Good riddance to bad rubbish... Platinum Edition
I've ranted about Sallie Mae before.
I'd even mentioned how I had come to personify the company as some crotchety, cantankerous, vindictive old geezer, sitting on a rocking chair (next to her sister Fannie and her inbred idiot cousin Freddie) on the porch of an old house packed to the rafters with cash stolen from bankrupt college students, taking pot-shots at passersby with a shotgun, screaming, "Git away from mah MONEY!" BLAM!!
Something pretty-much like this:
That's Freddie in the background, picking his nose and scratching his butt at the same time.
Obviously, the talented one of the family.
Anyway...
I've been paying down my last student loan as fast as possible. At the expense of, well, pretty much everything else.
Last week, I sent in my last payment.
Hang on... I want to savor that for a moment...
Ah, yes. Very nice.
Of course, they couldn't even make that easy, could they? Of course not. They don't want anyone to pay off their loans, they just want people to keep paying on them. Racking up that interest.
In this case, when you go to pay it off, they give you a 10-day payoff amount, which includes potential interest for 10 days that accrues if you mail in the final payment. Since of course, it would take them fully 8 days to open the envelope, and type the amount into their computer.
But I didn't want to mail it in.
So there's an online payment option, which says to account for "up to 2 days" of interest while that's being processed. That worried me. I could just see Sallie not processing the payment in time, leaving me with some fraction left that I owed, causing more headaches in trying to pay that off, or more likely, them not telling me about it for 25 years, and then me having to pay them with a house. Or something.
So there's also an option to apply the payment on the same day. It may not show up for a couple of days, but it will be applied to the date that it was submitted. So, no guesswork about interest owed. Naturally, they charge some $15 for this. But it was worth it to pay it off and know it was all paid off. But that brought up a little problem - there's no way to find out exactly how much you owe "today". You either get the 10-day amount, or you can go over to a payoff calculator (hidden away on the site in a completely different area) to calculate it out based on what day you want the payment to apply - but the calculator will not let you plug in "today" as an option. It only works for dates in the future.
Idiots.
So, I had to call them, and explain this whole thing to them, and find out how much I actually needed to pay, that day, to pay off the full balance, with interest, and of course, the fee to actually make it apply to that day.
That was Friday. And the payment was supposed to take "up to 2 business days" to be reflected on my account.
Today was Wednesday, and the payment finally cleared. You do the math. I'm tired of math. Suffice it to say, if Thursday rolled around and the payment hadn't cleared, Sallie was going to get a really irate phone call.
Anyway, much to my surprise, my balance actually, finally, honestly read $0.00.
That freeloading old coot is off my back.
So that calls for another cartoon. Me evicting Sallie Mae. And the real kicker... I saved thousands in interest by paying the old bat off early. Money she won't get.
I hope she's having a really bad day.
But at least she stuck the landing.
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