USA Funds Helps Borrower Resolve Payment Problems

Editor’s Note: The following is a feature from the USA Funds^® 2007 annual report. USA Funds Education Access Report is highlighting the students featured in the annual report to show how USA Funds is getting results for students. To access the full report online, you’ll need Adobe Reader.

It’s not every day you hear someone describe the process of resolving a student-loan-repayment problem as “fun.”

But that’s exactly the word Laurie Dent uses when she explains how she went from a frustrated student-loan borrower who’s behind on her payments, to a relieved student-loan borrower who’s back on track.

“By the time I was finished talking with people about my problem,” says Dent, “I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh. This was fun.’ It’s become ingrained in my mind that I pay my student-loan bills. In honor of the people who helped me, I pay my bills.”

Dent admits she was angry when David Hurd called her in fall 2006. A default-prevention counselor who works on USA Funds’ behalf to assist education-loan borrowers who have fallen behind in their payments, Hurd reached Dent at her St. Louis home.

After depleting her savings to earn a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo., that spring, Dent had little money left to apply toward student-loan payments.

The 50-year-old mother of five says her irate reaction to Hurd didn’t faze him. Instead, he listened to her concerns and then went to work to help her solve her problems.

“He worked his magic,” she says. “He explained exactly what process I needed to follow, what I needed to do and how to do it. So now I no longer was being bothered. Now I felt like I was being served.”

Hurd is part of a team of more than 250 full-time professionals who — backed by the latest information and telecommunications technology — counsel borrowers about their options for resolving payment problems. Those options can include flexible repayment plans, loan consolidation and opportunities for borrowers to temporarily suspend or reduce their loan payments.

Following Hurd’s step-by-step instructions, Dent requested and was granted a forbearance based on financial hardship, which allowed her to briefly suspend her payments. Then she consolidated her education loans to bring her monthly payments to a more-manageable level.

She’s been up to date on her education-loan payments in the more than one year since she talked to Hurd.

The default-aversion assistance provided on USA Funds’ behalf prevented more than $16.7 billion in potential loan defaults in 2007. As a result, U.S. taxpayers saved more than $16 billion in potential default costs, and student-loan borrowers avoided an estimated $5.5 billion in additional loan costs.

In more than nine of every 10 cases, the default-prevention professionals successfully avert default. Hurd says this success comes from “listening to a borrower’s needs and finding the right solution for that borrower.”

Dent works in customer service herself and also is a human-resources consultant. She says that successfully staying up to date on her student-loan payments is only part of her higher-education success story. Now that she’s earned a college degree — the culmination of 30 years of work — two of her sons and her husband have been inspired to follow suit. “I’m quite proud of myself,” Dent says.