Son is a graduate student at GW. Undergad he went to ELon. Coming from the school which “runs like butter” , it has been one mess after another working with the GW payment plan. My advice is to avoid it at all cost. We used another payment plan at Elon for years and found it user friendly and never had a problem. At GW it is very difficult to make changes to the plan once started, In the fall for 3 months the plan paid GW and then GW promptly refunded my son that amount. Crazy. This morning my son could not register for class because of a supposed financial hold. The last payment plan payment is scheduled to come out of our checking account tomorrow. UGHH!!! Never Again.
I’m sorry to hear about your negative experience with the payment plan. I had slightly similar experiences when I was under the payment plan as well (having a financial hold on my account near registration times). All I had to do, however, was to speak with the department that had the hold (Student Accounts, I think?) and explained why there was a current balance due. They quickly removed the hold each time.
While it’s not idea, there IS a work-around for it. I suppose it’s just an automatically-applied hold.