Filed under: Ask WalletPop, College, Debt

Isn’t it time you started reaping the benefits of your local congressman’s clout? Not yet ready to ask for a letter of suggestion for West Point? Have no fear because if you’re the bearer of student loans and your loan company is shafting you, your congressman might be the key to a happy ending.

Getting some satisfaction with the help of your congressman or woman is so easy anybody can do it. Allowed, like all problems and lending issues, it helps if you’re in the right and have been paying your lender what the terms state. But this strategy may work even if you are close to being handed off to a collection bureau.

As a little background: My wife had all of her student loans through Sallie Mae, affectionately referred to around our house as the devil. Several of these private loans which Ms. Mae was holding on to were pulling in 13.25% interest! We had included some of these loans in an initial federal consolidation which never worked out. Apparently the incoming fax line at Sallie Mae was hooked right up to a paper shredder because they never received our requests to consolidate. We tried again to consolidate my wife’s private loans with Wells Fargo, who, just like our federal consolidator, never received a response from Sallie Mae. Fed up with the problems we were having, I did what any rational person would, I called my local news stations call for action. This is where I found out I could contact my congressman to get some satisfaction.

The first thing I did was reacquaint myself with my local congressman, Jim Jordan and I found out that he’d a local office in my town. You can find your representative on the web at house.gov, the results should include information for his or her Washington office and links to the local offices they maintain. I selected to contact my local office in order to maximize the chance that the staffer would feel the need to help me out, being local and all.

I called up the local office and was transferred to the “top” local staffer who listened to my whole story including many lies we were told by Sallie Mae about the consolidation process. After expressing his astonishment he took down my info and shipped me out some forms to grant Jim Jordan to act on my behalf and a questionnaire about our loans and experience. My wife and I promptly returned the packet to our case worker, who let us know that we should hear back soon.

This is where it gets fun and exciting, soon after we began the process, Sallie Mae assigned us a representative who provided a direct line for the consolidation information to be routed through. We quickly began working with Wells Fargo to get our loans consolidated and anytime we ran into trouble our Sallie Mae caseworker would work directly with Wells Fargo to figure it out. In the end we got all of the private loans away from Sallie Mae and saved close to $300 in monthly payments and countless more over the life of our loan.

If you are having trouble with a difficult student loan lender then just follow the easy steps below:

1. Find your congressman/woman.
2. Call their local office.
3. Return the release paperwork and loan details
4. Wait…
5. Profit Resolve your problem with executive customer service for your lender.

You may be surprised how much clout your local representative has with student loan lenders and the federal student aid ombudsman. Once you put these parties into play you’ll likely find that the ball gets rolling much quicker with your current lender. This approach to resolution works best if you are in good standing with the involved lenders, stay tuned for more information on dealing with student loans.

Josh Smith is currently the holder of student loan debt which had been confused for a home mortgage by experienced bankers. He has been to hell and back with Sallie Mae and thus learned a significant deal about the student loan industry. If you’ve specific loan questions or requests for additional student loan topics please leave a comment below.

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Filed under: Ask WalletPop, College, Debt

Isn’t it time you started reaping the benefits of your local congressman’s clout? Not yet ready to ask for a letter of suggestion for West Point? Have no fear because if you are the bearer of student loans and your loan company is shafting you, your congressman may be the key to a happy ending.

Getting some satisfaction with the help of your congressman or woman is so simple anybody can do it. Granted, like all problems and lending issues, it helps if you’re in the right and have been paying your lender what the terms state. But this strategy may work even if you are close to being handed off to a collection agency.

As a tiny background: My wife had all of her student loans through Sallie Mae, affectionately referred to around our house as the devil. Several of these private loans which Ms. Mae was holding on to were pulling in 13.25% interest! We had included some of these loans in an initial federal consolidation which never worked out. Apparently the incoming fax line at Sallie Mae was hooked right up to a paper shredder because they never received our requests to consolidate. We tried again to consolidate my wife’s private loans with Wells Fargo, who, just like our federal consolidator, never received a response from Sallie Mae. Fed up with the problems we were having, I did what any rational person would, I called my local news stations call for action. This is where I found out I could contact my congressman to get some satisfaction.

The first thing I did was reacquaint myself with my local congressman, Jim Jordan and I found out that he had a local office in my town. You can find your representative on the internet at home.gov, the results should include information for his or her Washington office and links to the local offices they maintain. I selected to contact my local office in order to maximize the chance that the staffer would feel the need to help me out, being local and all.

I called up the local office and was transferred to the “top” local staffer who listened to my whole story including many lies we were told by Sallie Mae about the consolidation process. After expressing his astonishment he took down my info and shipped me out some forms to grant Jim Jordan to act on my behalf and a questionnaire about our loans and experience. My wife and I promptly returned the packet to our case worker, who let us know that we should hear back soon.

This is where it gets fun and exciting, soon after we began the process, Sallie Mae assigned us a representative who provided a direct line for the consolidation information to be routed through. We swiftly began working with Wells Fargo to get our loans consolidated and anytime we ran into trouble our Sallie Mae caseworker would work directly with Wells Fargo to figure it out. In the end we got all of the private loans away from Sallie Mae and saved close to $300 in monthly payments and countless more over the life of our loan.

If you are having trouble with a difficult student loan lender then just follow the easy steps below:

1. Find your congressman/woman.
2. Call their local office.
3. Return the release paperwork and loan details
4. Wait…
5. Profit Resolve your problem with executive customer service for your lender.

You might be surprised how much clout your local representative has with student loan lenders and the federal student aid ombudsman. Once you put these celebrations into play you’ll likely find that the ball gets rolling much quicker with your current lender. This approach to resolution works best if you’re in good standing with the involved lenders, stay tuned for more information on dealing with student loans.

Josh Smith is currently the holder of student loan debt which had been confused for a home mortgage by experienced bankers. He has been to hell and back with Sallie Mae and thus learned a significant deal about the student loan industry. If you’ve specific loan questions or requests for additional student loan topics please leave a comment below.

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Filed under: Debt, Real Estate

I’m continually encouraged by the quality of some of the comments we get here on WalletPop (To the guy who keeps spamming us with links to obscene stuff: I’m not referring to you!). In response to a post I wrote about bailouts for distressed homeowners, one reader had an interesting suggestion:

To me, the fairest solution would be simply to not record foreclosures from the evicted persons’ credit reports, if the dangers of the associated loan weren’t disclosed to the buyer and the buyer bought for living, not speculative, reasons. If homeowners have to again become renters, I have to say, it won’t be so bad and, when prices fall again, they’ll be able to get back into the market with much more confidence, because it will be affordable.

The logistics of it aside — not sure how you could convince lenders/the credit bureaus to expunge bad stuff from people’s credit reports — the concept is intriguing. It would be a way to let people get out of bad situations without having their credit hit so badly that they won’t be able to by a home for years without using a subprime lender which, I seem to recall, was one of the causes of this problem in the first place.

I’m sure this will never happen and, if it did, it would severely damage the credibility of credit reports/FICO scores. Still interesting to consider.

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Filed under: Internet, Social Software, web 2.0

Over the past year, Twitter has become an increasingly important source of news and communication for technology bloggers. If you sign up for a Twitter account and follow a few of your favorite tech writers, odds are you’ll get links to interesting stories they’ve written and articles they’re reading as well as a lot of back and forth discourse between writers, writers and readers, and a whole slew of other people. It’s that last part that can make Twitter seem overwhelming.

If you were thinking of signing up for Twitter just for the tech news, but don’t have the time to sit in front of your computer all day sifting through all the other stuff, TwitLinks can help. TwitLinks basically monitors the tweets from a group of influential tech bloggers and then lays them out in an easy to read format. Each article get a link, a first paragraph, and a link to the Twitter user who shared the link. Some, but not all, articles also have a thumbnail image.

The result is a page that works sort of like Techmeme, in that it gives you a sense of what stories tech bloggers are speaking about. But there several things that set TwitLinks apart from Techmeme. First of all, TwitLinks monitors the Techmeme Twitter account, so you’ll actually find Techmeme stories at TwitLinks. Second, there’s no threading, which means you can’t see the pile-on effect that happens when one blog or news source discovers a story and then dozens of others grab ahold.

Probably the ideal thing about TwitLinks is that you can subscribe to the site’s RSS feed and just read the latest high tech tweets from the comfort of your RSS reader. No Twitter account needed.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

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Filed under: Web services, Social Software

FriendFeed is a service that keeps track of the activity of your contacts across pretty much each social network. The problem with FriendFeed is that people want to view different sets of contacts in different ways. There are third party desktop clients for Twitter and Pownce, for example, that let you follow along and respond to comments more easily. But when you lump those services in with less-immediate ones like Yelp, Flickr, or the RSS feed to your friend’s blog, the slower stuff starts to gum up the works.

Alert Thingy to the rescue! If you use FriendFeed, and you’ve been looking for a faster way to read updates, you’re in luck: a desktop version is here. Alert Thingy is an Adobe Air application, which gives it the advantage of being lightweight and cross-platform. There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles to it, but it will display your feed and grant you post items directly to FriendFeed.

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