Great Lakes Higher Education Corp. is just one of seven companies that service federal loan financial debt by collecting as well as tracking repayments. If Great Lakes is your pupil loan servicer, below’s what it can help you do.
Register for on-line accessibility to your account. Once you have gain access to you can call Great Lakes, access your monthly payment statements and also pay costs.
Sign up in autopay. Great Lakes Student Loans can subtract your repayments automatically from your checking account. Signing up for autopay will reduce your passion by 0.25 percentage factor.
Sign up for income-driven payment. You can request income-driven payment, which restricts your student loan settlements to a portion of your earnings, by finishing a paper kind with Great Lakes. (You can apply online on studentaid.gov and after that recertify your income annually online too.).
Refine deferment and forbearance requests. Great Lakes can help you momentarily stop paying or reduce your settlement amount if you certify. This aids you stay in excellent standing to prevent default. However throughout any type of durations of deferment or forbearance, passion can continue to construct.
Refine monthly repayments as well as additional payments. Great Lakes will certainly track and collect your repayments. If you want to make added repayments, you can advise Great Lakes (online, by phone or by mail) to use additional payments to your present balance. Or else, it might use the added total up to next month’s settlement instead.
” EVEN MORE: Student loan servicers: Who are they and also what do they do?
Your loan servicer is appointed by the U.S. Department of Education when your loan is paid out to your university for the very first time. The name of the business sending you a government loan bill monthly is your servicer. If your loan payments haven’t begun or you’re not sure which firm is your servicer, log in to My Federal Student Aid to discover. You can additionally connect with any one of the loan servicer call centers by calling 1-800-4-FED-AID.
Servicers are there to help you, however they may use choices that are best for the firm, not the debtor. That indicates they can’t change exactly how payments are refined as well as might not recommend the most useful payment option for you. It’s crucial to understand your repayment options so you can know the appropriate concerns to ask.
If Great Lakes reported your account in error during automobile forbearance.
Virtually 5 million debtors whose federal student loans are serviced by Great Lakes might have seen their credit scores dip due to the fact that their financial obligations were incorrectly reported to the significant credit history bureaus throughout the automatic six-month forbearance that started in March 2020.
Your paused repayments may have been reported as “postponed” as a result of a coding error. The stopped briefly repayments must have been reported as if you had actually made them. If you were current when forbearance began, as an example, the standing should be “current.”.
Deferred standing is not a scoring factor under FICO credit report solutions, the ones most frequently made use of to make borrowing decisions. Yet deferred status can reduce the credit history produced by VantageScore solutions– the scores most frequently supplied free of charge to customers as a means to track their credit history.
Great Lakes claims it is dealing with credit report coverage companies to correct the errors. Once the info on the underlying credit report is proper, credit report ought to be unaffected.
Consumers should inspect their debt reports from each of the three debt reporting bureaus at AnnualCreditReport.com, the cost-free, government-run web site.
Great Lakes asks that debtors contact it directly if their credit history records are incorrect. Call 800-236-4300. Get extra details on getting in touch with Great Lakes customer service or making a complaint here.
Am I stuck to Great Lakes till my loans are paid off?
Loans are in some cases moved from one servicer to an additional by the Division of Education and learning.
The Department of Education and learning is planning to move the student loan servicing landscape by signing new servicing contracts with 5 firms to at some point take over all loan servicing. That indicates your loan servicer is likely to alter. Great Lakes is scheduled to continue servicing loans with December 2023.
Prior to servicing contracts finishing, debtors need to do the following:.
Download and install and also conserve your payment background from your online account or request a duplicate from your servicer.
Update your contact information with your newest address, contact number and e-mail address.
You’ll be alerted when a loan maintenance transfer takes place, and you’ll handle repayments with the brand-new servicer. All servicers deliver the same alternatives and programs, yet customer care may differ from one to another.