Customer ReviewsforEarnest

*** BEWARE ***. DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY ************ is part of Navient. I have a private student loan that I wanted to refinance, since I have a much better credit score and have NO OTHER DEBT other than this private loan. Which i have been paying MORE THAN MINIMUM due each month for the last two years! My original interest rate was 9% and I was offered ( prequalified for) an interest rate just below 6%. So, you authorize them to pull your credit and THEN they require a ton of various paperwork, all financial account records, 2 years of past tax returns. All were provide to them within 24 hours. I was denied because they said my debt to income ratio was to highmeanwhile they have proof that i have enough liquid cash to pay the loan four times overI have NO monthly expenses other than my day to day ( no mortgage, no car payments). Its clear that, as a company they will make more money to keep me at a 9% interest rate rather than a less than 6% interest rate. So now I am left with a credit pull on my credit report with no positive outcome.

They lie. There is a fee, the interest is high and the other thing. They start billing you you right on your loan. Now my son dropped out of college because it is going to be too much to work and pay off his loan while trying to study for college.

They are liars and manipulators! I recently fell on hard times and can no longer make my monthly payments. I had reached out previously to the company and was connected with an agent named ***** who told me that I could un-enroll from the auto pay and pay when I have the money without any repercussions. Well that was a lie, because months later, I reach out to try to lower the payment because once again the payment is too high and they are refusing to help me because I was late on that ONE payment by a few days. I never missed a payment before or since, and at the end of the day I DO NOT HAVE THE MEANS TO PAY THE LOAN. So now Im in a tough place where I cant pay and it will only backfire because these people want to mislead their customers and not offer any help when they come on hard times. I dont even care about the greater consequences anymore, I just wont pay the loan until I can find a more reasonable student loan servicer because is stupid and unfair. Please spare yourself from this company!!!

If I could give 0 stars, I would. I refinanced and had a great rate - but after three months, my account still had not been finalized, resulting in me missing 3 months of payments. It was not until I called did they actually realize I had not been paying on my loan due to their mistake. In 2022, I refinanced again and attempted to set up biweekly payments. But Earnest had an issue on their end again, making my April payment late (correct card info). This made my biweekly payments void, and I had to set up the payments all over again since you can't set up biweekly payments set up for the month you're in. In May, I was told automatic payments would not begin until June, but Earnest took out a payment, on top of me making one manually. I noticed it 3 days after it was posted and immediately requested a refund. Being told Memorial Day would hold up the refund, I was expected to receive it in about 10 business days. I have still not received the refund. I have called on 3 separate occasions, each time being told that it was on the way. Calling today, I was told when a refund request is made, there is a ticket submitted so staff can track it. But my refund request was never officially made and there was no ticket. This company is the worst and has wasted so much of my time and money. Absolutely ridiculous and I highly recommend staying away from Earnest.

While Earnest has great features such as biweekly payment, some of their processes are egregious from a customer service perspective. I refinanced a student loan with them in 2020 at a fixed interest rate. Apparently, there were errors and they made adjustments in my favor, both to interest and principal, and lowered my fixed interest rate by one basis point. However, when I asked to see the back-up to better understand why the adjustments were made, the response was we have audited the calculations and had a separate team confirm there were no errors, but we cannot share that information with you as a matter of company policy. To me, that makes zero sense. If you made the error in the first place (albeit I wouldve never known about the error otherwise), then you should be more than willing to show me what, how and why you arrived at the adjustments. Big banks do the same with respect to mortgages. I couldnt stand for this as a matter of principle and refinanced with SoFi.

I tried to check my rates on Earnest on two separate occasions spanning months apart. Both times I was met with issues regarding their website. I had already made sure before contacting Earnest that I tried both Chrome and Firefox with a cleared cache and no add on such as ad blockers or tracking blockers. Being that I am a software engineer, I decided to look into the browser web developer tools and see the *** requests coming through. I saw that every time I tried to check my rates I was being blocked by their *** and the returned error was a 429 too many requests. After explaining to the representative that rate-limiting is a technical term for a server blocking requests for various reasons and that it had nothing to do with me checking my possible interest rates, he replied saying that he thought it was my browser that I was using and that I should use chrome. So I hopped on two separate browsers, chrome and firefox and the same issue happened. I took pictures of the network tab and of the requests being blocked including all the headers, the status code, and the *** of where it was going (api.earnest.com/refresh-rate/check). Then a few days after I sent the email showing proof that it was an issue with rate-limiting (usually rate-limits stop after a certain amount of time and this one did not), they emailed me back and said they found nothing wrong on their end and insisted it was my browser and that I should use chrome on a home network.... First, I literally sent you a picture of a network request in chrome that shows that its chrome in the headers. Second, he quoted home network which means he has no clue what the difference is between a home network or others. whois lookup: this is a block originating from cloudfare and you can clearly see that in the headers of the request. I found out that Earnest uses ghand.net to host their site so they probably have no clue its happening. Regardless, the response from this company is abysmal. Do not use Earnest!

Earnest does not offer the lowest rates as advertised. I received a much better rate on Credible. Their refinance rate was more than my current student loan rate despite my financial situation improving significantly!

Easy to make extra payment and I know exactly what day money is leaving my account. I was able to refinance and take my parents off my loan within 6 months of graduating. Hoping to refinance again for a much lower rate.

I refinanced to save 2% on my current earnest loan. I paid ahead 3 months becauze I was having a baby and didnt want to deal with it. Each time I called, they told me my due date would be advanced I had to wait for my Cycle to close. Cycle closed, still owed. Called, they said its bc I cant pay ahead because I signed up for auto pay; even tho when I signed up for auto pay it said my option was to advance my due date. Earnest says I owe. Thank you earnest for making it so I am short $3k during my maternity leave during a pandemic!!

Horrible experience with this company. After submitting an application I was bombarded with inaccurate and threatening communications through text and email. When I tried to respond or ask questions I never received answers. They said my credit would be impacted on several occassions. I was already nervous about refinancing my loans and Earnest has now put me into a state of fear.