A little over a year ago, I was thrilled to refinance my student loans at 3.5% fixed with PenFed. Thrilled. The interest and payment abatement on student loans, instituted at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, was supposed to come to an end early in the new year, and I was excited to complete my refinance while interest rates were still low. PenFed was a great lender and the application process was fairly simple.

My refinance fevor was slightly dampened after the Biden Administration extended the interest and payment abatement on student loans several more times. Had I declined to refinance my student loans, I would have saved a little more than $200.00 in interest each month. A year later, interest and payments still abated, and I would have now saved more than $2,400.00.

While I am thrilled that our society is having meaningful conversations about student loan debt relief, I have been feeling a bit bad for myself and what would appear to be my mistimed student loan refinance. At least I was until I received this email from PenFed earlier this afternoon…

It’s rare that good news follows “Important information regarding your student loan” and momentary panic set in when I read the email subject line. PenFed had been great up to this point and I was dreading whatever change was going to accompany this correspondence. However, after reading and rereading the email several times, I finally realized that this was likely the best news I had received about my student loans…ever. While the refund for the finance change overpayment is appreciated, on principle, the reduction of my interest rate “…by 0.999315% for the remainder of the loan” is a much bigger deal. A rough estimate suggests that if I only made minimum payments on my student loan for the remainder of the term, the reduction in interest rate alone would shave off seven months of payments and interest.

Now, I have not taken leave of my senses and I have every intention of returning to aggressive student loan repayment in the near future once I have stabilized my finances.

Has this ever happened to anyone else? Honestly, I don’t entirely understand why they responded in this wonderful way given that I have had my loan with them for a little over a year. Excellent customer service? Am I missing something?

UPDATE: So after Avery and my exchange in the comments, I just KNEW it was phishing. So I called PenFed at 9:10PM ET this evening, and after confirming my identity, I rambled a bit about how I thought I might have received a phishing email. The woman interrupted me mid-ramble to say, “Yes…” and I immediately took that to be confirmation that it was phishing and began to ramble some more. She then interrupted me and said, “Could you please confirm your address?” I did. She then said, “Yea, you hadn’t confirmed your address in a while so I needed you to do that. But otherwise, that was a perfectly legitimate email. Is there anything else I can help you with?” I thanked her profusely and then slinked off, 1% less indebted.