I want to share with you guys on my DCP experience.
I submitted my application on Wednesday, and it was approved two days later.
Before I received news on the approval, I have already contacted the sales that morning to request to put my application on hold. Because after talking to my friend about this plan, I realised she did not mention to me things like how I will not be able to take up a loan in future until I have cleared a certain sum of money, and how it will affect my credit ratings and all.
I didn't research on this plan before meeting the sales officer up, and I am not a financial-savvy person to begin with. I am not having any difficulties in paying off my loan, so she took another approach by convincing me that it is so much easier and convenient to consolidate all my loans into one account. So as I have not reached the 12x mark, the sales officer told me to get a cash advance from my CC, and even encourage me to draw extra for standby because money would be tight afterwards. To which, I agreed and proceeded.
I'm a born scatterbrain, and I tend to realise what's happening only after a long while.
My bank loans were only 31K (if I were to pay off after the five year tenure), and my CC (including the cash advance I was asked to take) was about 9K. Which means to say that after paying off my loans with interest and all, I would only have to pay a total of 34+K for my bank loan, and I was going to pay off my CC bills with my bonus next month. I wasn't told, and did not occur to me to ask how much I would be paying at the end of my DCP tenure (which is 53+K by the way). It doesn't make sense.
When the sales officer finally got back to me, she told me things like she is on leave, and can't help me with it until she returns on Monday. But when I called her office to see if anyone could help me with it, I was transferred back to her. And she told me she's worried about my case, so she went back to office to settle it. Maybe she was genuinely concern, but I am skeptical about people in the sales industry, especially when her boss called me up a couple of minutes after we hang up, to tell me my application has been approved.
So now in order to cancel this DCP plan, I have to pay a 5% cancellation fee, which is about 2.1K. Expensive lesson learnt, but beats having to pay an additional 10K interest.