One of the original tribal lenders is now out of business and although this company will not be missed in terms of the lending products that they offered (they were not that good) the company will be missed in the sense that they helped forge the path for many of the tribal organizations that are in business today.
Gentle Breeze was around way before the Native Loans website was conducting reviews and lists of Native American lenders. The best guess as to when the company began (mainly by looking at news stories and online reviews, mentions and complaints about the firm) show that they must have started somewhere between 2007 and 2008. This is way before all the big tribal lenders, like Plain Green Loans, Great Plains Lending and Spotloan were in business. The only other big tribal lender that was around back in this time frame was the one and only Western Sky Financial.
The fall of Gentle Breeze from being a vibrant business in a brand new industry (tribes issuing loans is still a relatively new concept) to being a forgotten and defunct company didn't happen overnight. There was a slow process of being caught up in bad reviews, bad publicity and the loss of customers to other (newer and better) tribal lenders who did a better job at marketing their loan products.
If you are a former customer of Gentle Breeze the best advice is you can just pretend that the company never existed. If you still owe the company money from an old debt that was deferred (basically if you stopped paying) then you can officially declare yourself free from that debt. There is no one left to send money to, the organization is completely gone, there are no fax lines or phone lines, there is no website to visit and there is no one you can email in customer service.
There is no way to send any payments or wire any money. That old debt is closed for good. The good news is that Gentle Breeze didn't bother working with the big three credit reporting agencies so even though you stopped paying (let's call it what it is, you defaulted on that debt) there is no alert sent to any of those credit reporting firms so your credit score and report should be unchanged. Gentle Breeze is similar to nearly every other tribal lender in that they ignore financial organizations that conduct credit checks and ratings.
Now that Gentle Breeze is out of business and this time it is official, the company is not coming back, where do consumers turn to for Native American loans? The answer is good if you are a fan tribal lending because there are now over 300 companies engaged in providing either tribal payday loans (just like Gentle Breeze) or tribal installment loans or tribal lines of credit.
It's important to remember before we get too excited over these loan products that they are all very expensive and can be difficult to pay off if the loan is rolled over too long. The high rates have a tendency to catch up to customers even if they haven't had repayment problems in the past. We try to focus on the tribal lenders that offer better lending services over their peers, which is not the same as saying those loans are "good" loans, but rather that they are going to save consumers some money.
Another way of looking at the situation was if you were going to pay $10 for product XYZ or $30 for the exact same product XYZ. Why pay more for the exact same thing? Now it might be true that both of those prices are too high (and in historical terms the loans offered today are too costly) but let's assume that we have to take one of the loans. Obviously the right course of action is to take the version that is cheaper.
The real problem for Gentle Breeze ultimately was the fact that they were in the $30 group of companies. What does that mean? It means that every 14 days that a customer kept a loan from Gentle Breeze they had to pay $300 for every $100 of the loan that was outstanding. And that is a very expensive loan.
Traditional banks (back when they were actually issuing loans) would never have charged anywhere near that amount. More importantly (and more relevant) are some other tribal loan companies (like Plain Green Loans and Mobiloans) that are willing to charge only $10 (or less) for every $100 that is borrowed, for each 14 day period that the loan is outstanding.
Even though they were one of the first Native American lenders it didn't mean that Gentle Breeze would be able to survive with those high costs. Over time consumers learned that there were substantially better offers out there and they gravitated away from Gentle Breeze. Now the company is out of business and people are going to continue to search for the better (less expensive) loan options, just as they always will.
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