Everything you need to know about loans—types, interest rates, repayment options, and tips to borrow wisely while avoiding debt traps.
Attorney General Josh Stein was granted a temporary restraining order against the Miami, Fla.-based online payday lender Approved Financial, Inc. in a case he filed on May 15, 2019. The case alleges illegal, unlicensed lending practices, usury, unlawful debt collection, and unfair and deceptive practices. The temporary restraining order, entered by Superior Court Judge Stephen …
Let’s just hope more payday lenders don’t adopt the practices of the Far East Credit Company. Allegedly lenders in China was requesting nude pictures of female borrowers as collateral. A leak of images “exposed” 167 borrowers so far. The loans apparently began through Jiedaibao, a peer-to-peer lending platform in China. The request for nudes as …
Question: Dear Steve, My wife and I moved to Las Vegas, NV. two years ago we fell into the payday loan and installment loans from plain green, rapid cash, and opp loans. We stopped making payments because we were going to end up homeless. We owe a total of about 7,000. We are moving to …
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which is part of the U.S. Department of Treasury, has taken a big step forward in encouraging the lenders they supervise to feel free to get into the payday loan business. More importantly the lenders are encouraged to lend to folks they otherwise would not have …
Pope Francis once called usury, the practice of lending money at unreasonably high interest rates, a “dramatic social ill.” The supreme pontiff went on to say, “when a family has nothing to eat because it has to make payments to usurers, this is not Christian, it is not human.” Although impious and inhumane, predatory lenders …
Question: Dear Steve, I took out a title loan on my car for emergency cash. That loan is at 116% interest. Then a few months later I applied, in person at a different lender, for an installment loan. That loan turned out to be a title loan on the same car. The stupid thing is, …
Question: Dear Steve, Doing debt settlement but not making it … trapped by flex loan I’m into my second year of a debt settlement program with ClearOne Advantage. It was going fine until they started asking for additional payments to settle individual loans. It got to be so much, I’ve been getting local and online …
Question: Dear Steve, I took out a title loan due to an emergency about 1.5 years ago. I’m a single mom, newly divorced trying to make ends meet while bettering our lives. Unfortunately, in August 2016 I became unemployed. I contacted the finance company and explain the situation and they reminded me that I signed …
The Federal Trade Commission has obtained a $4.1 million judgment and a ban on handling certain sensitive financial information about consumer debts against an operation that sold lists of fake payday loan debts to debt collectors. A federal court issued a default judgment granting what the FTC sought in a complaint filed in 2016. The …
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) today finalized a rule that is aimed at stopping payday debt traps by requiring lenders to determine upfront whether people can afford to repay their loans. These strong, common-sense protections cover loans that require consumers to repay all or most of the debt at once, including payday loans, auto …