<p>I'm graduating this month, so I received an email from my school reminding me to do exit counseling. When I signed in, it said I owe $0 in federal loans. It should be more like $25,000 in both sub and unsub federal loans.</p>
<p>I called the school and they said I'd have to call some other number, which was disconnected. Awesome. So I went online today to check my balance on NSLDS, thinking I could just manually add the loans to the exit counseling website so I can get it done. It told me that I'm not in that system at all. And yes, all of the information I'm inputting is correct.</p>
<p>I plan on calling the 1-800 number they provided me at 9AM, but has anyone else encountered this problem? If so, how did you resolve it?</p>
<p>I am so glad you found out about this. You absolutely must follow up on this - with your school’s financial aid office - to find out what is going on. I am a financial aid director. If you were at my school, I would be extremely concerned - and I would work to find out what had happened. My fear is that something was done incorrectly on your loans, and someday it will catch up with you … with interest. </p>
<p>Loans are tied to your FAFSA info, and name/date of birth/SSN have to be correct on the FAFSA or it will reject. That means your loan info has to be correct, or the loan records would have rejected - your school would have realized that, because they would not have been paid for your loans by the government if the loan records had rejected (and this would be several years’ worth of loans, right?). </p>
<p>Do you recall ever being contacted by a loan servicer? I am wondering if your loans were serviced by ACS. They no longer service Direct Loans (they do still service FFEL loans, but those are from before 2008-09), and all Direct Loans they serviced have been moved to other servicers. I wonder if your loans might have gotten lost in the changeover - and of course, you would still owe them (eventually, they would be “found”).</p>
<p>Did you look at Financial Aid Review (<a href=“http://www.nslds.ed.gov)?%5B/url%5D”>www.nslds.ed.gov)?</a> If not, go there. What do you see for your loan info???</p>
<p>The op looked at nslds…and it said she was not in the system!</p>
<p>OP…did you receive disbursement notifications? My kids got those in the mail every time a Direct Loan was disbursed. We also got an annual statement with interest for the unsubsidized loans. Did you receive any of these? So you still have them?</p>
<p>No, OP was doing exit counseling. That is done on studentloans.gov — you can get there through NSDLS, too, but clicking the button takes you to studentloans.gov. There is a separate button to click when you sign into NSLDS that is for Financial Aid Review. It might not be synching with the exit counseling on the other site. I know the rep said the OP isn’t in the system, but I would still check [National</a> Student Loan Data System for Students](<a href=“http://www.nslds.ed.gov%5DNational”>http://www.nslds.ed.gov) & click on Financial Aid Review.</p>
<p>I thought this meant she checked NSLDS thinking she could manually add the loan amounts to the exit counseling…but found she was not in the system.</p>
<p>Oops - obviously, my brain was asleep last night.</p>
<p>Okay, if you are not in NSLDS there is a HUGE problem. Go into your FAFSA ([Home</a> - FAFSA on the Web-Federal Student Aid](<a href=“http://www.fafsa.gov%5DHome”>http://www.fafsa.gov)). Look at your Student Aid Report (SAR). There is a financial aid history section. Is yours blank?? If not, are there loans listed?</p>
<p>After about ten phone calls, I discovered there are two problems:</p>
<p>1.) The loans are under my maiden name even though FAFSA has my married name. I’ve been married for over a year.</p>
<p>2.) FedLoan Servicing has my graduation date set to August 2015, so there’s no repayment schedule set up until then.</p>
<p>My school changed my graduation date and mailed me a document showing the new date. Once I get that, I can fax that and my driver’s license with my new name to FedLoan Servicing so they can get everything correct in their system. Once that’s done, I should be able to complete my exit counseling.</p>
<p>This obviously won’t be done for a week or more and I graduate tomorrow, but the school told me that my degree will not be withheld due to my exit counseling being completed late. Hopefully the rest of this process will go smoothly.</p>
<p>It’s good that you got it straightened out. While you did use your married name on the FAFSA, if all your loans are under your maiden name, they don’t necessarily change automatically - FAFSA and the servicer are two different entities. This is one of those things … you will need to think about any other places in your life that you might need to change your name. Don’t be like me — I thought I changed all my stuff, but after 17 years of marriage I found out I had never changed my social security number to my married name! :)</p>