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Student Loans : About Student Loans With No Co-Signer

Federal loans are at to students, and they don't require a cosigner, but they do be lacking the student to complete the FAFSA. Find out ...

My advice: Stay the hell away from Citibank

So. Where to begin? In early August, before classes at GULC (Georgetown University Law Center) started, Jon realized that the necessary paperwork for his GradPLUS loan had not gone through. So he applied through Citibank since he has several student loans with them already...and got turned down (sigh - here we go!). After several phone calls, we decided the best thing to do was add me as an Endorser to the application – not quite a co-signer, but basically the same thing. The process to add me should have been a no-brainer: I fill out a one-page form, send it in, they look at my credit and say “yup, no issues here”, approve the loan and everyone has a great day. Right?? I completed the Endorser form and signed it on August 18, 2009. There were a couple of fields that we questioned whether we should fill out, but decided they didn’t apply to us as explained by the application form itself (specifically, details on the “Undergraduate Student”, and the “Parent of the Undergraduate Student” – of which we are clearly neither). So, left those blank, reviewed it, had Jon review it, signed and mailed! AHOY! Gimme the money… Anyway. So they got the form, hadn’t processed it. We waited and then heard the news on August 31 that the Endorser application had been denied because it “wasn’t complete”. I bet Jon 10 bucks it was because of those fields we didn’t fill out that pertained to undergrads. It would be more than 3 weeks before we found out, though. In the meantime, we asked for another Endorser form to be mailed to us. We were also waiting for the original Master Promissory Note (MPN) that had not yet been delivered. We borrowed money for rent from my folks, with the promise that “this should be resolved in about a week” (HA!) and that we could pay them back very soon (HA HA!). We paid the landlord 1 month’s of rent – late – and told him the payment for September was coming and to please be patient with us. He was very understanding. Weeks go by – Jon is calling Citibank maybe 3 times a week by this point. We still didn’t have the new Endorser form, we still didn’t have the MPN. We were basically at the mercy of these idiots at Citibank. We were both mentally exhausted, stressed to the max, starting to grumble at each other because of the stress and uncertainty of the situation. At one point we were even worried that GULC would pull his enrollment because the deadline of Sept 27th – when tuition was due – was looming. Add to this that I was trying to coordinate my class reunion with negative money from the class and no money of our own to use. We still have to pay bills and buy groceries and just how was I going to drive to Michigan on no money…?! Oh, and hey – here’s a great bit of news I got right in the middle of all this: “Dear Meredith, please give us $590 to register your house as a rental because you don’t live in it and therefore it must be registered. Oh, and your property taxes are going up – and therefore the mortgage payment – because this house is no longer eligible for the homestead tax credit. Love, the City of Lansing”. Around September 23 Jon’s mom had sent us a packet of mail that had been delivered to the NC address (remind me to blog about the postal service cluster that is forwarding…). In the packet was a new Endorser form and MPN. That same day we also got a forwarded envelope, sent by Citibank to Jon in NC instead of DC (they had the correct address, just didn't pay attention), with the old "incomplete" Endorser form. Both envelopes were originally mailed on Sept 2 and for some unknown reason the one was never forwarded and the other took THAT long to be forwarded by the post office. Great, so now we’re looking at some crazy conspiracy and the USPS has jumped on board – I swear, that’s what I was thinking. We filled out the new Endorser form and sent it in after several phone calls to Citibank to be absolutely sure we were filling it out right. Jon even went so far as to have the lady he talked with that time have her supervisor – and then another – come look over her shoulder as they all went through the application. Hope showed it’s face for a brief moment in time!! We wanted that supervisor to tell us were were doing this right because sure enough – on the old form that we sent in that was “incomplete” were 2 highlighted fields: both dealing with undergraduate student information. So this was proof that ever since the original form was processed on August 31 we had been given the run-around for no reason other than the person who took in the form was too stupid to realize that Jon was NOT an undergraduate and I was NOT the parent of an undergraduate! Seriously annoying. And totally their fault - not that they would ever admit that. The landlord is again stalled – although he’s still being cool we can tell he isn’t thrilled with a full month going by with no rent and a new month coming up quick. My parents are stalled – they are being very cool but we should have paid them off a month before and it’s driving me bonkers that we can’t. GULC is stalled - "please please don’t unenroll me”. Jump to the end of September and the news that we’d been waiting for: my Endorser application for credit has been approved!!! All I have to do is sign the forms and the application will go into final processing and then disbursement of funds, then a refund to Jon after tuition is taken out, then the landlord gets paid, the folks get paid…WHEW!! I go to sign the forms and realize that Citibank has listed ME as the student and borrower. I thought it was a cruel joke. Jon called them AGAIN (Call #423, I think) and explained the issue. They said no worries – the MPN that we sent in the week before is what they are working off of, so don’t print or sign anything else. They swore that Jon was really the student in their records, it’s just that the online system and system the customer service reps use are not synched. Well that makes perfect sense, right?! Of course – this is an incompetent cluster after all. FINALLY, about October 1, we got word that GULC had been paid. They set the refund in motion – “3-5 days” we were told. The landlord, after all the delays, finally decides that maybe he’d like something in writing from the school to prove that he really was going to get paid soon. The school does that with no problem.

Source: GreenHeels