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June 27, 2006
Consolidation Countdown
I posted an article back in April about consolidating your student loans to lock in the interest rate before it goes up on July 1. Haven't done it yet? Neither did I, until two minutes ago! Yes, I'm a horrible procrastinator, but thankfully the process was smooth and easy after I cleared up a problem with my PIN.
The whole consolidation thing had been looming over me for the past couple of weeks, but I kept putting it off. Yesterday, I decided it was finally time to get it done, since I only had until Friday to get it in under the deadline. I have some old loans through Sallie Mae, so I needed to go to the National Student Loan Data System web site to get the necessary information to plug into the consolidation form. To retrieve the information, they ask for your information and your PIN. But when I entered my PIN, I kept getting an error. I even went to the Federal Student Aid PIN site and requested a PIN look-up.
I got a little worried when they confirmed that the PIN I was using was the one they had on file. Why won't it work? Is the site broken or overloaded? What if I couldn't fix it before Friday? And then, of course, I couldn't help but feel immense guilt at not having done this months ago...
But then the extraordinary procrastinator's luck I've had most of my life kicked in. I called the student aid 800 number and got right through to someone after pressing "2" for PIN help. I explained my problem.
She asked "and you got the error message after putting in your 4 digit PIN?"
I replied, "No, I got the error message after I put in my 6 letter PIN."
Apparently, the PIN I'd been using for years -- the PIN I was issued by the FSA -- is no longer accepted on the NSLDS web site... they only accept PINs that have four numbers. Fortunately, that was easy enough to fix. You can change your PIN right on the web and can even set it to a number of your choosing. It was odd -- and frustrating -- that there wasn't a note about the incompatibility on the log-in page.
But now I'm all consolidated and happy and ready to procrastinate the next big thing...
Posted by rigd0003 at June 27, 2006 01:11 PM | Frustrations | PhD Process