Thoughts On Finance

Many people will be hitting hard times, and be left without enough money to pay even their most essential bills.  With this many people, who are without good credit, will be left wondering about their options, one of which may be to take out a payday loan.  Payday loans, as they advertise, are meant for short term financial need, and if you go in to take out a payday loan, they make you sign an agreement to that effect.  Yet, once you get into the payday loan cycle some people have trouble getting back out.  Paying off only the interest each time and hanging onto the loan.  For people who are living paycheck to paycheck, this can be a very difficult debt to repay.  Some succeed, however, even they usually return to re borrow at some point in the future.  So when should you consider taking a payday loan? If you are about to have a check bounce on the bank, then you should.  Although the banking industry will have you believe that they are above charging 300% interest on a loan, they will charge you $35.00 and up for a bounced check of even just a few dollars.  So really how is that any different, especially since, if you have ever bounced a check then you would know that once one bounces usually several bounce, and if you have a few checks bounce and your paycheck directly deposited, then that will just eat up your paycheck. Also, taking a payday loan is a better alternative to buying items from a rent to own place.  You can more inexpensively borrow the money from a payday loan and then buy the item out right.  So this is a time to consider a payday loan.

If you can avoid taking a payday loan, then by all means do it, because it is very easy to get caught up in the cycle, but if you have to do it, then don’t feel badly about it, just do it.  It may actually save you some money in the long run.

Our government is in high panic mode trying to fix the current financial crunch that we are in.  I am just wondering why no one saw this coming.  It only makes sense that we have been pouring out Trillions of dollars on fighting terrorism and the war and we have been doing this for the past 7 years.  It only stands to reason that over time we are slowly but surely going broke.  Honestly, if you look at things however, this really was coming to this point before September 11, 2001.  If you look at the trends in banking and in the economy, you can honestly see that interest on bank accounts took a nose dive around the mid 90’s.  Back in 1989, your interest on an average checking account was 5.14% and an average savings account was 5.5%.  Money markets and CD’s went up to on the average about 8-9% depending of course on the term.  Now you are lucky if you are getting about 1% interest on your savings.  This decline started before all this terrorism stuff came to a head.  Didn’t they see this was happening? Didn’t we? I guess I just think that better financial planning could have gone into this.  It is like our government has bounced a million checks in the past week and they are scrambling to figure out where they are going to get the money from quickly.  I just would like to think that our government had a better handle on their finances than this.  It really just seems to me that they could have planned ahead and seen this coming.  I guess with credit card companies charging exorbitant fees and banks charging equally exorbitant fees and interest rates, it seems to me that they would be doing well, but I guess not, which in essence means that the money that we think we have in the banks is really gone.  I am sure in this financial whirlwind that we are in, if we all went to the banks and tried to get our money out, our government would be in quite a pickle.  In any case, I really think that someone ought to be held accountable as this problem didn’t just happen over night, and it probably won’t be fixed over night either.