Door step lenders

now

Nothing really to do with BR but at least something is being done to curb these lot

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12041231

Tupperware_Queen

Lets hope they get properly clamped down on.

I went to open a credit union account last week, and in front of me was a young girl (may 19/20 tops) with two little kids in the pushchair - she was asking for a loan to pay off one of these type of things, she had borrowed about £150 a few months ago, and her debt had gone up to nearly £800!!! Ridiculous. I mean, you can argue till the cows come home about the rights and wrongs of debt, but this girl was never going to be able to pay back all those additional charges in a month of Sundays.

tigerfeet2006

I was chatting to a neighbour the other day when her Provi agent came to get her loan money. She has had this loan for years and it keeps getting added to and a bit paid off. The agent asked me how I was doing for Christmas and was it all paid for? I took great pleasure in telling her that my Christmas was all paid for and I didn't owe anybody anything and wasn't in debt because of it and the only loan that I had was from our local Credit Union and I was paying that off at 12% APR instead of the 120% they would probably want to charge me and my savings were growing at the same time.

I have said to the neighbour time and again she ought to go to the Credit Union and given her leaflets but will she listen <rolls eyes>

Tupperware_Queen

I was really impressed with the credit union lady, she says that you can get your benefits paid into the credit union account, which seems like a really good idea, if you can manage without it on a day to day basis, at least it allows a bit of savings to build up. She says they get a lot of people pay the child benefit in, and then draw it out for things like school uniform etc.

They also do a Christmas club, where you can't get your money till 1st Nov, I think I am going to put a bit in that next year!

Tupperware_Queen

The thing I liked best with the credit union, is that you can't have the money straight away, the quickest is 5 days with my local one, ie if you go and fill in a request on the monday, you can get your money on friday. OK, this creates a bit of a problem over holidays and in emergencys, so my plan is to have a small emergency fund which I can get access to easily, and to build up the funds in the credit union for the annual bills like car and house insurance (which I paid at the end of Oct, so I should be able to save enough to cover those in full next year )

Not being able to nip into the bank or use a cashpoint should mean that I really need the money before I can get it!!