Debt cycle ‘carries on’ with payday loans
May 21, 2008 by admin
Filed under News, News-Loans
Regularly using payday loans to get through until the next paycheque can lead people into a spiral of debt, National Debtline has warned.
Spokesperson Beccy Boden Wilks said that payday loans can have high interest rates and consumers can often find cheaper borrowing options.
Ms Boden Wilks warned that people using payday loans on a regular basis may have a more serious underlying debt problem and advised them to have a close look at their budgets as well as to possibly seek advice on how to deal with their debts.
“If you’ve run out of money [ahead of your next paycheque], so you feel that you need to use these sorts of services, then there’s obviously a problem,” she commented.
Ms Boden Wilks added that people using these services should review their spending and budgets.
The take-up of short-term payday loans has risen by 55.4 per cent since last September, according to Moneysupermarket.com.
National Debtline: Fewer balance transfer deals affects other personal finances
April 18, 2008 by admin
Filed under News, News-Loans
The drop in the availability of cheap interest-free balance transfers that have been popular in recent years could have a knock-on effect on other aspects of people’s personal finances, according to National Debtline.
Consumers are finding it increasingly difficult to find cheap balance transfer deals for their credit card debt, which is impacting the number of mortgage arrears as people stop paying their mortgage to counterbalance the problem.
In the past many borrowers would transfer their debt to another near-nought per cent deal, however such cheap, accessible credit is now harder to come by, although the organisation said that some reasonably good deals are still available for those with a clean credit rating.
Commenting on the future outlook for consumers, Beccy Boden-Wilks, a debt adviser and spokesperson for National Debtline, said: “Those cheap credit, nought per cent balance transfers are going to be very hard to come by, if not non-existent.”
Despite the current difficulty of managing large amounts of debt, around 716,600 people will try and transfer around £1.1 billion a month between credit cards this year, according to Sainsbury’s Finance.
