Pay Day Loans

Many Americans today find themselves living paycheck to pay check, struggling to provide for themselves or their family.  This is when payday loans come in.  The bad credit, no credit, instant approval, money now “institutions” are taking advantage of thousands.  A study found that the APR for these debts could be as high as 391%  (this was the lowest number I found, other sites claimed it could be as high as 500-1000%).

Normally I am not for government regulation of any kind, but these people are crooks.  They take advantage of people who don’t know anything about how loans work, let alone APR, hidden fees, rollovers, etc.  All these people know is that they need to some extra cash to pay rent or maybe even buy their children Christmas gifts.

Texas is one of 16 states that do not cap these payday loans.  The Pew Charitable Trust classified Texas as one of 28 permissive states when it comes to pay day loan regulation and also found that 8% of all Texans use pay day loans, opposed to the national average of 5.5%.  Also, a $10-15 fee per $100 borrowed is the national average.  In Texas this fee is an average of $23.

I know that people make the choice to borrow from the places, but it is usually not because they want to, and there is a lot of fine print that hardly makes sense when you read it.  There is a reason there are more payday loans than McDonalds and Whataburger in Texas, and its not because they want to help people through a hard time.