Doctor arrested for $180,000 worth of student loan debt<\/p>\n
Checkpoint<\/p>\n
A student loan lawyer is warning people not to put their “head in the sand” when it comes to paying a student loan while overseas.<\/p>\n
Last month a doctor was arrested at Wellington airport before trying to fly home to Australia due to defaulting on a decades-old student loan.<\/p>\n
With penalties, the loan had ballooned to about $180,000. The doctor’s brother owes more than $300,000.<\/p>\n
Almost 114,000 people living overseas have student loans, and almost 70 percent of them are in default; owing about $2.5 billion.<\/p>\n
The doctor’s lawyer, Dave Ananth, told Checkpoint a lot of people come to him because their circumstances change and they experience issues when travelling.<\/p>\n
“They thought ok, we’ll come back to the student loan a little when things settle down – that never happens and then after 15, 20 years you get a massive bill from IRD.”<\/p>\n
The former IRD prosecutor turned student loan lawyer had dealt with a few hundred cases over the last few years and said he didn’t feel there was an attitude that people just did not want to pay.<\/p>\n
“None of them have said look I’m not paying my student loan, it’s a lot of remorse… things didn’t work out.”<\/p>\n
He said illness, family break ups, divorces and loss of job opportunities often led to student loan debt piling up.<\/p>\n
Ananth said he was actively getting calls from people who wanted to sort their student loan out.<\/p>\n
He explained that loans overseas could quickly snowball and build up with changing interest rates and penalties.<\/p>\n
“As of April 1st, this year – every year the interest changes – it’s 5.6 percent. If you don’t pay that, there’s penalties of 9.6 (percent), that’s compounded daily.”<\/p>\n
The more a student loan was ignored the more it compounded, he said, and after about 20 years a $30,000 loan can turn into $120,000.<\/p>\n
Ananth said there was some flexibility with provisions under the Student Loan Scheme Act where people can look at remissions of, not all, but some, penalties.<\/p>\n
“There are provisions, but what I’m saying is engage.<\/p>\n
“Ultimately, I think it’s a student loan debt, it’s taxpayer funded, you’ve got to pay it back.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Doctor arrested for $180,000 worth of student loan debt Checkpoint A student loan lawyer is warning people not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":496274,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-496273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/496274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}