This is probably going to be a very long report.in December Windham Professionals contacted me considering student loans that had gone into default. I understand that I screwed up when I went into default, but I was more than willing to try and fix that problem.
I proceeded to enroll in their "rehabilitation" program. I set up payments of $50 dollars a month. The agreement was as follows:
You must make at least nine on-time monthly payments within 10 consecutive months. The payments must be received up to 20 days before or after the due date to qualify as being made on time. Each monthly payment must be the full agreed-upon amount.
After you meet the payment requirements, an eligible lender may buy your loan, which completes the rehabilitation process. The sale of your loan is not guaranteed, therefore, you must continue to make the required monthly payments on time to remain eligible. If you stop making the payments before a sale is completed, you will have to start over to qualify for rehabilitation.
Now here comes the fun part. So I authorize over the phone for them to automatically debit my checking account 50 dollars every month. Life goes on, a year rolls by. Every time they send me a paper to sign, I read it, sign it and send it back to them. So December comes and the money stops coming out of my account. I call and am told that my account is in the midst of a sale and rehabilitation so to wait for a packet.
Keep in mind, I got married in Jan of 09 and have informed them that mail will no longer come to me in my maiden name, so they must address it to me in my married name. They continued to address everything in my maiden name, so it took a lot longer for any mail to reach me, if it reached me at all. However, I did get the packet with the sale information and filled out all the paper work and sent it in to Windham Professionals.
I never heard anything else from them. So, today I called to check on the status of everything because I DID NOT want my loans to go back into default after working so hard to get them out.
When I called today it took forever for them to sort out what was going on with my account. Then they proceeded to get on the phone with me and tell me that THEY had stopped taking payments out of my account in December, but the sale was not till February or March and so therefore I was "two months" behind on payments. The woman I talked to fully admitted that it was the fault of Windham Professionals, but that there was absolutely nothing they could do for me except to put me back into the rehab program and start the process all over again.
And now, I have to make payments of $125 a month instead of the $50 and I have to go through this whole process AGAIN, just to bring my student loans out of default. On top of that the collection costs are 18.5% and now I'm going to have the pay more on collection costs because it is STILL in collection.
Then when I spoke with a supervisor concerning my mailing address and name I was told they cannot send me mail in my married name because the loans were taken out in my maiden name. So all mail is required to come out to me in my maiden name, but I've been married long enough that mail is no longer forwarded to me in that name.
Does anyone know the ins and outs of this? Are they even allowed to do this to me? Why do I have to pay for the mistakes of someone within their company, when I held up on my end of the deal?
Please HELP!!!
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