How WeMoney helped Sam consolidate four loans and finally take time to heal

• Member: Sam, 35, New South Wales
• Before WeMoney: Juggling repayments across four different lenders while facing her eighth surgery for an old workplace injury, with no way to fund the proper recovery time her doctors were telling her to take
• What she did: Used WeMoney's loan matching tool to compare lenders without it affecting her credit score, after the big banks turned her down despite a clean repayment record
• How WeMoney helped: Matched her with OurMoneyMarket, which consolidated her existing debts into one loan and added enough extra to get her through the time off
• Her experience: Relieved by the approval and impressed that OurMoneyMarket closed out her old accounts for her, though she felt the lender's interest rate should have been shown more clearly before she committed
• After WeMoney: One repayment instead of four, roughly $100 better off each payday even on reduced income, and checking her credit score monthly as part of the routine
• Next: Paying the loan down faster once she's back on full pay

Before WeMoney

Sam is 35, lives in New South Wales, and is raising two teenage children on her own. She keeps a close eye on her money every payday and has been through several rounds of trying to budget, which she says has only gotten harder as prices keep rising.

Years earlier, Sam had a workplace injury that has needed a string of surgeries since. By the time she came to WeMoney, she was facing her eighth. Each time before, she had pushed herself to return to work faster than she should have, because her pay dropped once she was on workers' compensation for too long, and she was supporting three people on one income. This time, her surgeon, her GP and everyone else around her told her she could not rush it. "I was like, well, you know, in theory that's fantastic, but I don't have the funds to be able to get me through that."

She was already repaying four different lenders, and the thought of consolidating that debt and adding enough on top to cover the income gap sent her, in her words, into "a bit of a meltdown." What she needed, she says, was enough "to kind of coast through that period so I could actually take care of myself properly for once." She tried the bigger banks first. Despite having no defaults and a record of paying everything on time, she felt turned away as too much of a risk. "I literally want to close all of these loans, and you're not giving me money."

How she found us

WeMoney came up as an ad on Sam's Instagram feed. "I think it may have been the caption in the way it was portrayed in terms of being able to track your budget and see where your money was going." She had tried a budgeting app once before that required entering every transaction by hand, which she found tedious, so linking her accounts automatically stood out. So did the security messaging. "I really liked the security aspect of things... the levels of security that you advertise was definitely a major selling point, because there's big dramas these days with being scammed and your stuff being lost."

She downloaded the app and, on a stressed-out Saturday at home, found the personal loan section. "I literally did that on a Saturday. I was just sitting at home, absolutely stressed about what I was going to do, and I'd gone onto that section, entered all my details, and it kind of went from there."

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How WeMoney helped

What mattered most to Sam was that checking her options through WeMoney did not affect her credit score, unlike applying directly with a lender and risking another knock-back. "The fact that I had been knocked back from the big lenders, and the fact that you guys have that section where you can put in that information and it doesn't affect your credit score, and that matches you with lenders rather than you trying to find a lender, putting in an application, possibly being denied and screwing up your credit score... that is probably what sold me the most."

She applied for around $40,000, enough to fold her existing debts together and add the cushion she needed to get through her recovery. WeMoney matched her with OurMoneyMarket, and she says the handoff from WeMoney's form to the lender's own application was smooth. "Everything was actually amazing. How easy it ran was awesome. Like there was no errors or anything." As with every WeMoney match, OurMoneyMarket remained responsible for assessing and approving the loan, setting its terms, and handling settlement; WeMoney's role was to show Sam her matched options and let her compare them before she decided to go ahead.

Sam was upfront about one part of the process she found frustrating: WeMoney's matching shows which lender she has the best chance of approval with, but doesn't show the indicative interest rate until after the lender's own paperwork is done. She recalls ending up on around 14.99 percent with OurMoneyMarket, without knowing that figure going in. "There's not really a lot of transparency around what your interest rate would be." She feels that matters most for people under pressure who just want an answer: "If the app's flagging that OMM is who I have the highest chance with, of course you're going to go with them." In her view, showing the highest-chance option ahead of the rate risks steering people who are desperate toward it regardless of cost. "I think that's a bit unethical to a degree. That's my opinion."

After WeMoney

When the approval came through, after being turned down elsewhere, Sam says the relief was immediate. "I was so bloody relieved. Honestly, so relieved. It took a lot of stress off my plate." She was also glad OurMoneyMarket handled the admin of closing her old accounts rather than leaving it to her. "OMM were amazing. They pretty much streamlined everything, they contacted who to close off my other accounts and everything... They did it all for me, which I thought was awesome." The one delay in the process was her existing car loan provider being slow to send paperwork, which she's clear had nothing to do with WeMoney or OurMoneyMarket.

Her loan settled in March 2026. Consolidating four separate repayments into one, plus the extra she'd borrowed to cover her reduced income, worked out better than she expected. "When I sat down and worked it out, for me to have the extra money that I did along with combining all my loans, I was still $100 better off." Once she's back on full pay, she plans to put that difference toward paying the loan down faster.

Sam's favourite part of the app has turned out to be the monthly credit score tracking. "I think that's probably my favorite part of the entire app... that's an incentive driver for me to make sure that everything's paid on time and everything, just to watch that number go up." By her recollection, her score was around 715 when she first joined, and dipped a little once the new loan came through, which she expected.

She has kept some honest feedback too. She found the home screen cluttered, "very, very messy," and ran into accounts, including Afterpay, that wouldn't link despite the app's marketing suggesting they could. Balances can also be slow to refresh after a change. She has stayed on the free version rather than upgrading to Pro, partly because building custom budget categories is a paid feature, and partly on principle. "When you're trying to save money and you're budgeting and you're using an app to help you with that, you don't really want to be paying more money."

Thinking about consolidating your own debts?

Sam's story is a reminder that folding several debts into one loan, alongside genuine income pressure, can free up more room than the numbers first suggest, but it isn't automatic and it isn't the same for everyone. A lower repayment doesn't always mean a lower total cost: stretching a debt over a longer term can mean paying more interest overall, so it's worth comparing the full picture, not just the monthly figure. If you want to see what consolidating could look like for your own situation, WeMoney's free [[calculator-sm]] is a good place to start.

Sam's figures, rate and experience are her individual experience. Eligibility and outcomes vary by member and lender, and her story is not a promise that another person will receive the same result.

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