Even though we comb through the internet everyday here at the site (Native Loans) there are some tribal lenders who somehow elude our constant search. And one of those tribal lenders is (or we should say "was" because they have since gone out of business) a company called Arrowhead Lending.
It appears that Arrowhead Lending was one of the very early online tribal lenders back in the Jurassic time frame of Gentle Breeze and Western Sky Financial. To put in terms of complaints written against the company (which is one of the best measures you can find to let you know when a tribal lender is at its zenith) came in around 2007. Arrowhead Lending was a small payday loan lender which was unusual for the 2007 time since it was before the financial collapse of 2008-2009.
It was that financial meltdown that created the vanishing credit environment that wound-up spawning the majority of Native American loan companies. So what we have with Arrowhead Lending is an oddity, a precursor to what would flourish over the next few years. But at the time in 2007 this company was a bit of an unwanted character mainly because their maximum loan amount was $300.
To give some perspective Western Sky was issuing loans with an average value of $2,600 around this same time (and offered loans to individuals of up to $10K) and Gentle Breeze was probably issuing loans somewhere around the $800 mark per average.
For Arrowhead Lending to think it was acceptable to issue the lower grade $300 maximum payday loans back when things were thriving and far larger loans were the norm, it's just no surprise that we never heard of this company and that they vanished so easily.
The only thing that stands out now was whether or not the team at Arrowhead Lending were the original inspiration for what we have flourishing today, which is the never ending supply of tribal payday lenders (and other tribal lenders who label themselves as installment lenders) who offer a maximum of $300 for their unsecured loans. And this is not always just the initial loan, some lenders are only interested in borrowers who are fine with a $300 maximum loan at any point in the business relationship. Arrowhead Lending may have been out of touch back in 2008 but they would be the absolute in normalcy by 2016 standards.
Of the 400 plus Native American lenders there are at least 200 firms that specialize in very small loans that range from $300 to $500. The $500 lenders often have an initial loan availability of only $300. And although it seems unbelievable there are a very small number of lenders who will only part with $200 to a first time customer.
The newest move by these small lenders is to try to act as if their loans are "installment loans" since they provide multiple months to repay the loan. But who needs four months to repay $300 or even $500? In my mind these are false installment loans. Just because we have a much longer amount of time to repay the debt doesn't excuse the fact that the loan amount is equivalent to a payday loan.
These are small dollar, low value payday loans being masked as installment loans. Instead of issuing a true installment loan (meaning some larger amount ranging from $1,200 up to $10K) many tribal operators are simply repackaging their payday loans and stretching out the repayment dates. In some cases the interest rates were lowered but that doesn't do much for us as consumers because if we adhere to their time frame to repay it will be far more expensive than just sticking with the 30% rate on the payday loan and simply repaying the full amount on the due date.
These pathetic dollar amounts show just how far we have fallen from the much more advantageous years like 2009 and 2010, when getting a much larger loan was not that difficult. Now there are only a few installment lenders left and we are left with these multiplying companies that are hoping to get many thousands of customers, with all of them taking the low quality $300 loan. At this site we say "no thank you" to those nearly useless and mostly unhelpful debt instruments.
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