Hey,
So I ended up being really stupid with money and am paying too much rent/so on. I know now for a fact that I will not be able to pay off quite a bit of my tuition by the time school is over this year. What does that mean? If I cant pay it off will I not be able to enrol in classes for next fall? Will my new tuition fees be put on top of that if I do get to stay and will that mean that I will then be paying interest on the whole lot of it?
Aside from that, say I were to take a year off to try and pay off my tuition from this year. I know that my student loans start to need to be payed off within 6 months of the last day of my enrolment, so if I do decide to come back after my year off, does that mean I will still have to be paying off my students loans (as it would have been more than 6 months from the end of this year) even though Id be back in school? Or would the payments stop?
SO STRESSED!!
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Hey there,
Alright, I wanna start off by saying that the documents I’m going to link to use a lot of terminology that can sound TERRIFYING if you don’t know what the terms mean. They throw around words like “sanctions” and “penalty” like they’re about to excommunicate* a nation.
I understand that trying to pay for tuition when you can’t is super stressful (trust me, I break down whenever I see the train fare price on my Presto card). BUT I wanna help you, not add to your panic. What I’m saying is I don’t need you STRESSING OUT, K? Bottom line is: you and the school both want the same thing, which is for the tuition to be paid. That means you can work together to find a solution.
Onto some policy-mongering:
Uoft has a variety of ways to deal with people who haven’t paid tuition, which you can read about in more detail here. To sum it up, if you haven’t deferred or made your payment after November 15th, a service charge will start to be applied, which is basically interest on your tuition. If it still hasn’t been paid in full by April 30th, your outstanding fees will eventually be transferred to a an “external collections agency,” which will then take over the job of collecting your debt (you can take a look at the exact schedule of that transfer here). They may also impose academic sanctions, which can include anything from stopping you from requesting a transcript to refusing you future registration, as well as financial holds starting May 1st. That’s the condensed version of it, but I’d really recommend you read the pages I’ve linked to to understand all those things better.
Depending on how much you owe, it might be a good idea to take a year off and focus on paying the school back. 6 months after you leave school, you would have to start making OSAP payments (they would stop as soon as you re-enrolled into school), but it may be possible to negotiate lower payments or even the preserving of interest-free status with the national student loans centre. I don’t know enough about the situation to be able to recommend taking a year off one way or the other, but what I would do is go to your college registrar’s office to talk about your specific situation, and you guys can figure out the best thing to do from here.
I know this is a tough time. I know school is hard enough as it is without dealing with all these financial shenanigans. I know tuition rates in this country are absolutely SOUL-SUCKING. Believe me, I cannot empathize more; but it’s not impossible. So listen to some meditative music in your underwear and then go out and calmly speak with people who can help you sort out the problem. It’s gonna be fine.
Good luck!
aska
*excommunicate is not the word I’m looking for. Does anyone know the word for when a nation is being bad and all the other countries, like, say they don’t approve of what it’s doing or whatever? Hmm. You can tell I’m not a Geography student.