My student loans have been aggressively collecting (or attempting!) for 2 years now and coincidentally, my life has been a train wreck for the last two years – following is a rough synopsis of my student loan experience:

In 2008, aggressive collection began – I kept getting nasty calls at work, I would often tell the collector that I am at work and can’t talk right now and they would ask where they can call me to talk – I did not have a home phone at that time because I was previously homeless and was just getting on my feet in a new apartment and just did not have a phone yet. I often had to put the call on hold to take other work-related calls and sometimes my boss would come to my desk and I would just hang up on them – they NEVER stopped calling. When I was out of the office at meetings, my voice mail would be full (not all them were the student loan people, but I had a lot of messages from them) so then with my voice mail full, all callers that wanted to leave messages for me had to do so with the receptionist – she would have a stack of messages for me, often times their messages were in the stack. They would complain to the receptionist that I am not returning their call and it would say on the message that they said that – my boss would see these messages and ask me about them and I assured him all the time that it was not a client, but rather student loan collectors – he told me to just tell them I am not allowed to accept personal calls – I did, but they still kept calling. I was warned consistently for bad performance on the job because of violating company policy and the top policy I violated was not returning calls within 24 hours as our company handbook states. I generally got emails all the time about my voice mail being full.

They also tried to garnish my wages and always threatened to do so – I already had a federal garnishment ordered by a federal judge who said nothing will ever trump that garnishment so when the student loan collectors threatened me with garnishment, I was pretty bold with them (I was actually bold with any collector that threatened garnishment). They would always say they can trump whoever is garnishing me, and I would be like probably not. Anyway, they still tried and the CFO of the company I worked for told them I am already being garnished by the US govt.

My tax refunds are applied to the huge amount of interest that accrues on my defaulted student loans and at this point, with the penalties and interest, I don’t see how I can ever pay these things off.

I was recently fired from my job for consistently not complying to company policy and these calls were a big contributor to that … since getting fired, I have had my lights turned off and battled with the utility company, I have been evicted, oh, I was pregnant when I got fired, I have a special needs baby – and this is all 2009. I was advised to speak to an attorney about the student loan collectors – I did that today … let’s hope 2010 looks a bit brighter!