Another brand new tribal lender is ready to issue loans, and this new edition to the field is Tall Grass Finance. One of the best tips that you are dealing with a tribal lending company is their name. As soon as you see "Tall Grass" it was an easy guess that they were tied to some tribe. All these terms like lake, river, sky or valley, this is the heavy theme the tribes like to use in their names.
Now the question is will Tall Grass Finance be different from all our other tribal loan firms? The fast answer to this question is "no" it's not different, you will be dealing with the typical short-term tribal loan operator. The longer we wait for Native American lenders to get creative with all their (constantly and vehemently) espoused freedom from state and federal regulators the more it seems we are only going to get the same drab, boring and uncreative loans.
In this instance we have Tall Grass Finance offering first time borrowers a maximum loan of $400, which is not at all a quality loan. Tribal lenders used to offer loans of $1,000 to $2,000 at the drop of a hat, it wasn't a big deal at all. Yet now we are left with a huge number of tribal companies (probably at least 400 at this point) and they all are making what appears to be the same offer. This low dollar loan is not very useful to most borrowers. And for customers that do find this lower value amount acceptable there is still the very high interest rate that comes with it.
One thing that is weird about Tall Grass is that they must have offered (at some point or some marketing situation) to provide a larger loan. Maybe they instituted a new loan policy and they want to communicate to the former customers why they have come down in their loan offering amount.
Tall Grass Finance is basically apologizing / justifying their low dollar loans on their FAQ page. At one point in the FAQ the company actually writes "I thought I could receive $1000 or $1500" as if there was some offer or indication that the loan amount could be for more money. And then the company clears up our question when they give us the surprising truth when then admit...
"If you came to this site via a different site, or applied on a different site, but are funded by Tall Grass Finance it is possible that another site advertised a loan up to a certain amount that is higher than what we actually lend to first time borrowers."
That verbiage is straight from the Tall Grass Finance FAQ page. It seems that the company may have acquired, or merged with, or through some other method is getting potential customers to their site that were offered different potential loans, which clearly were offering a higher dollar loan. Instead of maintaining that market for higher value loans Tall Grass made the decision to "roll down" those customer expectations and just hope that they decide to take the small dollar loans offered by Tall Grass. And maybe that strategy will work just fine for them.
The longer I review and read about the Native American lending business the more I have come to realize that many of the customers in this (large, constantly growing) cottage market do not care that much about the size of loan they receive. They obviously do not care about what interest rate they are provided or how much they are charged through those high rates, so I guess it makes sense (somewhat) that they wouldn't care much about how much they get in a loan. At the end of the day it looks like most consumers that have become accustomed, or who prefer, tribal lenders are just happy to qualify for any loan - no matter what is going on inside that loan. Interest rates, high costs, fees, penalties for being even a day late, low dollar loan amounts and extremely quick turn times to repay the debt - none of the factors that would be pertinent to most borrowers just do not have much of an impact (if any) on the customers for the tribal lending business.
Which leaves us with our own review of Tall Grass Finance. We can't say that the company is totally without merit or interest, however the problem is there are other tribal lenders which offer a better lending service. If you need examples just take a look at companies like Mobiloans, Spotloan or even RadiantCash which is also a tribal payday lender but is run in a much better way, with lower costs and incentives for returning customers. There just is no need for consumers to turn to Tall Grass, at least none that I can find.
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