Sallie Mae Review

Monday, August 2nd

2021 Student Loan Provider Reviews

Sallie Mae

• No application or origination fees
• No prepayment penalties
• No payments required until 6 months after leaving school
• Interest rate discounts available for automatic payments
• Cosigner release option after one year of on-time payments
• Graduated Repayment Period feature
• Variable interest rates from 2.50% to 9.59% APR
• Fixed interest rates from 5.74% to 11.85% APR
• Minimum monthly payment of $50 during repayment period
• Customer service: 877-279-7172

You may be familiar with SallieMae already when it comes to student loans. Until several years ago, they were responsible for the administration of federal student loans as well as private ones; however, they have since split off into a lender strictly for private student funding, in addition to other consumer products such as banking and credit cards.

No-frills site

As you might expect from a website that used to be a government program, SallieMae is not flashy or interesting to look at: just a basic site for getting a student loan, known as the Smart Option program.

Borrow up to 100% of college costs

Like most private student loan programs, you'll be able to apply with no application fee and no origination fees. Also, SallieMae is one of the few lenders we reviewed that allows you to borrow up to 100% of your school-certified cost of attendance, with no arbitrary caps or other limits.

Qualification criteria

To qualify for a SallieMae Smart Option student loan, you'll need to meet these criteria:

• U.S. citizen, or foreign student with a creditworthy cosigner that is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident
• Good credit (you or your cosigner), typically a minimum score of 640; the average SallieMae borrower has a credit score of 748

3 repayment options

If you choose a SallieMae Smart Option student loan, you'll have three primary repayment options:

• Deferred Repayment: no requirements for payment until you've left school
• Fixed Repayment: $25/month while in school, resulting in an average savings of 12% over the life of the loan
• Interest Repayment: make monthly interest-only payments while in school, resulting in an average savings of 25% over the life of the loan

You can get additional savings of 0.25% on your interest rate if you choose to make automatically-debited payments while still enrolled in school.

Graduated repayment period

And, for new graduates, you have the option of requesting a "Graduated Repayment Period". This means that if your loan is in good standing and you've graduated, you can request to make 12 interest-only payments, helping you ease into you full payment amount for up to a year after you've graduated (and hopefully gotten a job!).

Other student loan products

SallieMae has several other student loan products that may be applicable to your situation: Career Training Smart Option, Medical/Dental Residency and Relocation Loan, and Bar Study Loan. We recommend you visit the website if your loan falls into those categories.

Cosigner release

Another advantage of SallieMae's program is the possibility of cosigner release after 12 on-time principal and interest payments. This is an improvement over some of their competitors, who require as many as four years of on-time payments before being eligible for a cosigner release. There may also be options for deferment and forbearance - we found several references to those possibilities on other sites, but SallieMae does not make it easy to find the fine print on their own website.

Loan servicing issues

Despite competitive interest rates and some advantages over other student loan providers, SallieMae appears to come up very short when it comes to servicing borrowers' needs after the loan has been approved. We found a significant number of customers who said that they regretted the day they applied for a SallieMae loan, had payments applied incorrectly or not at all, or were sent to collections despite making regular on-time payments. Other reviews said that the representatives treated them rudely, going so far as to call them names or make condescending comments regarding ways in which the borrowers could get the money needed to make their next payment. This is unprofessional at best.

So, while we can't overlook some of the advantages SallieMae has over other student loan companies, we are concerned over the way they handle customer service after the loan has been approved.