Harvest Lending is now out of business as of April 2014. The company may have gone out of business before this point because I haven't kept up on this lower grade tribal payday loan operator. The funny thing is there is no cached remnants or anything left of the company now. With the exception of the occasional online complaint that's floating around it is like this lender never even existed.
What did we lose when Harvest Lending shut it digital doors? Not a thing. I hate to be that callous but it's true. Back in 2012 there were probably around 80 tribal lending companies. By the middle of 2013 that number had grown to well over 100 lenders. Now as we sit in the early half of 2014 (it's currently April) there are probably around 200 tribal lenders. And there was one report that said by the year 2016 there might be as many as 400 Native American tied loan companies. The majority of these firms are payday loans shops, meaning they issue one product only, the infamous 14 -19 loan where you get one pay period to borrow the funds and you have to either pay the loan in full on your next pay date or roll the loan over for another 14 days, which is a highly expensive proposition.
It's nothing personal against Harvest Lending but society just doesn't need another payday loan outfit. We already have too many as it is, in fact I'm surprised that more of these payday operators don't go out of business because I just can't understand where they keep getting new customers from.
Most of the old customers that have been through the mill know the story and they will do just about anything to avoid this type of loan. Then you have the batch of customers (now they are ex-customers) who used payday loans and then discovered that installment loans were just as easy to qualify for, they provided more time and more money to borrow, they are more flexible in general and they charge less with their finance fees because they carry a lower APR.
I guess there are always new people getting into financial trouble, and there are always young people who are turning 18 or 21 who become eligible to borrow from payday lenders and who don't know that this is a bad budgeting decision. When a customer borrows from a payday lender (like the old Harvest Lending) they usually don't realize (or at least they don't understand at that moment they sign for the loan) that they just put an incredible burden on their household budget the next time they get paid.
That's because whether they pay the full amount of the loan off on that Friday payday or if they roll the loan over they are essentially screwed. If they pay off the debt then they will be out the full amount borrowed plus 30% more for the finance fee. That's going to destroy the budget for the next 14 days for most consumers. The other option isn't much better because if they roll the loan over it means that they will only have to payt that 30% finance fee, which is much less than the alternative, but the full amount of the original loan lives on. So on the customers next pay date the same problem is going to be there, and it will be the same dilemma all over again.
Do they pay off the full amount on this payday and then be forced to have little funds for the following 14 days? Or do they take the expedient solution, which is paying the finance fee only (for a second time) and roll the original amount forward into the future, again? See how this situation becomes self-perpetuating? Once you jump into a payday loan there is no good fix unless you get a windfall of cash or can ask your family or friends to loan you some interest free cash for a month or two.
This is the business Harvest Lending was engaged in and that's why I'm not too sad to see them go. I personally don't give much consideration to tribal payday lenders because they do very little in the way of providing a financial benefit to their customers. The tendency is that they create much more trouble than they solve.
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