Public weighs in on need for new payday loan regulations

In the U.S. Senate, Merkley’s news release said, “he has remained a champion in taking on predatory payday lending, and has pressed the CFPB to use their power to protect consumers from predatory small dollar loans“. If the loan is repaid, the title is returned to the borrower. Also, a lender could not accept an auto title as collateral, and the number of times that borrowers could roll over loans into newer loans would be limited, as would the number of times a lender could debit a borrower’s bank account for an outstanding payment. One of dozens of speakers at the hearing, she told of a professional woman who got a payday loan to cover a auto fix, but couldn’t repay in full weeks later when the loan came due. And payday lenders say the rules could further squeeze access to credit for the people who need it most urgently. Roughly 12 million Americans take out a payday loan each year, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts, who has done extensive research on the industry. “Restricting credit options will ultimately drive up costs for consumers, cause the loss of thousands of jobs in the state, and force borrowers underground to unlicensed lenders”, Advance Financial chief executive officer Tina Hodges said in a statement released by the Tennessee Flexible Finance Association. She said the proposal would aim to “prevent lenders from succeeding by setting up borrowers to fail”. Consequently, the bureau has issued a set of new regulations to stop the repeated financial gouging of those Americans least able to afford it. Even softer limits on repeat lending have severely contracted the industry. By 2014, almost 450 of those had been shuttered. “This is less reform than an attack on the operators, ” The Washington Post quoted Dennis Shaul, CEO of the Community Financial Services Association of America, a trade association. CFPB research shows that more than four-in-five single-payment loans are reborrowed within a month. The full-payment test would require lenders to calculate whether borrowers can afford to make repayments on time and still cover basic living expenses. “They tell you, ‘No credit?” The CFPB was created in response to the 2008 financial collapse as part of 2010’s Dodd-Frank banking legislation. The agency is expected to announce new rules for payday lender prepaid debit cards this summer. One-in-five payday loan sequences end up in default and one-in-five single-payment auto title loan borrowers end up having their vehicle or truck seized by the lender for failure to repay. “The way these products are structured, it’s very hard to repay the loan and therefore people end up borrowing again and again and paying far more in fees and interest than they borrowed in the first place”, Cordray says. Don’t lenders already have to ask for income information? While the protesters say the practice of payday lending can be unsafe, there are people out there who need safe access to “fast cash”. Installment loans, which have grown in popularity in recent years, often carry similar interest rates. “It is common sense that someone scraping by paycheck-to-paycheck simply can not afford to repay a loan with 500 precent interest”. When making the initial loans, they are given either a postdated check or access to the borrower’s bank account. Horowitz said the proposed rules still allow payday lenders to charge extremely high interest on loans, just with more paperwork. Hughes, who makes $8.75 per hour at a Wendy’s in Kansas City, Missouri, devoted her next paycheck to pay off the debt. She has to get to work and take her kids to school.