An Expensive Football Game. My Experience with Payday Lenders

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   Michael L Clementsposted 6 months ago

   I LOVE college football!! I think that college football should be one of the seasons of the year! I am especially a huge fan of the South Carolina Gamecocks!
   
   One day, I was given two tickets to the Arkansas Razorbacks-South Carolina Gamecocks game, which was to be played in Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, South Carolina that weekend. I was very excited about traveling to Columbia to see the game! However, there was a slight problem: by the time that I paid my weekly bills, I didn't have enough "spending money" to take with me to the game. So, what was I going to do about this?
   
   I then decided to visit the local payday lender. I only wanted to borrow $50.00 until my next payday. I knew that in the back of my mind that this was a bad idea. However, I did not want to miss going to the game or waste the tickets that I was given for free.
   
   I approached the counter and asked what I had to do, since I'd never taken out a payday loan before. I told the clerk that I only wanted to borrow $50.00. I was then told that the least that I could borrow was $100.00. I didn't need to borrow $100.00, but since this was the least amount that I could borrow, I decided to borrow $100.00.
   
   "What do I have to do?", I asked the clerk at the counter.
   
   "You write me a check for $115.00. I will give you $100.00. Then, whenever you get paid, you will come back here and give me $115.00." So, I wrote the check for ,$115.00and the clerk gave me $100.00. I was now set to go to the big game!
   
   Here is where things started spiraling out of control for me. Whenever I returned to the payday lender the following Friday to repay my loan, I then realized that I now had $115.00 less of my paycheck to use for my weekly expenses. So, what could I do? I decided to readvance my loan and I borrowed the same $100.00 again, once again writing them a check for $115.00.
   
   This process continued until I realized that every time that I went to the payday lender to repay my loan, I was always $115.00 short. Since I was always $115.00 "short" every week, I then decided to borrow $150.00 to overcome where I was $115.00 short. So now, in order to do this, I had to write them a check for $172.50. Now instead of repaying $115.00 every Friday, I was now repaying $172.50!!
   
   So, in order to make up for the $172.50 shortage, I now borrowed $200.00, now having to write them a check for $230.00!! To make a long story short, downward spiral continued until I was repaying the payday lender almost my entire paycheck!
   
   I knew that something had to change! I could not keep living like this! I worked too hard at work, only to give all of my hard-earned money to the payday lender every Friday! I felt stuck and trapped! I started off borrowing $100.00, all because I decided that I needed "spending money" to go to a football game! Later, I decided to get a part-time job delivering pizza on the weekend and some days during the week in order to finally break the cycle! Eventually I did and I have never looked back! I never borrowed money from a payday lender again!
   
   At this point, you are probably thinking that I should have known better and that I was unwise to borrow money against my paycheck. And you would be right. I knew in the back of my mind that this was unwise, but I did so anyway! This was definitely an expensive lesson learned! If I had this to do all over again, I would have given the tickets to someone else and kept my behind at home!!
   
   I decided to write about this experience because I didn't want anyone else to fall victim to the payday lender trap. I hope that you will all learn from my negative experience and stay away from these loan sharks!!

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