Back in 2005, due to stress in job and dealing with loss of family, I ended up wigging out a bit. DH took over paying bills, including my SLs, which were being serviced by Great Lakes at the time. Best as I can figure, around Nov 05, Sallie Mae bought the rights to service my SLs from GL, but we never received any monthly invoices or a payment book so we continued to pay Great Lakes (who took our money). This continued for nearly a year when my dad called me Oct of 06 telling me Sallie Mae was trying to find me.

I called them up asked them what was going on, and they told me I was 28 days from defaulting. In 24 hours, I learned more about the SL process than I ever wanted to know. We were lucky enough to have the consolidation process started, approved, and funded before my loans went to default. We called GL and they ended up refunding us they payments we made. When asked why they didn't contact us, they indicated that it wasn't part of their procedure if the loan is in good standing Because I was thankful I wouldn't have to pull teeth to get my money back I didn't push it.

So now, I have two sets of Sallie Mae loans on my CR. The ones from the consolidation (one TL), and the ones that were close to default (16 TLs) that have been closed. Both have the same payment history attached to them (i.e, the year of lates from 2005/6). This is the biggest reason my FICOs are in the tank.

My questions:

Should the consolidation have the same payment history as the 16 pre-consolidation TLs? I would have thought a new loan would have a 'new' history.

After reading here - I am wondering - did I make the right decision to consolidate at the 11.9th hour vs defaulting and rehabbing?

Do I have any recourse on how all of this reports? I have read that Sallie Mae are the immovable object when it comes to reporting.

Any advice would be appreciated! Thanks a bunch

If you look at my thread you can get the jist of how sallie mae operates. The only advice I have is find a manager that's at least 2 tiers above the CSR's that answer phones. Make sure they speak english and persistently hound that one individual by email, letters, and phone calls. Don't try to goodwill them. They are like Satan's helpers, they don't have souls.

You have to nutcase them like never before but it IS possible to get them to remove some lates. If you decide to tackle this, make sure you are ready for war. Don't get discouraged.

The only baddies on my CRs are the lates from my 16 SM TLs and one SM consolidation TL. It wasn't completely my fault that the lates happened on the pre-consolidation TL - both SM and I are to blame on that one and since they are closed, I am going to wait it out and try to up my scores other ways, knowing my salvation is 5 years a way (when DH and I will have our 90% of our SLs, 100% of our mortgage, 100% of our car loan paid off, and when these TLs will be aged off). Right now I have other things I need to get set up to go from average credit to excellent, rather than getting myself irritated trying to force SM into giving me a break.

What concerns me, however, is how should the consolidation loan report (has been paid ontime since payment 1)? Does a consolidation loan for SLs automatically inherit the payment history of the old loans it is rolling up? If it does, what are the specific reasons for it.... If it shouldn't, I then will consider getting into the pot of boiling oil with SM to get that fixed.

All three CRs (from the CRAs) report the consolidation loan as being opened in Oct 06 but the payment history summaries show the lates starting from back in 2005. The loan hasn't been open more than 17 months, and the last 25 month 'history' lists 8 +90 day lates. All of the closed TLs report only to the month that the consolidation was made.

The only thing I wished SLs would do is report out at as 2 TLs (one for sub and one for unsub) instead of a TL for each disbursement you take . ah well