Is this a dim-bulb way to collect debts, or what?
My son has student loans, but he doesn’t have a job. Like most debtors, he’d like to pay his loans. Like most unemployed people, he can’t. There’s a lot of that going around. It’s not his fault. I’m cosigner of his loans. Like most cosigners, I’d like not to pay his loans, but I did cosign, so I made my bed, I have to lie in it, and I can.
I did get a notice a while back that he hadn’t paid. Over the past two weeks, I’ve received maybe half-a-dozen calls from Sallie Mae. In each case, I refused to provide my identifying information over the phone. If you call me, I won’t do that no matter who you say you are. In each case, I told them if they are calling for my son’s contact information, they have that, so don’t call. If they want me to pay them, I said send me a bill in the mail. If I owe it, I will pay it.
You probably noticed those last two sentences are composed entirely of words of one syllable. That was intentional. I composed them entirely of monosyllabic words so they would be easy to understand But Sallie Mae didn’t do what I asked any of the up to half-a-dozen times I asked them to.
However, today, I did receive a letter threatening to report me to credit agencies. It didn’t have the Sallie Mae or the SLM Corp. name on the outside of the envelope, so they’re lucky my wife opened it. It didn’t say how much I owe or where to send it either! I have to call them to get that information!
What a pain! You may imagine for yourself where the pain is located.
If someone with a FICO score over 800 told me if I sent them a bill, they’d pay it, I’d send them a bill. If they didn’t pay it, then I’d harass them, but I would send them a bill first if they asked for one. But no, I have to call them, and deal with a phone-answering decision tree. Feh!
If it wouldn’t adversely affect my otherwise stellar credit, I’d still tell them to stick it.
If they had sent me a bill the first time I asked, they would have had their money sometime last week. So, this is a business model too dumb for me to understand.
I see their problem. “Mail” actually has two syllables.