If someone told you that they would lend you $500 today if you repaid them with $5000 a year from now, would you take it? What if the repayment amount were only $2500? Would that strike you as a good deal? This may sound like an insane amount to repay on a small loan, but that, in effect, is what thousands of consumers do every day when they take out a payday loan.
Payday loans, also known as cash advance or quick cash loans, are short term loans that typically last about two weeks. In exchange for borrowing relatively small sums ranging from $100-500, the borrower pays a fee that can range from $10-40 per $100 borrowed for the two-week loan. The borrower writes a postdated check for the borrowed sum plus the fee, which the lender may cash two weeks later.
These fees may seem relatively small, but when viewed as an annual percentage rate, they actually amount to anywhere between 250-1000% per year. That’s an astronomical amount of interest in a world where a credit card loan at 25% is considered to be high. And yet, the payday loan business is thriving and there are now some 23,000 stores in America that offer some form of these cash advance...