One of the oldest, and one of the least discussed tribal lenders is a company called Lending Leaves. The company at first looks to be a relic from the early days when Native American tribes first became involved with online lending but the company site is still updated and they appear to rolling along just as they were 10 years ago. The question is do we (the consuming public) want to take out a loan from Lending Leaves or should they be left behind for better tribal companies?
If you want the short answer, I would suggest filling out an application with Mobiloans, or Spotloan, RadiantCash or a number of the other tribal lenders that I prefer over the great many Native American lenders that I have no interest in. And unfortunately for Lending Leaves they will also be joining this long list of 'uninteresting' tribal loan companies.
What's the problem with Lending Leaves? It is not the normal complaints, which are usually that the loan amounts are too low, the time to repay the loan is too short or the interest rate charged is way too high. Those tend to be the big three reasons why I would give a pass to a tribal lender. In the case of Lending Leaves they commit the fourth sin which is to simply disclose next to nothing about themselves.
When you scroll through the pages of Lending Leaves (and there are not that many pages to look at) you will quickly discover that the site provides no pertinent information about their loan products. They don't make any attempt to let you know how much money you can borrow, there are no hard numbers shown and there are no examples provided.
There is no information about how long the loan will last, we don't know if these are payday loans or installment loans, or a hybrid, or a line of credit, we simply do not know what kind of loan they will offer. We also do not know how much interest the firm will expect their customers to pay when it comes time to make the repayment. We do not have any information about whether there are extensions or how many times the loan can be rolled over.
A better way of describing the situation would be to work backwards and state what information we do know from the company site. We know that Lending Leaves issues online loans, they do not have a physical brick and mortar store. We know that the loans are unsecured because there is nothing mentioned about securing a car or collateral. We know that the loans are issued via direct banking transfer (either the ACH or EFT methods) and that there is no cost to get a loan. We also know that the company doesn't have any application fees. So at the end of the day we know that this company issues loans online and that it won't cost you any money to try to (that means applying) get a loan.
That information is absolutely not useful to a consumer. We know we want a loan and we are quite confident that this is an online lending outfit. The key here is the information they provide is strictly fluff, there is no substance or meaningful content in any of their pages.
If the company thinks that it's alright to just throw out a website on the net and plan on super desperate people coming across their site and being happy to simply get any loan, at any cost, for any amount of money, then I just have to disagree with that logic.
Lending Leaves is not a company that I would plan to do business with and I personally see no reason to become (or attempt to become) a customer of their loan services.
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