is laughable because the banks did nothing to help the poor get banking services, or charged outrageous fees for said.

read it right here on DU!

Usury laws must have been wiped out given what they are charging.

We found out that my recently deceased brother had a payday loan. I thought it was a title loan on his old truck since we couldn't find his title. Note, my brother was on disability and had to live on $735 a month plus $150 in food stamps. He was mentally slow as well and weighed about 90 lbs when he took out his loan on May 28th for $130.00. When I called last week they wanted $307.00 and he had made one payment of $75.00 on top of that!

When I spoke with them and found out it was a payday loan and not a title loan I asked if they loaned on people on disability. She said yes. I said then it will serve the owners right because they will have to eat this loan!

He did not do a title loan. The truck is sold and mom is the only one who recovers under intestacy. His estate is the truck and an affidavit of heirship took care of the title work. Nothing for them to get and not enough money to justify them trying to find out. I will go after them if they come after mom which is not likely.

At their interest rates they would not ever be paid off by my brother had he lived. He had never done this before and I suspect since he knew he was dying he wanted to party on his way out.

We don't have payday loans in N.J., but we do have check cashing "services." They charge the person a % to cash payroll checks. No personal or third party checks. We reported the break-in but with no evidence of anything having been stolen.

Anyways, one of our employees got fired. That night he broke into our office and detached a check from way down the bottom of the check register, where it was not going to be noticed for a while. He took the blank check and made it out to himself for $657.87.

The check cashing service paid him, minus commission.

Four days later, the check cashing company called us to make good on the bounced check. We traced the check number to the missing check at the bottom of the register and amended the police break-in report to include the check.

Check company threatened to sue but were advised they could not collect on stolen, forged property. After a year, they finally gave up trying to collect.

A year later, former employee was found dead from heroin.

We could say the "lenders" -- and I use the term loosely -- can't charge more than prevailing interest rates for people with good credit. Of course, no one is going to lend money to people who have to borrow against their pay check at that rate. I don't know what the right answer is. The Post Office likely wouldn't lend to payday borrowers anyway, too much risk.

A better answer is to help poor people avoid these loans, but that is a different issue.

I had just moved to a new city and had burned through most of my savings with the move when I had a $1700 car repair, I used credit cards for $1000 of it, but took out $700 from a payday loan, it took me almost 6 months to pay back that $700 and the total I paid back was well over $2000.

These places had interest rates at 600% and 700%, some of the lower ones are still over %200. And once they get their hooks in you they pressure you to keep renewing your loan, so you take out $700 for an emergency, well you have to pay them back $790 in 2 weeks, but then you will have no money to pay your bills so they simply assume you are "re-upping", they even pressure you to do so. So you have to re-up for $650, and that's how it goes pay check after paycheck, you pay it down $50 at a time, but pay close to $100 in interest pay period after pay period, then you know what happens when you get your balance down to $300? Another emergency happens and you re-up to $600 then.

I'm a college grad, I am not stupid, but emergencies happen and there is no lender available. It's so easy to get trapped into this when you have no toher options.