BHG Financial review: Personal loan scam 5

While they may appear legit on paper, this is a predatory lending company that takes advantage of naive physicians with little financial sense.

I got a loan of $30, 000 with 16% APR from BHG at the end of my fellowship year. I was having trouble finding jobs due to COVID, and I had built up a significant amount of credit card debt, and I was desperate. I have learned my lesson since then. Here are the reasons why BHG is a predatory lending company:

(1) Exorbitant fees. I got a loan of $30, 000, and the document fees alone were $4500. That's 15% of the loan.
(2) Long lockout periods where you cannot pay off the loan. Initially they offered me a contract with a lockout period of 36 months. When I hesitated, they quickly negotiated down to 12 months.
(3) After a year of making payments, they started aggressively contacting me via phone calls, texts, and emails, encouraging me to re-finance. Even when I asked them to stop, they kept contacting me every few months asking me if I needed more money. When I said no, they offered to refinance my existing loan. This is a classic predatory lender tactic. They said that since my salary and credit scores had gone up, they would be able to give me a better deal. This "better deal" was a new loan of $33, 000 to cover my remaining $27, 000 balance + $6000 in new document fees (these are in addition to the $4500 I paid last year) + a renewed lockout period of 12 months (now that I was outside of my lockout period), at a slightly reduced 12.5% APR.
(4) When I hesitated (rightly so as this was a truly awful deal), the guy who called me with the offer kept calling me, saying things like "we have to act fast to lock in this lower interest rate" and "If you sign within the next 2 hours we can get you the reduced rate otherwise there's no guarantee" and things like that, trying to pressure me to sign quickly.
(5) At this point I had finally learned my lesson and declined this horrible refinance offer, and I was able to find another bank that was willing to lend me the same amount of money at less than HALF of the interest rate, with 1/10th of the fees that BHG charged.
(6) When I tried to pay off my loan early, even though I was now past the 12-month lockout period, they still said my contact was "non-cancellable," but that they would be "willing to accept a payoff" at a sum that was $400 higher than my remaining loan amount. So even though I was outside of my lockout period, they STILL charged me a penalty for paying off earlier. At this point I was so desperate to be done with them that I paid the extra $400 to get out of their claws.
(7) They don't report to credit bureaus, which is incredibly sketchy, and they also don't have a mobile banking website, so it is very hard to keep track of how much you owe, and it is hard to make additional payments because the only way to do this is by calling them. If you email them they will send you a document that has your payment schedule, but this is just a word document, and if you make additional payments then you have to request a new document each time to get a sense of how much loan you have left. I believe this is intentional.

Overall, I believe that BHG is a predatory loan company that exploits physicians in training. Stay away.