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In this article, I wrote about how Sallie Mae would allow me to decrease my payments online (or even apply for deferment or forbearance) but not increase my payments.  Well, this seems to be just one of the many ways in which Sallie Mae is subtly discouraging me from paying back my loans within any sort of reasonable time frame.  

Sallie Mae also seems to have several other methods for discouraging my prompt payment.  For one thing, it is taking an inordinately long time to set up my auto debit.  I filled out the forms 11 business days ago, and I was told it would take 10 business days to activate my auto debit abilities.  

Lo and behold, when I signed on this morning (the 11th day!) I still had no auto debit privileges (nor any sign of impending privileges, other than the lone email 10 days ago that said my request was under review).  

Now, I know I can just set up online bill pay from my bank account to pay Sallie Mae.  But, when you sign on to your account at Sallie’s website, they give you this terse little message suggesting you set up auto debit, so I was just trying to do as I was told.  

Meanwhile, my payment is due on the 28th, so I don’t know if I should just continue to wait and hope they get their acts together, or if I should do a bill pay and then hope that they don’t decide to auto debit me anyway.  It pretty clearly says on their website that they can and will auto debit the account on the set date, even if there is no outstanding amount due, so a double payment would be a real possibility if I pay now and then they somehow manage to process my forms.  And, if they did decide to take a double payment from me, well this leads me to my next complaint.  

And that next complaint is the way they handle payments made above-and-beyond the amount due.  There seems to be no way, save sending a check with a note, to get them to apply excess payments I make to the principal.  The default, according to the site, is that if I send in money above and beyond what I owe, they will reduce my next monthly payment.  Why, I wonder? Why can’t I select a little button or something online, or change my default preferences under my account settings?  I don’t have checks, and there is also no way to automate a check, so that defeats my plan of having excess payments taken right out of the checking account before I have a chance to spend the money in some other, less useful manner.  

Could it possibly be that good old Sallie Mae is trying to keep me indebted to them forever so they can continue to collect interest on me??? :0