Saturday, January 12, 2008

Sallie Mae Owns My Firstborn Child

During my final year of college I added to a few other loans I had when I took out a loan through Sallie Mae, the Gordon College 'preferred lender.' If I had done my homework, I would have realized that the interest rates Sallie Mae offered were sky high and that Gordon endorsing the lender as 'preferred' was probably not entirely in accordance with the College Loan Code of Conduct - Gordon gets kickbacks from the college's relationship with Sallie Mae, and the financial aid office ought to do better by their students than entrapping them with some of the worst loans possible. In any case, I didn't know that 6 months after graduation I would be slammed with a 9.5% interest rate.

And I didn't know that in the first year of making regular payments on the loan, I would pay over $800 in interest alone.

And I didn't know that by the end of the first year of making payments I would have paid thousands of dollars...

...and be left with a balance higher than the amount I had originally borrowed.

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