Complicated student loan issue

Aug 012010
 

Hi everyone,

 

I have a rather unusual student loan issue I was hoping the board could shed some light on.  It’s a long story, so here goes:

 

I went to grad school and graduated in 2002.  I got a great job and was making plenty of money.  I won’t go into details, but things fell apart in 2005 after a back injury.  I ran up more than 100,000K in credit card debt, lost my job and ended up hospitalized for nearly 6 months in mid-2006.  Like I said, I don’t want to go into details, but I was not hospitalized for the back injury, but a debt-inducing condition that resulted afterwards…I’m sure most of you can guess what that was.

 

Anyway, I stopped paying my bills in mid-2006, including all of my student loans (I had 2 student loans with AES – 1 public and 1 private).  In 2007, after I got my life back together, I declared chapter 7 bankruptcy.  All of my credit card debt was discharged.  My lawyer told me my student loans were not, which made sense from what I knew about the new bankruptcy law.  Soon after I started working.  Once I had some money, I wanted to start repaying my student loans again since they had not been discharged.  I logged onto my AES account.  It stated that I was behind on my public loans, but that my private loans had been paid off by “bankruptcy.”  I didn’t know if this was a mistake, but I figured I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.  I started repaying the private loans only and everything was just dandy. 

 

About 6 months later, I got a letter from a woman named Jennifer Myers at “Keybank, NA” stating that I owed them for the private student loan.  She wanted me to payoff the loan over 25 years.  I called and spoke to Ms. Myers.  She explained that Keybank was the guarantor of the private student loan (AES was the distributor or something), and that once AES charged off the loan, it reverted back to Keybank.  I began sending monthly checks to Keybank’s “Recovery Payment Processing” office in Ohio (they were sending me monthly bills).  Again, everything was dandy, though I was about $300 poorer each month.

 

In May 2009 the business I was working for started to have serious problems.  My salary was cut by 33%.  I sent only $50 to Keybank that month with a letter explaining that I was having financial difficulties and that I would send them what I could.  I lost my job the next month when the business cut half it’s workforce.  I stopped sending the checks to Keybank and went on a forbearance with my public loans.  Keybank sent a couple of more bills but then they just stopped.

 

In November of 2009 I checked my credit reports.  The private student loans were listed as discharged by bankruptcy on all 3!  Since it had been about 6 months since I had sent a check to keybank, I decided to wait and see what happened. I figured they would at least threaten to sue before they actually did.  Anyway, it’s now August 2010 and I still haven’t heard anything from them.  It’s been more than a year since I’ve sent them any money. I know the statute of limitations on debt in my state is 6 years.

 

Does anyone have any knowledge as to what happens next?  Will they sue me?  Why have they waited so long and why aren’t they at least contacting me to demand money?

 

Also, isn’t it strange that my credit reports continue to recognize the loans as discharged?  Why would AES report it like this?

 

Have I gotten lucky and cheated the system, or is Keybank suddenly going to drop a lawsuit in my lap?

 

Thanks to anyone who can give me some insight.