“Defense to Repayment” is a legal statute which can allow loan-forgiveness for students who have faced “acts or omissions of an institute of higher education,” referring to a range of unlawful practices including lying to students about anticipated annual salaries, job prospects, or other factors which contributed to your decision to attend the school.Approval for a loan discharge via defense to repayment requires a thorough legal argument regarding the school’s wrongdoing against you as a student and loan borrower, and the statute also asserts that this argument is only legitimate if the school was in violation of state law and its “act or omission” was directly related to your student loans.A defense to repayment letter may include the following:
- A written statement that you “Wish to assert a borrower defense to repayment based on state law;”
- Your official legal first, middle, and last name, date of birth, and contact information;
- The name and address of your school;
- The degree or certificate program you earned or were in the process of earning (students who completed their programs are just as eligible as those who were still enrolled);
- The dates between which you were/are enrolled at the school;
- A thorough explanation of how you were defrauded by the school, including the state law/s which were violated, how the school’s misconduct affected your decision to attend it and take out student loans, and the damages you’ve suffered as a result.
If you are struggling with student loan debt or have been a victim of the unlawful practices of a college or similar institution, contact an experienced student loan attorney today for a free consultation.
Submitted Comments
January 22, 2019
I applied for deferment under the category of 30 hrs or less weekly employment on January 19, 2019 to begin deferring Jan 22, 2019. I understand it does take a few days for acceptance. I've never been denied before so I don’t expect to be denied this time as well.
If I had know this was the kind of company that would end up being my loan servicer I would have never gone to school. Willfully, and maliciously, miscommunicate information related to credit scores and future employment is unconscionable and unacceptable. The purpose of which is to create such user frustration that users give up trying to contact them for repayment option information. It should be noted here as well that Navient makes no attempt to own its mistakes and answer for its behavior as a company as the complaints page for the website has been shut down.
My complaint list items are as follows:
Item 1. Navient willfully and maliciously causes negative credit impacts as well as future employment as a result of the redirect behavior of the website combined with the fact that many of the contact us and reference links are broken; resulting in unintentional delayed response actions from borrowers.
Item 2. Navient auto notified me Jan 22, 2019 they had sent me a response to my user account inbox. After I log into my account I see no indication of new email or alerts. Therefore there is no visual cue of what it is or where I’m to look in my account for the response to my deferment request.
Item 3. Navient purposely redirects account users to back links that don't make any logical sense and just has users repeatedly log in without telling them exactly where to find the information Navient is asking users to supply. I had to click on every navigation panel link with their built-in redirects in order to find the email reference sent by Navient.
Below is my true immediate complaint:
Item 4. Navient inaccurately reports deferment status. After all the redirected link clicking and finally finding the reference of email Navient sent, Navient is stating the following, which is completely inaccurate: “You are currently in a status that is more beneficial than the deferment in which you are requesting. Please reapply within 30 days of the expiration date.”
I'm not sure how this is possible when I earned less than the estimated yearly poverty line dollar amount for the entire 2018 year. I didn’t work/earn enough to qualify for unemployment in 2018, and I have no other income.
In summary, because of Navient’s website redirect behavior and its incompetence of correctly categorizing deferment requests, my credit score will now take a huge negative impact as I am in no position to repay loans without suffering hardship AND any future employment relying on credit report as one of its metrics for hiring will no longer consider me.
A fair resolution is for financial law to include Federal Student Loans under bankruptcy law or maybe partial discharge of loans when entry level jobs wont even begin to cover the costs of loan repayment.
Ideally, I want to sue FAFSA for fraud as well as colleges. Colleges and FAFSA both know that the college education is a business and a joke. College is a joke because all programs are more than 10 years out of date when it comes to current industry requirements needed to perform in any industry. Therefore all college graduates are underemployed and underpaid right out of college. Based on the latter how could any graduate pay back student loans without ending up homeless or near homelessness. College is a business that sells FAFSA to students, knowing their programs are all out of date and intentionally makes students feel the need to take on more debt in order to fill in the gaps their intended major left open as those gaps can only be filled by enrolling in additional programs.
