Student loan service provider questions

[becalubob]

Last month I posted a question about AES, thank you for the help. Today I have a few more questions, if anyone has been following these issues or works with student loans, I could use some suggestions!

Part of my student loan payments go to AES, and the other part is paid to FedLoan Servicing. Before having AES, those payments were going to Great Lakes. Great Lakes, which I found easy to work with, sent my loans to AES and I've had issues with them. I would like to move all my loans to one servicer. From what I've been reading, I can only do that if I consolidate OR move them all to FedLoan Servicing as I work for a non-profit. I personally have had no issue with FedLoan Servicing, and would be fine with that option, but now I see that PHEAA (which administers the PSLF program - and operates as FedLoan Servicing), is exiting the federal student loan servicing business at the end of the year.

Now I found an article yesterday which states AES is ALSO under PHEAA. At this point, I don't know if I should attempt moving my AES payments to FedLoan Servicing, so they are all together, or if I should just hang tight and see what happens at the end of the year and not bother doing anything right now. They might end up just splitting them up again with whatever happens at the end of the year. At one point I had three servicers, yuck. Anyone else in a similar situation? Or have any insights on this?

 

[sarahk0204]

Your loans serviced by AES are most likely FFEL that you received before 2010, correct? These were loans that were made by a bank, but were guaranteed by the federal government. In 2010, the government bought the loans from the banks.

Your loans serviced by FedLoan servicing came directly from the federal government.

While the government likely owns all of your loans now, being serviced by two different branches of PHEAA likely means that they originated under different programs with different rules at the time.

Consolidating may be possible, but it can mess up your PSLF, so I would proceed very carefully here. And I know it is hard to get good information about this. The reason PHEAA is getting out of the student loan servicing business is that they didn't do a good job sorting out PSLF for people and really messed things up for some.

I have AES for my FFEL and Nelnet for my loans directly from the government. Two different servicers hasn't been that bad, so I am just sitting tight and seeing what happens with AES.