My complaint:
My outstanding loan was reamortized by Fidelity in January 2023 due to a blackout period. Received a notice about this, fine no issue. No instruction to re-establish my already occurring payments (they have my bank account information). When I noticed my February payment wasn’t deducted I called. This cycle continued on repeat with various responses from the agents (no action needed; we have your bank account information on file; will launch a ticket to see why payments aren’t being deducted (which I found out later was never done) to the most recent where I was told the payments would be resuming and that the missed payments would not be collected retroactively (doubled down by stating I would have to call in to make those payments manually if I wanted to after the payments resumed). Imagine my frustration when I received a delinquency notice. I made the decision to spend the missed payments since I was explicitly told they would not be recouped but added to the end of the loan and now I am being charged for those plus additional interest to avoid the loan going into default. Fidelity acknowledged to me I was given wrong information and the agent(s) is/are being counseled; however it is still my problem to resolve. Offered no reprieve and refusing to honor the instruction provided to me. I made a decision based off of what they told me and now I’m scrambling to come up with funds. I have no issue paying off my loan as agreed but am in straights now to figure out how to scrape up the missed payments I was told would be tacked on to the end of the loan.
This is my second experience with Fidelity errors costing me financially. The first involved a mistake on a tax form sent to the IRS that indicated a loan was a taxable distribution. It took me almost 2 years to resolve this and was only able to resolve after hiring an attorney at my own expense because the IRS wouldn’t acknowledge my corrected form and proceeded down the path of wage garnishment. Sure—Fidelity isn’t responsible for the IRS failure to respond but the root cause was Fidelity’s error.
I once considered Fidelity to be the best and had complete confidence in them. I am so disappointed in these two incidents and am at a loss as to how to proceed. I can’t let this go. It’s unacceptable to me that there is no recourse for participants when Fidelity screws up!
Suggested solution:
I would like to be reimbursed for the $200 attorney fee I had to pay to resolve the wage garnishment issue related to the incorrect reporting to the IRS.
I would like them to honor what I was told and resume my loan payments but not recoup missed now but rather at the end of my loan.
