Who am I?
My name is Holly Mamoru and I am an expert on payday loans. You may wonder at why somebody would become an expert on payday loans and the truth is it happened by accident. I was originally working at a bank as a financial consultant when I accidently became acquainted with payday loans. After years of helping other people to sort out their finances I found myself in a difficult financial position and I ended up having to use a payday loan. This was a real eye opener and it lead to a completely new career field for me.
Originally the reason that I had to use a payday loan was that I had recently bought a house and had to incur the expense of that plus the cost of moving. At around the same time my car finally gave up the ghost and I had to get it fixed. With all of these expenses hitting me at once I found myself with a shortage of cash. My credit cards were maxed out and while I still had some money in investments getting at it was going to be a hassle. So I figured that a payday loan could solve my problems. I knew they were not a great way to borrow money but as one time thing I wasn’t too worried.
I quickly found out that payday loans are an even worse deal than I had been lead to believe. The first issue I had was that they told me what the interest rate was when I took the loan but they neglected to tell me about the check cashing fee. It was included in the three page document they gave me when I took the loan but it wasn’t like I was going to read that while I was standing there in the store taking the loan. This proved to be a mistake I ended up paying far more than I realized. I did the math and came to the realization that I was paying more than four hundred percent interest.
It turned out I hadn’t even discovered the worst part of a payday loan. After I got my pay check I had to immediately pay off the loan in full. This left me with less than half of my pay check. Meanwhile my credit card bills had shown up and where due before I would get my next paycheque, so was my mortgage payment. I quickly realized that there was no way that I would be able to pay these bills. Ultimately I decided that it was better to make late payments on my credit cards and take the hit to my credit for that than to take another payday loan. I also realized that many people don’t have that option and have little choice but to keep rolling over payday loans.
After that experience I decided to become an advocate for consumers when it comes to payday loans. I started writing about them and created a website to make sure that people know exactly what they are getting into when they take a payday loan.