Mobiloans once offered their financial products (mainly the line of credit) in all 50 states. In 2011 and 2012 the best advice anyone could give to a potential unsecured borrower was to contact Mobiloans. The company offered a $1,500 loan at a 10% basic interest rate per every 14 days the loan was outstanding, and they still have this loan available, although we are about to see just how limited the number of possible customers has become. Mobiloans has always been very flexible with how the loan was used, the loan itself is a line a credit, so the same (approved) loan can be accessed over and over as the funds are needed.
The problem we now face is the fact that this halfway decent tribal lender has limited the number of states they make their line of credit product available to. And it's not just a few states, there are a lot. Basically, the entire Eastern Seaboard has been pushed out of service and other large states like Illinois.
Below is the full list of states where residents will no longer qualify for a loan from Mobiloans strictly based that they live in one of these states...
Minnesota
Illinois
Arkansas (surprisingly)
Louisiana (very surprised to see this state in the list)
Maine
Massachusetts
New York (no surprise at all, would surprised if they were not in the list)
Rhode Island
Vermont
New Hampshire
Pennsylvania
Connecticut (again no surprise)
Colorado
Maryland
Georgia (a mild surprise and a bad sign for Mobiloans future business)That's 15 states where no one from that state will even begin to qualify for a loan via Mobiloans. Georgia was one of the more recent additions and it shows a disturbing trend where a state with financial leniency laws has no passed enough state level legislation regulating the transactions of short-term lending that Mobiloans feels it is unable to operate there. At the rate they're going Mobiloans will not be a viable business if a few more big states get added to the list. One side note, it was very surprising to not see the West Coast states of California, Oregon and Washington to be on this list? How their state governments have not acted, while the state governments of Arkansas and Georgia have is really a mystery.
Normally these pages bring quite a bit of criticism against Native American lenders, as well as all short-term lending operations. But we have always made an exception for a few companies and Mobiloans has been in that camp since the first day they were reviewed here. Why? It has nothing at all to do with any business alliance, deals or arrangements with Mobiloans. This site has never received a penny from any tribal (or state regulated) lender and never will. There is no quid pro quo or any other reciprocal or business affiliation of any sort taking place. The reviews provided by Native Loans have always shown that Mobiloans, while not a great lender especially when compared to the old version of unsecured bank loans that used to be issued in this country, is one of the best lenders available to the mass public.
Another way of saying this is that Mobiloans is the best (or at least in the top five) of all tribal lending companies out there, and the reason for that is all the rest of the tribal lenders are just so bad at what they do. The majority of Native American loan companies offer a very high priced lending service, they often do not have very big loans (rarely getting beyond $500 these days) and on top of that they are very inflexible. Where Mobiloans has a high degree of flexibility, where the line of credit can be accessed as needed and repaid in flexible ways, the typical loan from a tribal entity is just a basic one size fits all $300 - $500 dollars and has an extremely rigid repayment schedule. If a customer wants to break from that regimented repayment schedule they will be looking at extra fees (penalties) along with the possibility of phone calls to their home, cell phone and/or their work phone number.
That's why losing Mobiloans to all these states and they general decline of one of the better tribal lending outfits available to people with not so great credit scores. That's why most people turn to tribal lenders in the first place - because they have very low credit scores and can't get anything like a standard loan. It's nice to have a company like Mobiloans around that charge a decent rate (10%) and offer a decent amount of money to borrow ($1,500) and that can be flexible. This type of company was already a rare option in the lending market and now they are shrinking. Not a good outlook for the future of tribal loans. There have been so few opportunities to get anything resembling a good loan that slowly losing this company makes the situation even less palatable.
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