State and federal lawsuits filed this week accused Navient, the largest collector of student loan payments in the nation, of the kind of sloppiness and misleading tactics that emerged in the mortgage market in the years after the financial crisis. “Navient has a well-established, superior track record of helping student loan borrowers succeed in repayment,” Patricia Nash Christel, a company spokeswoman, said in a written statement. In recent years, the Obama administration has significantly expanded programs that allow people with federal student loans to cap their monthly payments at a fixed portion of their income. It took more than six years, Ms. Vitakauskas, 43, said, to get her monthly payments lowered. But in 2015, she started to get collection calls on the student loan that she thought had been paid.

Source: New York Times January 20, 2017 01:38 UTC