Painful to the extreme

<p>I took out a student loan with NSFAS a few years ago and since then it has been nothing but struggle. </p> <p> </p> <p>They do not respond to emails or phonecalls. It takes anything from a month of 7-10 emails and phonecalls to 3 months or more to get them to send a single statement showing what payment is due. On the good days I receive an automated response email saying they will answer my query in 24 hours, but I never hear from them. </p> <p>For over a year their reply to my resquest for a balance statement was that they were unable to issue statements due to their system being down. FOR A YEAR??? And for that year they still charged me interest. Even though I made every attempt to get a statement out of them to be able to continue with my repayments.</p> <p> </p> <p>Most businesses run on a system that if a payment is made, they send the customer a statement showing the remaining balance. And should the customer not pay on time they send a statement and request for payment. But NSFAS wants the customer to do the leg-work and beg them for statements to be able to make repayments. If I had really not wanted to repay my loan I would have been able to just forget about it for 3 years and they would not have been able to claim back any payments at all from me and would have had to write the whole loan off. How ridiculous???</p> <p> </p>