Department of Education Terminates Contracts with 5 Debt Collection Companies

Huffington Post reports that the US Department of Education is terminating its relationships with five debt collection agencies which have been contracted to collect student loans. This action is in response to an inspector's report that found fault with the agencies, specifically mentioning that some misrepresented the rights of the students, the collection fees, and the effect on the students' credit reports.  The agencies in question are below.

Pioneer Credit Recovery
Coast Professional
Enterprise Recovery Systems
National Recoveries
West Asset Management.

Parenthetically, the article mentions that Pioneer Credit Recovery is a subsidiary Navient, the company formerly known as Sallie Mae.  (Sallie, that girl.)

The government will be winding down its accounts with these companies and will transfer them to other agencies. Apparently there are approximately 20 debt collection companies authorized to collect student loan accounts.  If you are a student loan debtor, I suggest that you not believe anything these companies tell you, and get independent verification of anything they say. In addition, get them to put everything in writing.  As a matter of fact, you should do this when dealing with ANY student loan collector.  Just because these five got caught, doesn't mean they are the only ones doing nasty things to student loan debtors.  

Did you cosign a student loan for your grandchild? the perils and pitfalls

I have no respect for schools that pressure their students to get their grandparents to cosign student loans.  If a school has no confidence that the student or even the student's parents can pay for the school, then the educational program likely isn't worth what it costs in the first place.  That goes double when the grandparent's income is basically just social security.  What grandparents should know is that no federal loan program (that I know of, anyway) takes grandparent cosigners.  The private loans that grandparents cosign for may survive bankruptcy, BUT the private lenders can't garnish social security.  

If you have cosigned a loan for a grandchild, you should know that after 12 months of on-time payments, students can apply to have the grandparent removed. This benefits not just the grandparent cosigner, but also the student. For most private student loans, if the cosigner dies or goes bankruptcy, the lender has the right to declare the entire balance of the loan due.  If the cosigner has been removed from the loan, the death or bankruptcy of the cosigner has no effect on the loan.  For loans issued prior to 2009, the death of the borrowing student could mean tragedy to the cosigner. The lender could declare the entire balance of the loan due. This has devastating effects on a family who just lost a child to an untimely death. 

I think the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is going to issue new regulations that give student loan cosigners more rights, but until they do, I urge parents, and especially grandparents not to cosign on student loans for any more money than they can afford to lose.  And if you can live without the money, it might just make more sense to give the money to the student outright and save the hassles down the road.  For more on this topic from the CFPB, click on the link here.