you don’t have to pay student loans while you’re taking courses at least part-time.

recently, letters and phone calls had been coming in at home about my loans, and my parents and i figured it was all these “HAY CONSOLIDATE YUOR LOANS WITH US PLZ KTHX” scams, so i ignored them – most of them were these consolidate-your-loan scams, but it turned out i had been ignoring some of the actual correspondence regarding my student loans. anyway, recently i opened a letter that appeared to be one of these shady deals and i found out that my student loan payments were “seriously past due”, and my reaction was “wtf past due i shouldn’t be needing to pay these back now?!”

in any case i wasn’t looking forward to a $500-something payment when i had these other bills and things that need money, like car tires and maintenance. 😛

so, i went online to see what i could do about postponing payments, and the deferment and forebearance options seemed like they’d be what i needed – the problem was that it said online that as long as you were enrolled at least part-time then you didn’t need to do anything about your loans in order to take advantage of these options.

but then i realized: they say my student loan is 84 days past due, so that’s about 3 months…. but what happened 3 months ago? i transferred out from umbc! so the student loan people were getting signals from umbc that i was no longer active there, and even though i’m taking classes at umuc now it’s not yet the fall semester and i’m not yet taking classes at least part time (this is where i lolz at my current 1-credit “how to do research” class), so as far as the student loan people were concerned i wasn’t taking classes at the moment! i called them up right now and explained how i was understanding it and they thought the same thing, so they put me on a temporary forbearance effective as of april 16 until october 16 which would give me time to complete my transition into umuc, and i can complete this form they’re sending me to tell them that yes, i’m still taking classes. this way the forbearance makes it so i don’t have to pay the loans that they say are currently past due at the moment, and once the enrollment process is complete for the fall that’ll take care of things from that point onward!

at least it will until i graduate. *shakes fist*