Payday Loan Problems

Paul_london_2

Good evening,

I was just wondering if anyone knows of an organisation / website which gives advice specifically to people who are have got caught up in the payday loan cycle?

I myself have had numerous problems with payday loan companies and still do, i have spent many sleepless nights searching the internet but have found nothing other than the usual debt free advice sites such as the cccs and payplan and of course the odd payday loan thread on here.

I am considering putting together a website myself although i have no experience just as a place for people to offer advice on payday loans would there be much demand for this? Any help or pointers in the direction of a site which caters for this type of problems please let me know.

Regards

Paul

saltnvinegar

Hi Paul

TBH payday loans are no different from loans from any other creditor in terms of how they should be dealt with when in a position of debt.

However because of the way they operate in terms of how they get their money back, and ensure they are top of the pecking order of your creditors in getting their money, there are steps that have to be taken to prevent this.

If you've not seen my thread on this issue you can find it here:

Dealing with Payday Loan Companies

Please note the advice I provided in this thread is not a route to be taken lightly, but a method of ensuring that payday loan companies can then be dealt with fairly with other creditors in a debt management situation.

I'm not sure if a website dedicated to payday loans would necessarily help as the majority of people who take them out and then get into trouble tend to have other debt as well.

I believe its tackling the overall debt position thats necessary, not just focusing on the payday loan element.

Best

SnV

Paul_london_2

Many thanks for the link to your thread, i hadn't really thought about it like that but yes the main reason for me taking out payday loans was the fact i was already in debt and it was a last resort.....

I have found myself in a real problem with the payday loans i have 10!!!!!!!!!!:eek:! luckily i can repay 8 this month without having to roll them over or re loan next month. Quickquid the 9th loan have been very helpful and offered to freeze interest and take repayments over a three month period all this without having to default or miss a payment.

The thorn in my side at the moment is the 10th, PaydayUK.

Do you or anyone else have any experience with them, i contacted them to advise i was having difficulties and the extent of my debt problems. They swiftly and rather unhelpfully froze my account so that i could not request to roll over the loan or pay slightly more than the minimum and slowly clear it over the next 4 months as i had planned to do. Therefore they are saying i must repay the full amount at the end of the month (£737.50) which due to the other 9 loans is completely impossible. I know i borrowed the money and need to repay this but i feel they have almost forced me to default, whereas Quickquid were very helpful.

Has anyone had any dealings with PaydayUK and can offer any advice as to what happens once the payment has not been made?

Will they call me at work 100's of times a day?
Will they accept a payment plan?
Will they issue a default?

My plan is to call them at 9am the day the payment is due and try and speak to their collections department and request some kind of repayment plan.

Any advice would be helpful

eyeopener2

Oooh, PaydayUK. I've had some fun with them.

They will not listen to you so your in for a fight. I must have 20+ emails from them and countless letters, all of which I have replied to explaining my situation and they point blank refused to deal with CCCS, so CCCS just paid them anyway on my terms.

After paying them for 4 months they decided to refer me to Mackenzie Hall who I now pay the same amount to.

They are bizzare, they have no understanding beyond the " pay us now", "you must pay us now", "we have tried to take money from your account and it was refused" (thats because its closed as I told you time and time again), "pay us now".

You can try talking to them if you want but be prepared for your bank account to be cleared out, they will do this. THEY WILL DO THIS. mark my words. As i've said above they tried taking a payment 4 months after I had closed my bank account and had been paying them through CCCS.

THEY WILL TRY TO TAKE FULL PAYMENT FROM YOUR BANK.

Follow SnV's advice on how to deal with Payday loan companies because PaydayUK are, from my experience, the worst of the lot. (Quick Quid, Payday Express have been fine to deal with onmy DMP)

eyeopener2

If you ring them at 9am the day the payment is due you may find its already been taken and you are £700+ in the red, or beyond your overdraft limit.

Hax

eyeopener2 wrote: »

They will not listen to you so your in for a fight. I must have 20+ emails from them and countless letters, all of which I have replied to explaining my situation and they point blank refused to deal with CCCS, so CCCS just paid them anyway on my terms.

After paying them for 4 months they decided to refer me to Mackenzie Hall who I now pay the same amount to.

They are bizzare, they have no understanding beyond the " pay us now", "you must pay us now", "we have tried to take money from your account and it was refused" (thats because its closed as I told you time and time again), "pay us now".

To be fair, this is quite a common practice with a lot of "normal" creditors - many will only accept the agreed repayments. When you default on it, it will then be passed to a collections company (possibly internal) at which point you will have a better chance of negotiating a repayment plan/schedule.

mostlycheerful

“I am considering putting together a website myself although i have no experience just as a place for people to offer advice on payday loans would there be much demand for this? Any help or pointers in the direction of a site which caters for this type of problems please let me know.”

Hi Paul
I think that’s a great idea, I think that could be very successful. I think you’ve identified a gap in the market.

It would take a bit of effort to set up and it would take a bit of a while to kick in but once it did then possibly it could take off big time and get established and do very well. Well, as long as you have the time and expertise to manage it and or can recruit sufficient unpaid volunteers to help you work on it. Or perhaps get ambitious and get some funding and pay wages. But, hey, slow down, maybe it would be better to start in a simple straightforward way and see how you get on before you get too ambitious.

Yes, I like the idea of a big comparison chart for all the payday loan companies, that could be good. And a forum discussing all aspects of it. And you’d probably soon want to expand it into all sorts of other loans and various other forum chat subjects, just like this splendid site.

Yes, very inspiring. I can imagine it all now.

So what do you know about website building? You say you have no experience but have you at least, for instance, opened up some pages on Facebook and Myspace and such like? If not then perhaps have a go at these as these are sort of basic website building and some of the skills and information necessary for them are relevant to other basic website building such as for an actual standalone site about payday loans. Indeed, you could partly start with simply pages at Facebook and Myspace as they have some of the functionality that you could use to kick it off. And perhaps also add a yahoo group in the same vein as freecycle which perhaps could also be a simple jumping off point for this and for getting started. They’re all free as well which definitely helps. And fairly stable and developed with a lot of tools. Yes, there’s several ways you can fairly instantly get started for little or no cost and just a certain amount of time and effort.

I’ve made a few websites on an amateur self entertainment basis over the years and it’s not that difficult doing the basics, just a bit of fiddling around. But they’re only very basic and I’ve never actually developed them or promoted any of them to any degree so they remain just a dipping a toe in the water exercise. Not really proper websites as such, just basic outline sketches of what could have been. But possibly I might be ready for more of a challenge and I’ve sometimes thought about doing something to do with finance, property, writing and job agency and some other subjects with regards to websites as I think all those and some others could make good sites.

For getting started with your own actual standalone website as opposed to using Myspace, Facebook and Yahoo I would suggest, at least initially, using free hosting sites and resources and the cheapest .com domain names are generally at 1and1 and last time I looked a couple of weeks ago they were £8.49 a year which is a lot cheaper than a lot of other providers. The free host I use is http://atspace.com and I’ve seen some other ones being recommended recently so maybe those are also worth looking into. The particular good point about atspace and the other ones is that they have no advertising on them. For your name it might also be worth getting the .co.uk which is only £2.49 for two years at 1and1 which is very cheap. And while you’re at it you might as well also get the free version of your name at .co.nr which might be handy at some point, particularly if, for instance you get successful enough to get hacked or get a ddos (distributed denial of service attack) and so having the whole site always backed up on another host and with another domain name might be a good idea.

I can immediately think of all sorts of great names for the site, kind of obvious ideas, you can check at a lot of the domain name providers if the names are available. Some of the better ones are probably already being used or cyber squatted or parked but I’m sure there must be some usable ones not already taken. Or if all the decent ones are taken you’ll just have to a use a long name with lots of words but even so a subject like this wouldn’t be hard to get a decent name for.

This MSE site makes its money from the affiliate links so that would be one of the first things to sort out. Whether there are many or even any affiliations for payday loans is a question but you’d expect there would be. If not then perhaps just sign up to affiliates for ordinary loans. And perhaps you wouldn’t want to actually be encouraging people to use them seeing as they are such a destructive nuisance for so many people. Yes, it might defeat the object of your site if you simply send more people to their doom, wouldn’t it. Hmm, maybe some more thinking needs to be done.

But, yes, if you got it up and running successful then possibly you could do very well, it could maybe become a full time job and make some money and pay you some wages for not too much effort. Yes, mate, very inspiring, go for it. You could do very well indeed with that. Maybe.

Of course, maybe not. It could just go wrong and be a waste of time and effort and even be a disaster. It all depends. Yes, alternatively you could fail and fall flat on your face and not pull it off for all sorts of reasons. There’s lots of ways it could go wrong or just not even happen despite trying. There’s a lot of skulduggery in business and lots of competition so you might just find yourself knobbled or crushed in various ways as soon as you peep out over the parapet and get your face shot off. As soon as you go online you’ll probably find that overnight ten other people copy the idea and open up bigger and better versions of what you’re trying to do. Any good idea normally instantly gets copied and ripped off.

So, yeah, it could be quite an achievement to actually pull it off and get it up and running. And the payday companies might nobble you if you attempt to do a comparison chart as only one or two of them will be the best and you’d be making all the others look like coconuts which none of them would like. So I can see possible pitfalls in this straight away.

But hey, you only live once, nothing ventured nothing gained, no pain no gain and all that. You have to speculate to accumulate. So why not. Even if your first efforts don’t get off the ground you should learn something interesting and some useful stuff for another venture. And the attempt at doing it would probably make a good story in itself and especially if it gets knackered or goes wrong spectacularly.

Possibly I might be up for chipping in with time, work, information, knowledge, ideas and helping recruit a team and maybe finance and such like. Or not, it all depends. If I got really inspired then I might go for it with you, but maybe it would be better if you just did it yourself as it’s your idea and I’m not sure I want to just randomly get involved in something like this. I’ve got some other ideas about what I’m doing at the moment and I’ve done various business previously so I kind of know what I like and what I’m good at and what’s appropriate for me to be involved in. Yes, there are some fairly good reasons why I probably wouldn’t try to get involved other than in an occasional arms length cheering on from the sidelines capacity. But who knows. I spose anything’s possible and I should at least try to keep an open mind.

Anyway, I hope what I’ve said here is encouraging and if you decide to get started then I wish you the best of luck.

Yes, let us know how you get on. And good luck with battering those debts into submission. Sorry, can’t really suggest anything practical about that other than the obvious things of try to increase your income, reduce your spending and read this MSE site a lot and do all the debt reducing things that people suggest and then hopefully you’ll be fine. Good luck.

Gordon_Hose

I've used PaydayUK before. Never again. Although I didn't mess up any payments, it took me 7 or 8 months to pay off after I needed money for an expensive car repair.

Now they're texting and emailing me saying my next loan is approved and to click the link, sign the agreement, and the money will be transferred immediately. If I was of weaker disposition I'd be in trouble again. I find it disgusting they try and tempt you like that tbh. But I guess that's what they reply on.

Paul_london_2

eyeopener2 wrote: »

If you ring them at 9am the day the payment is due you may find its already been taken and you are £700+ in the red, or beyond your overdraft limit.

I have changed my bank account and my wages will be paid into my new account, fairly worried what the fall out will be but i really have no choice at the moment.

Thanks everyone for the responses so far

Paul_london_2

Please go easy on me as its a first ever effort at website building but i spent a couple of hours last night trying to come up with a very basic website specifically for payday loan problems, not sure if i can ad a link in here but if anyone who has had problems with payday loans could have a look and any feedback would be really appreciated.

http://www.paydayloanhelp.moonfruit.com

Many thanks

Gordon_Hose

It would be better of you could register a domain or pay to get rid of "moonfruit" tbh.

As for the site, it looks OK, but I'm just not sure how it can help any more than the various other debt help forums there are, including this one.