Pay day loans a scourge, but nonetheless a need
Fourteen states prohibit payday financing, calling it predatory. The government that is federal stepping in, too. But also for those that require the cash, you can find few choices.
3, 2016 september
- By Simon Montlake Staff Writer
At a highway junction outside city, a trio of outsized blue guitars attached to a telegraph pole face on the fertile farmlands for the Mississippi Delta. In blues mythology, this crossroads is The Crossroads, where guitarist Robert Johnson traded their heart towards the devil for musical genius. Today it is a stoplight on Highway 61, a sun-baked strip of discount malls, gasoline stations, fast-food joints – and half dozen shops providing quick cash..
For Jennifer Williams, a high-school instructor, it is a strip of financial obligation and pity and heartache. For a long time, she’d invest every payday shop that is going shop, wanting to carry on with repayments, even while sliding deeper into financial obligation. At one point she owed 1000s of dollars to nine pay day loan stores in three towns.
“Those places would be the devil. As soon as you have covered involved with it, it is difficult to escape,” she claims.
Tales like hers have shone a spotlight that is harsh an ecosystem of alternative finance that affluent bank clients seldom see. In majority-black towns like Clarksdale, but, where 1 in 3 real time underneath the poverty line, they’ve been the only type of “banking” some residents ever know. Read more →