Student Loan Servicers Are At It Again!

by Ashley

I have a long history of issues related to my student loans, even across a number of student loan service providers. I think my loans have been sold 3 times over the course of time that I’ve been blogging here. Most recently, my loans were sold to Mohela at the same time I applied for public service loan forgiveness. I don’t actually qualify for forgiveness yet (I still have approx. 2 years to go), but I just applied to the program during the pandemic timeframe.

Payment Pause and Resumption

As folks with student loans are aware, student loan payments were paused for about 3 years during the pandemic. After all this time, interest started accruing again in September, and payments resumed in October. But….did they, though?

You may have seen one of the numerous articles written in October about Mohela (my current loan provider). Apparently, Mohela made a big mishap and did not actually get their borrowers into repayment status, causing over 800,000 borrowers to be considered delinquent.

Alternatively, there were also borrowers whose debt had already been forgiven that received past-due bills from Mohela. Sounds like their process to resume payments was a big old mess.

I counted my lucky stars that I was not among one of the botched repayment jobs. My payments resumed per normal and everything was fine for the months of September and October.

Loan Forbearance that was Never Requested

That changed quickly. In November, I received an email that the status of one of my loans had changed. If you recall, to qualify for PSLF, I had to consolidate two of my student loans into one. That consolidated loan, all the sudden, was showing up as being in forbearance. The problem is, I never requested this! And, in fact, I couldn’t figure out a way to get it OUT of forbearance.

I started googling, “why is my student loan is in forbearance when I never requested it.” Guess what, friends. I’m not alone. Looks like LOTS of student loan borrowers had a similar problem with Mohela in November.

From reading articles written about this random forbearance, it sounds like Mohela has done this automatically to cover their own butts while they figure out some issues in their loan processing system. That said, they don’t relay this information to borrowers. So others, like myself, are left scratching our heads as to why our loans are suddenly in forbearance when it was never requested.

In my case, my assumption is that this occurred due to my loan consolidation throwing things off. I consolidated my loans and made a single payment toward the new consolidated loan, and then suddenly received a forbearance processing message the same month. In fact, my payment was submitted on 11/9, and the forbearance suddenly appeared on 11/28.

Interest Paused and Future Communications

The one bright side of this conundrum is that, while Mohela struggles to figure their “ish” out, they’ve paused the capitalizing of any interest. In the letter I personally received, it says this is the case until the end of February.

Even so, I prefer not to be in forbearance. And it does not appear that I can change my loans to be in normal repayment right now, even if I try!

When I log into the Mohela website, I receive a big alert at the top of the screen that they have high call volume and to expect long wait times. Sigh. Hard to get much done with them when you have to set aside a 2-hour chunk of time for a simple phone call.

Watch and Wait

Rather than try to chase down this issue at what is one of the busiest time of years personally (kid’s holiday parties, performances, and weekend activities) and professionally (semester wrapping up, final exams, excessive grading!)… I’ve decided to just follow a “wait and watch” approach.

I’ll continue monitoring any happenings with my loans through the Mohela site. But I’m not planning to sit aside 2 hours for a phone call to the loan servicer anytime this week (or month for that matter!).

My hope is that they straighten up their stuff and my payments will automatically resume as I’ve been promised. I can revisit this sometime in the New Year to ensure that’s happened.

Does anyone else have Mohela as their student loan service provider? Any similar loan servicing issues?