So – you’ve ventured away on the big OE, and it’s looking like you won’t be heading back to New Zealand any time soon. But the student loan still looms, and your interest free grace period has run out, so it’s time to knock it out. But what’s the best way to send NZ student loan repayments from overseas?
As you’ve probably discovered at this point, the normal route of sending bank transfers or using a service like Paypal mean that not only are you paying off your loan, plus the interest – you’re also paying an extra 10% or so on top of it all in bank transfer fees. Not to mention, you’re often charged not only by your local bank when you send the money – you get charged another fee when the money arrives at the other end.
That doesn’t exactly make it easy to get that debt paid off ASAP. Luckily, there’s a better way to get things done that can help you get out from under the student loan rain clouds a lot faster.
OrbitRemit was started by Kiwis, so we understand this problem on a personal level. We’ve developed our system to be ideal for Kiwi expats who need to send bill payments home. In fact, we’ve come up with a way you can pay the IRD from overseas – without paying any international transfer fees.
Here’s how you can easily use our service to send student loan repayments to the IRD without incurring massive bank fees in the process.
1. Create your OrbitRemit account.
2. Create a payment instruction.
3. Transfer your student loan repayment to the local OrbitRemit account in the country where you currently live.
4. Once it comes through to us, we then transfer the money to the IRD on your behalf.
What’s the catch? How can it be free?
Our service works on the same principle as, say, Amazon. Amazon was a huge success because it recognized that customers can be given a better price when the business doesn’t have to cover a bunch of unnecessary costs – like having a physical store. By moving book sales online, Amazon revolutionized the way people buy books (and read them – look at the Kindle) and brought the costs down in the process.
We’re doing the same thing for online money transfers. We don’t have to lease space on Queen Street next to BNZ and National Bank, which means you don’t end up paying our rent through huge fees (which is exactly what you’re doing when you pay a 10% fee on an international transfer through your bank).
In the case of student loan repayment transfers, we make our bit on the currency exchange (and even then our rates are much more fair and transparent than what you’d typically get from a bank). It’s because of this low cost, online model that we can help expat Kiwis pay off their loans from abroad, without having to charge transfer fees.
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