Student Loan Nightmare: One Borrower’s Struggle to Find Relief

One of the four directives of the Student Aid Bill of Rights President Obama announced this week says every student in America should “Receive quality customer service, reliable information, and fair treatment when repaying loans.”   “…we are committed to finding new and better ways to communicate with student loan borrowers and to creating a centralized, easier process for repaying loans,” adds the Department of Education.

The President, and others in Washington who have been pushing for this reform must may have had people like Bridget Butler in mind.

In 1994, Butler was able to secure about $20,000 in Federal Stafford Loans at a rate of 8.25%.  She used the money to go to nursing school in southern California. This was a return to study for the former University of California (Los Angeles) chemistry major, who left UCLA in 1993 in order to have a child.

Soon after graduating from nursing school, Butler was able to secure a nursing job.  “I was religious about paying my monthly student loan bill,” Butler says.  “In fact, I was so uncomfortable with the debt that I left nursing and took a job at Southwest Airlines so that I could make bigger payments and get rid of the debt faster, ” she adds.

In 2002, Butler returned to UCLA, borrowing another $6,000 from Uncle Sam. At the behest of student loan lending giant Sallie Mae, a few years later, Butler consolidated all of her loans into an affordable $200 monthly payment at a fixed rate of 4.75%.

“It was manageable, it was easy, and it made a lot of sense,” Butler says.

While her story sounds simple enough, the complex student loan industry is making her life highly complicated.

Loan Sales

When a lending institution exits the student loan business they sell the loans they’re holding to another loan servicer. Analyst say students often don’t know about the transfers until well after the fact. In addition, many say the notification process is inefficient and students can lose valuable information about their loan’s status.

Butler’s loan was sold 4 times. The latest lender recently sent her a statement saying she owed a total of $29,000— about $10,000 more than she believed her remaining balance to be.

“I was shocked. I have always paid my loans on time for years … more than I had to pay in some cases. Now they’re telling me my balance is bigger than all of my original loans put together? It didn’t make any sense,” Butler.

Read more about Butler’s story on the next page …

In addition, the company said her first loan originated in 2002, not 1997, and they had no record of her previous 5 years of payments.

“It sounds like there was a mistake somewhere along the line,” says Mark Kantrowitz founder of FinAid.  “Maybe one of the former lenders passed on erroneous information, data could have been corrupted, or there could even be someone else out there with her name,” he adds.

With her original lender out of business, Butler was told by her lender that her only recourse was to come up with statements or payment records dating

back to 1997.   Unfortunately, due to upheaval from a divorce and other life events, she didn’t have the paperwork.  She also had her monthly payments automatically withdrawn from her checking account, consequently, there were no cancelled checks.  To make matters even more worse, the credit union she used for her banking does not keep records dating that far back.

“For that burden to be placed entirely on her is nonsense,” says Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com. “Mortgages get sold all the time.  You don’t have to go back and prove you’ve made house payments,” he added.

The Burden of Proof

While there is no question that borrowers should keep copies of all of documents associated with their  student loans and loan payments, attorney Robyn Smith of the National Consumer Law Center says in cases like Butler’s, the lender must prove they own the loan and that the borrower agreed to the terms.

“Anybody can hold a copy of a document and say ‘You owe me money,’” Smith says.  “If they claim to own the loan, they have to show a chain of

title. They should be able to produce the promissory note — the contract that outlines the terms and conditions of the loan. The lender needs to prove they own the loan and that the borrower agreed to the terms and interest rate. There is always a paper trail.”

In the interim, Smith says Butler should seek out legal counsel and decide carefully if she will continue making payments. “If she stops making payments, it could negatively affect her credit history.  This could be reversed if she were successful in court, but it’s a decision that should be weighed heavily,” adds Smith.

Butler approached me with her story at Black Enterprise’s Women of Power Summit last week in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.  We will keep you posted as her story unfolds and share what she learns.  In the interim, Butler and the other Americans who collectively owe more than a trillion dollars in student loan debt anxiously await Washington’s execution of a Student Bill of Rights that can keep stories like Butler’s from happening in the first place.