The Big Picture of Personal Finance: Managing with Smart, Quick Fixes
The television commercials for financial management companies miss what millions of hard working people do everyday: manage through cash flow crunches with any trick they can devise.
Instead of hearing about saving for retirement or college, what many if not most people need to hear is about how to pay this month’s bills. How do you cover utilities, car payments, rent or mortgage, insurance and other regular bills, when an emergency expense eats every available bit of cash in your checking account a week or two before your next payday? Loans for times like this are never in bank or investment firm advertising.
But such loans are there. Even if you have poor credit, and even if you are unable or unwilling to offer collateral (such as your home, your car, or other valuables). What you need is a job with a paycheck. If you have pay due in the next 30 days or so, you can get a loan against that money.
It is, in effect, a loan from you to you. It does not introduce new money to you. It simply is a way to get paid early, enough to iron out the wrinkles of poor timing. bills might be due today, so you need your cash today. Otherwise, as you well know, you will have to pay additional fees, penalties and interest on those bills.
These loans come with many names: payday loans , online cash loans, paycheck or paycheque loans or poor credit loans. What has brought this form of savvy, fast-moving financing to many more people comes from lenders online in the past eight years. Where it used to be necessary to go to a payday loans store, a retail location usually in a shopping plaza, you can now do it completely from the convenience and privacy of a personal computer. Online cash loans not only get busy people money they need in a hurry. They also only take about ten minutes to transact. The money is deposited directly into your checking account within an hour.
Advertising for these loans do not come with dreamy shots of retirement vacations or college graduations. They’re just there – at borrowers’ fingertips with just a few mouse clicks.
May 23 2011 11:36 pm | Finance