Happy St. Pattie’s Day! And long time no post, eek.

Life has it’s way of tosses curveballs your way, and I’ve struck out a couple times in the past 6 months or so.

My financial woes have been at an all-time low (rhyme unintended), I had some medical issues with my health crop up (resulting in $3000 of bills for me, yay!) and my online time as well as blogging time about the fur kids was one of the first things to take a hit. I apologize for the hiatus, but it was much needed. I feel I’m able to continue now though, so here I go :)

First, an update on things that have happened since last August.

Kadan and I have ditched the Gentle Leader collar now that he’s become a  polite walker. That’s not to say he doesn’t still try to pull, because he does, but now it’s being handled with just the plain nylon collar. I’ve been wanting to try out the Easy Walk Harness since I’ve heard nothing but great things about it, but for now, nylon leash and collar will do.

In late January I got back in contact with Animal Behavior College to see about enrolling. With my current budget and inability to find a job despite numerous attempts at applications in the past year (nobody wants to hire unless you have experience anymore!), I decided I needed to step out into the world and try to get my career started, even if it meant going slightly into debt by way of a student loan.

Animal Behavior College has this partnership with SLM Financial for Sallie Mae student loans, whether you’re going to community college, a university, or career training (which is was ABC is considered, a vocational school). Having no credit history of my own (I’m 21 and all), I needed to have a co-signer. I of course, went to my grandmother who has superb, perfect credit. She was all-too willing to co-sign for me, since she’s one of my biggest supporters in my dog trainer career endeavors. Unfortunately, despite having a great co-signer, I still got denied for the loan…well over a month and a half after applying. See, they neglected to mention that I needed extra info from my co-signer after I initially applied for the loan (through the school itself). ABC’s counselor assigned to me called me up to let me know that I needed to call Sallie Mae and see what information was needed. I did so, and after going through countless annoying teleprompts before finally speaking to a living, breathing human, I got someone who told me that they needed to speak with my co-signer, and I would have to have her call back. So I hang up, call back my counselor to let her know what’s up before calling my grandma. Grandma is 78 years old. She’s not too great when it comes to techie stuff, especially teleprompts, and she would need all of MY information just to be able to get to talk to someone anyways, so I asked if they could call her instead. They said no. So I told her I’d just try to do a 3-way phonecall with her so that she could talk to whoever needed to talk to her.

The day of the 3-way call, things seemed to be going fine. I had grandma on the line, Sallie Mae on the other line dealing with all the teleprompts..then I merged the call. Well once they kept redirecting me to different customer service agents to take my call, it would keep dropping my grandmother from the 3-way, thus destroying the whole point of calling altogether. Eventually a woman finally told me that I could try getting grandma back on the line, but if they talked to her and she didn’t have all of the “necessary information ready”, they’d be unable to pursue any further actions on the loan. AKA, if she didn’t have all of her personal and credit information ready at THAT MOMENT OF THE CALL, they wouldn’t try again and deny the loan. So maybe this was a good thing that the call was dropped? – is what I thought initially. The woman gave me a list of things grandma needed to have and to call back.

We tried, but same thing. Couldn’t get through teleprompts + call redirection. At this point, I just decided to give up on Sallie Mae. Too much of a hassle, in my opinion.

A couple weeks later, my grandma calls and leaves a voicemail on my cellphone. She says she got a letter in the mail from Sallie Mae that gave her a number to call, and that she talked to an agent or whatever and gave them all the information they wanted. All that was left was for me to call them within 24 hours. So I immediately called when I got the voicemail about an hour later. I get to a customer service agent who puts me on hold while they bring up my records, only to come back and say my co-signer was denied.

“WHAT?!”

They proceed to explain that at this point I need a new co-signer. At that point I was angry. All of this hassle they’ve been putting me through, only to get the information from us and deny it in the end. PERFECT CREDIT — DENIED. My only good co-signer out the window.

I asked the agent WHY I was denied, and they said it was confidential. Confidential how? It’s MY loan we’re talking about. But he said he couldn’t disclose the information to me because it concerned my co-signer, blah blah. Okay, whatever. He again asks for another co-signer, and I resisted the urge to tell him to shove it and hang up. (Was very tempting, but not his fault afterall!) I instead just asked him to cancel the loan application completely, and that I was through with Sallie Mae. No more.

He asked me to please stay on the line to leave feedback in a “brief survey” about my Sallie Mae experience. That’s when I hung up.

About 3 weeks later, March 10th or so, I receive a letter in the mail that was postmarked on March 6th, but the letter inside dated February 6th. It was from Sallie Mae stating that I needed to give them co-signer information within such and such amount of time or my application would be denied.

This letter was dated a MONTH before it was even sent out to me! So THAT’S why I was denied a loan? Not because of some issue with my grandma’s credit,  but because of THEIR negligence to send out this letter on time? You better believe I was fuming.

So long story short — Sallie Mae sucks, I would NEVER recommend them to ANYONE, and no Animal Behavior College for me this Spring as originally planned! Tentative plans for Fall though. Hopefully things go well this second time around. By then I hope to have the money to pay for it on my own. I’m actually kinda glad that loan didn’t work out though because really…I can’t imagine what they’d be like if I owed them money, after all the trouble I went through just trying to get the loan in the first place. Sheesh!

Well that’s enough of a book of an entry for today. I’ll continue will the more POSTIVE stuff tomorrow.

~ by Kiyo on March 17, 2009.