Sallie Mae......The Student Loan to Avoid

In 2005 I graduated Dean's List from The Art Institute Of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania with a degree in Residential Design. The graduation itself had to be one of my proudest moments and biggest dreams come true. However, the ensuing debt that I incurred from my Sallie Mae loans would remain a nightmare for years and years to come.

Sure, I knew that I had to pay those loans back and I was paying them back at first. However, the economy went South and with it went my husband's business. Soon we found ourselves in bankruptcy court. This was followed by Welfare applications and opening our new home improvement business. Money became a commodity that was more and more rare to find every day. To keep a roof over our heads and wheels under our backsides we stopped paying all unnecessary bills not excused through bankruptcy. This of course included our Sallie Mae bills.

This move made it so our car and house were safe but it angered the Sallie Mae loan officers. We called them and tried to explain our game plan, which was rather simple. That plan was to get the car paid off and get our son out of daycare and into kindergarten. Once that was done we would have enough money to pay back $100 per month on the loan. This would make the $7,200 loan vanish in about 6 years from September 2011, our projected start date for paying back the loan. Sounds reasonable doesn't it?

Not to Sallie Mae. Our simple pay back plan launched a verbal assault of epic proportions from Sallie Mae. Every day we were called and told that they had told our friends about our transgressions and that they were taking our home and our car as well as our Social Security checks. Each phone call suddenly had to be monitored in order to avoid the unnecessary abuse. However, avoiding the phone was to no avail. Soon nasty and very threatening letters began appearing in the mail. "Pay up or else.", was always the final message. The more we ignored the abuse or tried to restate our payback proposal the more the calls came in. Sometimes as late as 9pm at night and as early as 8am in the morning.

So here we sit, drowning in Sallie Mae debt, our hands tied in terms of what to do about stopping their abuse. And here we will sit until September when we finally can begin paying them back. I just have to wonder what kind of abuse is going to ensue when we begin paying back the loan!