For the past couple weeks I have been slowly and surely reigning in all my finances and changing them to work with Hiromi and my new fancy joint account. Its pretty exciting and a big step for me in regards to finances. I usually manage my finances like I would a motorcycle - recklessly and without a helmet; but I have been trying to do everything the “correct” and have actually been reading blogs and what not to find out how to budget things efficiently and without losing money.

Anyway - today was “change the autodebit accounts on my student loans day.” So I called up Nelnet and they helped me. No problem. Didn’t even flinch or say anything shocking. So I got off the phone and thought “wow - loan people are OK.” HAH.

So then I called Iowa Student Loan and promptly got fucked.

Back in 2001 when my student loans went from deferment to repayment - Iowa Student Loan has a deal that was supposed to reward people who paid their loans on time. For a certain amount of consecutive student loan payments that were autodebited from your checking account, they would decrease your interest rate a certain small percentage. Nothing too big - something like .025% off - but when you have 70k of student loans, you pay attention to details like that. So I immediately signed up and started my autodebit plan. It worked really well and I went over 6 years without a missed payment or even an issue.

So I call today to change my checking account. First off, Iowa Student Loans mentions that it would take around 2 months for my payment info to be updated. And in the mean time, I will have to check both my statements and my checking account to see if the payment went through. So this seemed a bit archaic - especially since every sketchy porn site and other sketchy business out there can handle autodebit - it seemed a bit insane that these people were going to take 100 years to process something that seems like it would only take a couple minutes. So I question why this is, and apparently their autodebit system sends a test charge to make sure that the account is correct and then changes the account, after the correct test charge works. However they can only send the charge at one specific time only once per month. wtf. this seems insane.

But whatever, I can deal with this. So I casually ask, since there will be a break in my autodebit, if this will effect my percentage bonus. And lo and behold, by changing checking accounts, I will be ineligible for the autodebit bonus. Even though I have almost 7 years of autodebit and have never been an issue. Apparently they don’t offer the autodebit bonus any longer. And rather than treat their long time customers well they decided to experiment with being inane.

Now, in total, the amount I will be losing by not getting my interest rate bonus is around one to two thousand dollars. That isn’t a whole lot in the scheme of 70k. however. WTF. how does a company get off on treating their customers like this. If this were a phone company, I would pay the termination fee and leave. But sadly I cannot pay the termination fee and leave my student loan lender.

Fuckers.