FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE

Financial hardship is when someone is having trouble meeting repayments for their loans or other debt. This may be a result of an unexpected change in circumstances (such as illness or injury, loss of income or being affected by a natural disaster). Many people will experience financial hardship during their lives.

If you’re struggling to make repayments on any of your loans or have experienced an unexpected change to your circumstances that might impact your ability to make your repayments, please get in touch with us about hardship assistance as soon as possible.

For assistance

• Contact your local Relationship Manager , or email to Medfin Customer Support 
• Submit an Online Enquiry, alternatively email us 
• Call Medfin Collections on 1300 430 452 (available on regular business days, 9:00am – 5:00pm, NSW EST)

Once you’ve contacted us for financial hardship assistance we may require further information from you to consider your request. Otherwise, we’ll be in touch with you again to either confirm we’ve agreed to provide a financial hardship arrangement or to discuss other options if they’re more appropriate for your circumstances.

Please note:

In some cases, a financial hardship arrangement may not be appropriate for your circumstances. We’ll write to you to let you know of our decision. We’ll be available to talk to you about other options.

• Financial hardship arrangements don’t provide you with money. If you need help with your finances (unrelated to hardship), contact your local Relationship Manager.
• If you want to discuss an agreed arrangement or have any concerns about meeting an agreed arrangement, please reach out to our team.

We’ll typically assess your request based on the information you’ve provided us within five business days.

Sometimes we can assess a hardship assistance request without calling you. In other cases, we may need to speak with you to discuss the application before we can make our decision.

Sometimes we may need additional information from you, which may mean we aren’t able to fully assess your application until we’ve received the required information.

Once a decision by Medfin has been made on your request, you (and any joint account holders) will receive a notice to your nominated email address or postal address of the outcome.

While we can help you with your Medfin facilities, we can’t help with other bills or expenses. If you need assistance with payments for your utilities like electricity, water, or mobile phone, please reach out to those service providers and ask for assistance.

At times like these, it’s important to take care of your health and wellbeing. Consider whether it would help you or a loved one to speak with Beyond Blue, or Lifeline. We also support our customers with access to free, independent, and confidential counselling for all aspects of life – physical, mental, social, professional and financial. You can call 1300 574 759 to make an appointment with a TELUS Health Clinician.

If we agree to a financial hardship arrangement with you, direct debit and periodical payments may be impacted.

In some cases, we may be able to provide your requested financial hardship assistance immediately without contacting you. We’ll send you a notification in writing, but this may take up to seven business days. In these circumstances there will be the following impacts on your facilities affected by the hardship assistance:

If you have a direct debit for your repayments, we’ll pause it during the hardship assistance period. If you’re agreeing to a payment arrangement, we’ll enter a temporary direct debit to make those payments while you have the arrangement. When your arrangement ends, your normal direct debit and periodical payments will resume.

If you have redraw available on your facility your ability to access this may be restricted. Please contact us to discuss access to redraw.

A financial hardship arrangement is an agreement between you and your lender to adjust your repayment obligations when something has happened that has affected your ability to pay them.

There are two types of financial hardship arrangements:

• Temporary financial hardship arrangement which reduces or defers regular repayments for a period of time, e.g. reduced payments for a couple of months or a deferral.
• Variation financial hardship arrangement which changes the terms of the loan, e.g. in some cases, we may allow any overdue amount to be paid off over the remaining term of the loan.

A financial hardship arrangement is a way to make it easier for you to manage your payments. When you agree to a financial hardship arrangement (also known as a hardship support arrangement) with a credit provider, it shows other credit providers that you’ve taken steps to take control of your financial situation and you’re working with the credit provider to get back on track.

We’re required to report the information to credit reporting bodies for Medfin Personal Loan. The information on your credit report about your hardship arrangement is known as Financial Hardship Information (FHI).

Although we’re required to report any financial hardship arrangements you have with us, we’ll never report the reason you asked for hardship support. Your financial hardship information can’t be used to calculate your credit score or as the sole reason a credit provider declines a credit application. Financial Hardship Information stays on your credit report for 12 months after the arrangement ends.

Provided that you make the payments required during your support arrangement (if any), your credit report will show that a hardship arrangement was in place and that you met the terms of that arrangement. This will help improve your credit score. If you can’t pay on time, missed payments will show on your credit report as the number of months you’re overdue and can lower your credit score.

We must consider all requests for financial hardship assistance, however, we aren’t obliged to agree to enter into financial hardship arrangements. If you ask for financial hardship assistance, we’ll consider your circumstances to work out what sort of support is suitable for your circumstances. It will depend on Medfin’s assessment of your financial circumstances and why your repayments are overdue.

If we don’t agree to provide a financial hardship arrangement, we’ll explain why in writing. If you don’t agree or feel our decision is not reasonable and fair, you can lodge a complaint with Medfin or with the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA).

Getting a hardship financial arrangement is better than missing payments with no arrangement in place. Importantly, financial hardship arrangements can provide some breathing space you may need during a difficult time and prevent your credit account(s) going into default.

A financial hardship arrangement can help protect your credit report and credit score while you recover from your financial difficulty. It does this by changing your payment obligations to make it easier for you to meet them, and your payments will be reported as up-to-date to the credit reporting bodies as long as you make the adjusted payments on time and your credit report will also show that you’ve worked with us to get through your current financial difficulty.

When you agree to a financial hardship arrangement with a lender, it also shows other lenders that you have taken steps to take control of your financial situation and that you are working with the lender to get back on your feet.

Seeking or agreeing to hardship assistance doesn’t exclude you from applying for credit in the future.

If you take no action, your credit report and credit score can be negatively impacted and affect your borrowing capacity in the future. Credit reporting bodies don’t use financial hardship information to calculate your score, however, missed repayments do impact your credit score.

Please note: During most hardship arrangements, interest, fees and charges continue to be charged and arrears continue to increase. We’ll discuss options about what to do with the arrears at the end of your hardship arrangement, but it’s important to keep paying what you can towards your debt.

If you apply for a new credit account (such as credit card or loan), a credit provider will need to check whether you can afford the repayments. You may be asked for some additional information about your finances.

To assess your creditworthiness for future credit applications, credit providers may use your credit report to check the credit accounts you have, your Repayment History Information and whether a default has been reported.