As we roll into 2025 we've watched a bunch of the tribal lenders go out of business, reroute their customer traffic into newer (rebranded) entities and overall there's been a big washout of these Native American companies.
But one company that keeps chugging on is Big Picture Loans. This lender keeps rolling, not only with email marketing and online ads, but they're also sending out snail mail letters to anyone who has ever spoken to them. Big Picture Loans is a very aggressive tribal lender. If you call them up to talk about their loan products (and that is misleading because there really is only one product) they will try to keep you on the phone and walk you through signing up for a new loan - even if you don't want a loan.
Based out of a sovereign tribal land in Michigan, and this company has been around for quite a while. They're real name is Tribal Economic Development Holdings LLC - but you'll never see that name online, where they operate as Big Picture Loans and sometimes you'll see them appear with the moniker Big Picture Personal Loans. The company has 186 Google reviews as of February 2025 - that's not bad at all considering most tribal lenders don't even exist in the eyes of Google and if they are mentioned online then they will have somewhere between zero and five reviews. Any customer interaction is usually super thin.
While Big Picture Loans is super easy to work with (the staff there will fill-out half of the information needed for you, in fact they will put together the entire loan request) - the problem is they are super expensive. And to their credit the team at Big Picture Loans doesn't hide this difficulty. They will tell you repeatedly while you're on the phone with them that 'it would be best if you were able to pay off the loan early, as this is a very expensive form of credit' and various messaging that's very similar.
Scary thing about their loans is many installment lenders (tribal or traditional) will offer you a maximum loan term of six months. But Big Picture has some big ideas about making money off of their customer base, because their installment loans are for no less than one full year. That's going to be a big drag on their customer's wallet and at the same time will be a big gain for the owners of Big Picture Loans.
While we all get into financial trouble from time to time, it's important to remember that taking out a tribal high interest loan isn't going to help much in the long-term. In fact, it's not going to help much in the short-term either. These lenders tend to pitch their advertising in the direction of 'help make sure you don't bounce a check' or 'make a car payment so you don't fall behind' - but the part they don't mention is that you better come up with some extra money relatively quickly, beyond the money you just borrowed, because when those loan repayments begin (usually in 12 - 19 days after you sign for the loan) now the customer will be paying pure interest payments for the next few months. Nothing at all will go to the principal.
Even though we lost a lot of our Native American lenders over the last few years there are always new companies appearing and always some of the longer term operators like Mobiloans or Big Picture Loans. In general, while it's nice to have a lender around that allows for bad credit lending, in the end it's more akin to a trap than a benefit. With interest rates that are over 200% per year, just have to wonder if this is the right road to go down, even if you have financial problems.
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