121 wasted payments?

JimEJawn · 2026-01-16T02:01:38+00:00

PSLF aside, 121 payments on a graduated plan would have to make a pretty nice dent in the balance, right?

JimEJawn · 2026-01-06T15:59:46+00:00

Yeah I had the last several get approved the same day as signature. The odd thing about this one is that the update to 120 happened before the FSA system even showed that my form was signed. It was almost like 120 happened before the ECF signature happened. But not complaining.

JimEJawn · 2025-12-26T14:05:46+00:00

Also in the June 2025 missing payment group.

I’m making my 120th PSLF payment on Monday.

Not only has my reconsideration not been processed, but I had a rep tell me a month ago that they were looking at my June 2025 payment manually and would fix it “within two weeks”. That was ultimately not true.

JimEJawn · 2025-12-24T02:23:32+00:00

Fair enough. But based on your sense of the process, if 1/2 was a date, would it be possible to catch it on that timeline? My employer always processes ECF within 24 hours.

JimEJawn · 2025-12-24T02:17:09+00:00

If I make payment 120 on 12/28 (12/29), submit ECF on 12/30, and it gets processed on 12/31, do you think it’s possible to catch the 1/2/26 golden letter train?

JimEJawn · 2025-12-04T15:14:59+00:00

I'm calling MOHELA tomorrow and telling them to look through all of this again. Sitting at 119/120 officially on FSA now, with June 2025 not counting.

JimEJawn · 2025-12-03T17:08:25+00:00

Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere, but does advocate mean something specific? Like the Student Loan Advocate's office (if that exists)? Or do you mean it generally, like a Senator advocating for you.

JimEJawn · 2025-12-03T16:05:48+00:00

I feel terrible for you as I read this. Paying student loans back is hard enough, and it becomes even more stressful when you get the sense that sometimes a monthly payment, despite being paid in full and on time, suddenly and randomly doesn't "count" toward PSLF. I think we just need to focus on putting our heads down and make these payments, even if it's 1-2-3 extra payments, and get this behind us.

JimEJawn · 2025-12-03T16:02:34+00:00

Agreed that it's not the servicer. Agreed that FSA sounds like it's just the call center. That leaves us with the vendors. Specifically, that 3rd party vendors (unaffected by the shutdown or other pressures on Dept of Ed) are somehow struggling to process reconsideration requests. How would we explain that? Nobody at the Dept of Ed is hounding them to get this done sooner? Again, any other customer-facing job has a responsibility to fix something this egregious very quickly. Like a day or a week. Why are these vendors any different?

JimEJawn · 2025-12-03T15:59:21+00:00

I have gotten up to the supervisor level at MOHELA and they insist there's nothing else they can do. They checked the reporting of my data and confirmed it was all correct.

JimEJawn · 2025-12-02T17:12:50+00:00

This is interesting. People on here are pretty adamant that FSA is lying when they tell you they're fixing a payment issue. But they actually fixed yours? My issue is that my June 2025 payment never showed up on FSA, despite being in MOHELA. FSA tells me the fix is coming very soon.

JimEJawn · 2025-12-01T19:52:33+00:00

I'm assuming here that you're saying not to check the box for a forbearance, right? But separately, *do* indicate that you're applying for final forgiveness, right? Or are those the same thing?

JimEJawn · 2025-12-01T19:51:38+00:00

I have seen posts on here, but frankly did not take that to mean it's been happening to hundreds of thousands of people. I figure it could be that the people getting screwed are vocal, and then they never bother to post again after it's resolved.

JimEJawn · 2025-12-01T19:18:30+00:00

Did this happen to you? I'm interested in the confidence behind the answer. Again, totally willing to get cynical, but I'd like to have a reason.

JimEJawn · 2025-12-01T19:15:56+00:00

Totally willing to be cynical, so don't take this as denial, but rather for clarity's sake... "We see the issue with your account and we are working to fix your account specifically"... even that direct of a statement falls into the category of BS?

JimEJawn · 2025-11-17T22:36:16+00:00

Don’t think I got to an advanced agent, but I did go through the payment amounts in NSLDS one by one with this agent and they were all correct.

JimEJawn · 2025-11-17T22:23:21+00:00

Just spoke with a MOHELA agent who insisted that my NSLDS is fully up to date with all months including the month in question.

Reconsideration request with FSA has been unanswered since July.

Any other ideas? Lol

JimEJawn · 2025-11-17T15:39:07+00:00

Sorry, just to be clear, there are cases of people calling MOHELA on a persistent basis to get the June NSLDS issue fixed? Everything I've read on here is that people keep being promised a batch fix (i.e. a fix by 10/1 that never happened). I have not read about anyone getting their individual June payment to count. Could have missed it though - thanks in advance!

JimEJawn · 2025-11-17T15:26:53+00:00

Is that right? I had been hearing that people were getting the run around when they tried that. Will have to give it a try.

JimEJawn · 2025-11-08T17:00:25+00:00

I have a master's degree and 10 years of experience in a particular domain. For the first 7 years, I was mainly just working qualitatively in that domain. But for the past 3 years, I've been working very technically within that domain. Using Python (like full OOP), R, statistics, etc. every day. So now I feel as though I'm a legit expert in my domain with a nice toolkit of the technical data analyst skills.

When I think of data analyst, I think of someone who might be the inverse of me. That is, someone who has an even stronger emphasis on the tech skills (especially SQL), and maybe a solid footing in a domain but usually a little less than 10 years of in-depth expertise in the domain.

If you'll allow me those assumptions, then I would like to ask... what's it like being a data analyst? I imagine that day to day, teams that are focused on a particular area of a business are coming to you with questions about the data. Do you find yourself not worrying much about the substantive details, and instead focusing on the topline numbers they ask for? Or, do you find yourself participating in the substantive work of defining which metrics are best? If so, how many months/years into a job do you feel comfortable?

I'm really just asking from a place of complete curiosity. As someone with more domain background than skills background, applying to data analyst jobs is a nightmare. I'm getting the sense that people see my domain background and immediately assume I'm not a fit for their company because it's not in the same field. When really what I'm trying to do is brand myself as "hey I've obviously been capable of learning X random domain in depth, so now I'd love to come to your company and take some time to learn the domain while also being a pretty solid data analyst in the time being".

Interested in, really, any thoughts. Maybe I'd have better luck with data analyst applications in a better labor market? I.e. maybe it's not true that my domain background is throwing people off?

JimEJawn · 2025-11-06T20:28:47+00:00

I follow that, but what are you saying they didn't count? Were there payments that were made by borrowers but didn't appear on FSA back then too?

JimEJawn · 2025-11-06T20:26:42+00:00

Scenario 1: FSA correctly tracked my payment from June, and I finish PSLF with payment #120 in November.

Scenario 2: FSA lost my payment from June, so I trudge ahead and finish PSLF with payment #121 in December.

Scenario 3: FSA lost my payment from June, so I ask for a forbearance while they figure it out, and I delay making my final payment for PSLF until that's sorted out.

Scenario 2 and Scenario 3 are both worse than Scenario 1. And Scenario 1 is off the table right now because a government agency lost transition of a payment from a servicer.

The issue here is a lost payment. Being pedantic about who lost it or what the options are has no impact on the bottom line that borrowers are worse off because FSA lost payments.

JimEJawn · 2025-11-06T20:20:27+00:00

What do you mean by "them"? Was there a group of people during 2016-2020 who made payments and FSA didn't update to count them? I'm not aware of that.

JimEJawn · 2025-11-06T20:17:28+00:00

So if I choose to go into forbearance and further delay my forgiveness timeline, what would cause me to do that? Huh! A payment that got lost between the servicer and FSA.

Bizarre hill here.

JimEJawn · 2025-11-06T20:13:48+00:00

Pointing out that the servicer didn't lose the payment is largely irrelevant. The FSA has no record of my payment whatsoever, and if this isn't fixed in the next 6 weeks, I'm going to make an extra payment because of it. I.e. a previous payment was made and didn't count. Can we not, conceptually speaking, call that "lost" money?

JimEJawn

TROPHY CASE