NT's other student loan (NOT the one that hasn't yet registered a couple payments they received 6 months ago) has been messing up too.

In December they sent us a late-payment notice and I discovered they hadn't added his most recent amount borrowed to the autopay for some reason. I got them to promise to add it to autopay and to apply the late fee to principal.

Then a few days ago, we got a late-payment notice; they had never added the loan to autopay as promised, and were once again charging us a $5 late fee.

I emailed and explained the situation, asked them to add it to autopay for real this time, and requested they refund the late fee again since it still wasn't our fault. They replied to say OK to all, but that I had to manually pay the late amount because they couldn't retroactively collect it via autopay.

I immediately did so. Today the amount I paid was deducted from checking -- twice! Sigh. I went onto the loan account and at least it was deducted twice. So I'm not going to argue, since the extra payment -- plus the late fee amount -- went toward principal.

So, unexpectedly, that's $24 more paid to student loans. Now we're at $1911 down, $87 to go on our March goal.

***

Now for the REALLY good news. I touched base with our lawyer to let him know the birth is coming up soon and to see when he wants to find about about it so he can start the adoption process. In the secretary's reply, she also mentioned she'd be sending us a retainer agreement soon, and gave us two options for payment:

-- A $3500 flat fee, nonrefundable, that would cover all the lawyer fees, and a $1000 refundable retainer to cover any court costs that might arise

-- A $3500 refundable retainer that would be applied to lawyer and court fees. The catch is that if the hourly lawyer fees + court costs ended up being higher than $3500, we would have to add to the retainer and pay the full amount. It could end up being less than $3500 or a great deal more, depending on how things went.

We opted for the first payment plan, because we're doing two unusual (third-parent) adoptions, so we feel complications (and thus lawyer fees) could easily crop up.

Since I saved up enough money to cover the high end of his very rough estimate during his initial consultation with us, I actually had $6500 set aside. Now that it looks like we'll get both adoptions for under $4500, I'm sending the extra $2000 straight to student loan debt.

I could put it in the EF, since I'm always grousing about being behind on that goal. But the simple truth is, having student loan debt bugs me more than not meeting my EF goals. I know we'll get there eventually with the EF, even if it's not this year. We've got over 3 months' expenses saved already, so it's not like we're unprotected should emergencies arise.

So woo hoo! The payment should hit the account in a couple of days!