again, got a different person who said I could request to be re-assessed and that might mean I get a lower monthly payment so of course I said I wanted to do that. I had ten days to fill out the appropriate form, fax it in with supporting documentation, and hope they decided to be nice. I faxed the paperwork the next day but didn’t hear anything from them so on the tenth day I called to confirm they had it and the guy I spoke with said it wasn’t in my file but if I faxed it in that day it would still be there on time and I would be ok. So I faxed it immediately and made sure I got a copy of the fax confirmation print out. I breathed a sigh of relief and then waited to see what they would do.

They are not always the fastest moving organization so it isn’t like I was expecting to hear from them right away, and while they prefer people upload things to their site or fax them they choose to send snail mail to student loan borrowers so I knew I had at least a week before I’d get a letter.

I didn’t forget about it exactly but since I knew I had to wait for a letter from them I stopped having the situation be at the top of my mind. I went on vacation, did my normal stuff, then randomly a couple weeks ago I get a letter saying I owe them over $400 dollars asap, my credit rating is being screwed up because of this and blah blah blah.

What the hell??

I called them and asked what was going on, I explained I had faxed in the paperwork and had been waiting for a letter saying what my new payments are and never received one and all of a sudden I get this letter and I didn’t understand what was happening. The lady I was speaking with said they never received the paperwork so my file reverted back to my owing the original monthly payment amount and I was actually owing them over $600 now.

Luckily I keep all my paperwork so I said I know they got the paperwork because I have the fax confirmation print out and they received it on such n such date and such n such time. I wanted to say “so there!” and stick out my tongue but I was trying to be polite lol So she then puts me on hold to check my account and when she comes back she is all “we have the paperwork you faxed in”, then she said some mumbo jumbo and asked me a couple questions and informed me I could resubmit the request to be reassessed with new proof of payment for the previous month and basically we can start the whole freakin process over again!

Sooooo, they got the paperwork, on time!, didn’t do anything with it, didn’t send me a letter saying what was going on, adversely affected my credit rating because they show I am late on over $600 worth of payments and now I am the one who has to redo everything, in the hopes they actually do their job this time??

How is this fair?

Of course I did what they wanted, not like I have a choice, sigh. This time though instead of faxing I did everything on their website, theoretically it is supposed to be faster.

So I go online, fill out the form, I have to upload the pay stubs which I can’t do for 5 days because I have to scan them at work and email them to myself first but once the form is started it will stay in the system for 30 days waiting for the additional information. It says this right at the top of the screen, 30 days! So not even a week after I fill in that form I go to upload the pay stubs and my form is gone, disappeared from the system, as if I never did it, wtf?

Filling out the form isn’t a huge deal but why did it disappear? What’s going on here?

I redo the form, upload the pay stubs and figure finally this madness will start coming to an end, well…no…because I went to check on the process today and my form is still there but somehow, magically, the pay stubs I uploaded to my file are gone…so the file is incomplete because the system is waiting for the pay stubs.

I swear I am about to rip out my hair!

I uploaded the pay stubs, again, and have absolutely NO faith it will matter or that my file will be processed or that they won’t screw something else up.

How oh how does this organization still get to operate?

student loan

Sorry for the ranting, I just really needed to vent about this!

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No More Back Up Plan

11 Apr

You may recall a short while ago I blogged about thinking about going back to University, specifically, going to Law School. I was torn between being a grown up, sucking it up, and just going already and following my dreams and staying with the acting. I had almost convinced myself that I would start studying for the LSATs and take the necessary steps to apply.  I would be a good lawyer, shrug, and I’m sure I would find it entertaining and challenging but it’s not acting. Nothing will ever be as good an option as acting. However, acting doesn’t pay very well unless you make it to the top and I’m sick and tired of being poor.

Turns out I don’t get to make the decision about going back to school, the government has chosen for me.

For those not in Canada let me explain how student loans work here. You apply, hopefully you get money, you go to school. Once you have been done school for a certain amount of time (6 months or a year, I can’t remember which) you are supposed to start paying back your student loans. However, if you are poor, which most recent graduates are, and not making a lot of money you can apply for Repayment Assistance. You send in a form, the people that manage the paying back of government student loans look at the form and decide if you are so poor you don’t have to make monthly payments.

I have always been that poor. 😦

When you qualify for Repayment Assistance the government pays the interest on your loan and you don’t have to make any payments, or you might have to make payments but small ones that are calculated based on what you earn.

Like I said, since graduation I have always been poor enough that I haven’t had to make monthly payments.

Well, the student loan people in all their “wisdom” have decided that I can now somehow magically afford to make monthly payments on my student loan. Uh, what?? I go a good 3 out of 4 weeks every month unable to buy groceries and only survive food wise because I work somewhere that has a kitchen and the chefs will feed me. I literally live paycheque to paycheque and now I have to find an extra $90 a month to give the student loan people??

student loans

Who does the math over there?? Do they not realize I live in a ridiculously expensive city? That I live on my own and therefore have to rely on my paycheque to pay for everything, no spouse/partner to help me out? That I have car payments? That I have other bills that I struggle to pay? Do they not realize that a person, no matter how little money they make, still needs to have enough left over every month so they can buy something fun otherwise they will go a little nuts?

The thing is, they know everything about me due to the nature of the organization. They have all kinds of info about me because of lending me money for school. They know what I earn, what my expenses are, where I live, the cost of living here, that I am human and sometimes need to buy something fun, they just don’t care.

They were more than willing to loan me money when I was younger, and stupider, and didn’t really grasp how hard life would be when I was done school, living on my own and trying to make ends meet and now that I am older, hopefully a bit wiser, and in the stage of life where I should be paying them back but can’t afford to, they don’t care.

They want their cut, just like everyone else and screw my need for groceries, rent, or anything else my money strains to pay for now.

As if that wasn’t mean enough the letter I got from them today telling me how much my monthly payments are also says:

“you are now restricted from future student financial assistance benefits, in the form of new student loans and grants should you decide to return to school in the future”

Huh.

So, even if I was the most gung-ho person ever with regards to going back to school it wouldn’t matter, cause I can’t afford it, they won’t give me money for it, and even if I somehow found a way to earn extra money I wouldn’t be allowed to save it up because they would increase how much I have to pay them every month.

While I can see the logic of not continuously loaning money out to people who can’t pay it back I can’t help but feel the system is flawed. I went to University, did well, decided to pursue an acting career, haven’t made money at it (yet!) and am now thinking about going to Law School. I’m pretty sure the argument can be made that lawyers will always be needed and it is a slightly more secure career path than acting, so you’d think they’d be ok with helping someone go to school so they can then earn a higher income which would enable them to not only be a more financially contributing member of society but also pay back their student loans.

But since the world isn’t run using my logic I must follow the rules they have set out, flawed as they are, which means no possibility of law school for me.

Good bye back up plan *waves somberly at UBC Law Department* guess I won’t be seeing you soon.

student loan meme

Sidenote: I am well aware not being able to pay back a student loan is a “first world problem” and I don’t mean to come off as a whiny, spoiled brat, I’m just frustrated with the student loan system. you can’t get a well paying job without a University education, you can’t get a University education without student loans, tuition keeps getting hiked up which means loan amounts keep getting hiked up but once you graduate the promised well paying jobs are not there and so you are shackled with a huge amount of debt, with a high interest rate, and a low paying job. All because you followed the rules that said going to University was the way to succeed. *rolls eyes*

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