Hi All,
Wondering if someone’s been through this or has any advice on what we might be able to do.
This morning my spouse received a credit alert from her monitoring agency that her credit score had dropped 120 points. Come to find out, two of her federal loans have been in collections for 3 months.
How’d that happen? Well apparently in December her undergrad institution moved her loan from Heartland ECSI to regular ECSI. ECSI only notified her via physical mail at an address we lived at 6 years ago. This is despite, of course, her only communicating with Heartland ECSI via email and text, as she’d opted into digital alerts through them.
We’re happy to pay the two loans. They’re both very small in the grand scheme of student loans. She’d been on-time paying them for years before this and would have continued to if we knew they changed! We just want the hit on the credit score fixed. We just had our baby and would like to buy a house in the next 7 years, but that default on her credit score won’t exactly help.
We called the federal loan agency that handles collections. We couldnt enter rehabilitation because the loans are so small that we’d be paying them off before 9 months is up due to their income driven repayment requirements.
We called ECSI—no help. They only send physical mail, apparently, so it’s not their fault, even though they had her email and phone number. They’ll only act to remove the “trade line” on our credit score if her undergraduate institution made a mistake on the address.
We called the bursar at her undergrad institution—they don’t know why they sent them our 6 year old address. She graduated more than a decade ago and never updated her address with them. It doesn’t make any sense for them to have had that address. We lived there for a year.
At this point we’re not worried about the money—it’s the credit score. we’ve paid the loans so they no longer accrue $1.50 in interest every day. we’ve filed a CFPB report, and we’ve disputed these trade lines on her credit reports. Tomorrow I’m hopeful the bursar might give us some information about why in the world they provided this address, and maybe, just maybe, they might be willing to contact the dildos at ECSI to say, you know what, yeah, we gave you an incorrect wrong address.
Any advice is very much appreciated. At a total loss right now at the total criminality of this system, which I knew about, but this is a brand new low for these ghouls.
Update:
Just an update here in case anyone is interested:
The undergraduate university is stating they did not have that address on file. They provided an address for her mother, which would have been accurate and fine, as we then would’ve been notified of the transfer. They also stated ECSI should be updating their addresses every month based on USPS forwarding requests. Which also would’ve caught the issue.
I called ECSI with this information and they stated I need to get a letter from the university informing me of their “mistake” which they said I can then take to the credit bureau.
Essentially, ECSI refuses to accept responsibility again and again.