We've Finally Arrived

I must say, me and Scotty are pretty much professionals now. We have successfully finished the first part of the remodeling of his parents house. Overall it took 4 long months. We started in the living room taking off popcorn on the ceilings and patching holes or other imperfections in the wall. We textured the ceiling and painted everything. It looks really good. Then we moved to the back bedrooms. That's what took the longest. We made two bedrooms into one which consisted of knocking down a wall, building a closet, painting everything and putting carpet in. It's sounds easy enough but there are lots of small details no one bothers thinking about. I have yet to put the pictures on my computer so you'll have to wait to see the before and after.

This past weekend we were able to move his parents downstairs and started organizing the upstairs. When springtime gets here we are having a HUGE garage sale. I'd like to say the upstairs is completely empty and ready for us to move in but it's not. It's full of things to put in the attic and garage sale stuff. We put the first coat of paint on last night and we'll put another one on in a few days. Our plan is to start the moving process Friday (weather permitting). Because of the storage incident that happened in June his parents rented a POD and have put it in their yard so we don't have to worry about someone making a home of it. So all of our stuff is occupying a lot of the space and we can't get the garage sale stuff in it till our stuff is out....but we can't put our stuff in the room till the garage sale stuff is out. So it's going to get a little tricky but we'll manage. It's going to be so nice to see all of our stuff again.

On top of all the work we've been doing we've gotten some bad news lately. Last month sometime we received an email from AES (American Education Services). They told us our first payment is due soon. We thought that was strange because as far as we knew all of our loans were through Sallie Mae. So Scotty emailed them back and told them they have a mistake. A few days later we received a phone call explaining that if we don't pay they will file fraud charges. We were utterly confused. So Scotty called the number back and asked for all sorts of information. I emailed our financial counselor from OC to see if she knew anything. I figured she had taken out a loan without his permission. I thought that because she did the same thing to me while I was in school. I kept a close watch on the activity with loans and noticed an extra $2,000 that wasn't suppose to be there. When I confronted her she said I had asked for it....she was wrong. She fixed the problem but she didn't own up to it. So needless to say, me and her aren't the best of friends. So I just assumed she did the same thing with Scotty. But after Scotty talked to someone on the phone we found out that it wasn't a mistake. At the time we thought our financial counselor took out ALL loans from Sallie Mae except one....which is really annoying and stupid. So here we are with an extra loan we didn't see coming. But don't worry it doesn't end there.... Just this week we received ANOTHER letter from a DIFFERENT service saying that we start payments soon. I can't believe this has happened again. I'm so glad that Scotty is so calm and collected. I was in the middle of a break down when Scotty got the smart idea to find the credit report Arvest pulled on him a few months ago before he got hired. It had listed every single loan, including the surprise 2. Needless to say there shouldn't be anymore surprise loans. Now if you're thinking if we had it on the credit report this whole time why didn't we know about it? Well, me and Scotty were absolutely positive that we knew where all of our loans were from. Our credit is good so why bother looking? Wrong. Our financial counselor from OC finally emailed back and said that she did indeed take out ALL loans from Sallie Mae except one, and that is the most recent one. But the one from AES was a mystery until we found out that Sallie Mae sold it right as we started paying them off. I'm sure they sent us a letter about it but they send us a letter about everything so we probably just skimmed it and threw it away. Bad idea. It's still really frustrating though. Why would our financial counselor do that? I know it's not her fault, but because of the history with her I'm still going to be mad. So when my loans are out of grace period in December we will be making 4 separate payments to get them paid off.

Our goal is still to pay them off in 4 years. We have set out a plan and we are going to be successful. But some words of advice....read every letter your loan service gives you and make sure you understand it. Ask your financial counselor where all your loans are from and how much they're for. Hopefully your financial counselor was better than ours.