Payday Loans Blog

Getting a prepaid Visa card from Check City is a great option when you want the benefits of a Visa without having to go through a credit check or open a bank account!  There are so many benefits to a prepaid Visa card, and knowing where and how to get one is half the battle.

 So, what can a prepaid Visa card do for you?  I'll tell you!  First, you can use your card anywhere a regular Visa card is accepted-which is pretty much anywhere.  The prepaid Visa card also makes it easy to add funds to the card by transferring money from your bank or by bringing money to a Check City location.  You can also use your card to pay for bills online or over the phone.  This card also makes it easy to manage your money by including an account management tool and free money transfers.  Prepaid Visa cards make it possible for you to have the convenience of a credit card, but don't cause you to go into debt because they're alread prepaid cards! 

 Applyying for a prepaid Visa card is quick and easy.  Like all of the Check City services, you can just walk in to your nearest location and talk to a staff member who will help you through the process.  Prepaid Visa cards are convenient, helpful and very easy to get through Check City.

If you are in need of a lot of fast cash, consider getting a title loan from Check City.  No matter what the situation is, the great customer service will be able to help you get the money you need.

A title loan is not a complicated concept to understand.  It is a basic loan.  The biggest difference between this loan and any other type of loan is the collateral.  The collateral for a title loan is the title to your car.

When you go into Check City looking for a good chunk of fast money, you will need to give the title of your car to the lender.  Also bring a picture identification and proof of residence.  In return, they will give you the cash you need.

Getting a title loan does not mean you can't then drive away.  All it means is you are very temporarily giving the right for the lender to own the car if the loan is not paid off.  After a certain period of time if the loan is still not completed, the lender will go and take the car to sell it in order to pay off your debt.

Don't let it come to that.  Make sure you are able to pay off your loan.  Always remember to use a title loan responsibly.

Money transfers are a great way to send money across the planet.  The world is about 25,000 miles in circumference, so isn't it great that Check City has the ability to instantly send money to nearly anywhere on Earth?

When it comes to finances, sometimes we just come up short.  Some of life's expenses can get really expensive, really fast.  But often times, there is a family member or friend who is willing to help out for a little bit.  Or maybe you are that family member who needs to get some money to your loved one fast.  If they are far away from you, you should use a money transfer.

Because they are so fast, easy, and convenient, money transfers are one of the most popular ways to send and receive money.  Check City works with Western Union, one of the biggest money transfer providers in the world, to help customers provide or receive financial aid from their loved ones.

After using Check City to send money with a money transfer, the recipient can go pick up their money.  If there are no Check City locations in the area, they need to go to one of Western Union's agents in order to pick up their money.

The fastest, simplest, safest, and most convenient way to send money anywhere in the world is through a money transfer.

Check City offers a prepaid visa card known as the Cashin Prepaid Visa Debit Card and is pleased to announce that automatic bill payment is another great feature now available!

Prepaid Visa cards offer great advantages over traditional credit cards. You can never spend yourself into debt with a prepaid debit card. You are only able to spend as much money as you have loaded onto the card. You can also run transactions as either credit or debit.

Much like a credit card, prepaid Visa debit cards can be used for purchases online, over the phone or in merchant locations around the world where Visa is accepted. Cardholders even receive a card with their name embossed on the front.

Now when you log into your online account, you can access great automatic bill pay features with the Cashin card. You can either have the payments set up to run electronically. If your biller doesn't accept electronic payments, don't worry! We will simply send a paper check to them on your behalf.

With life so hectic these days and so much going on, it's great to have one less thing to worry about. Use your Cashin card to sign up for bill pay and never worry about getting any of your bills paid on time again. Wouldn't that be nice!

The Cashin card has other great features like email alerts, text notifications, PIN protection and much more! Come into any of our locations to get yours and start enjoying all the advantages of prepaid Visa debit cards today!

There is a new bill in Montana that is looking to cap the interest rates of payday loans at an annual percentage rate of 36 percent. Those supporting the bill say that Montana's payday lending businesses are “preying on often-unsophisticated, desperate, poor people with excessive borrowing fees”.

I don't know about you, but this sounds a little stereotypical to me. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Bill Wilson, also commented that, “this industry thrives upon the victimization of vulnerable repeat customers.” The wonderful thing about payday loans is that they are there if you need them. Saying that the industry “victimizes” anyone is just ridiculous. It's the consumers choice to use the payday loan service and are always informed about the stipulations of the loan.

The payday loan companies have created about 500-600 jobs. Bernie Harrington, a member of the Montana Financial Services Centers and owner of six businesses, stated, “Our clients made good competent decisions about their personal finances.”

Some other arguments against the bill are that payday loan lenders are lenders of last resort and are there to help those with jobs who have unexpected financial problems and only need to borrow a couple hundred dollars.

The committee has not yet voted on the bill. While supporters may feel like eliminating or greatly capping their payday loan capabilities will help, it will only cause citizens to lose their jobs and take away a reliable lending outlet. Payday loans are available to those who need short-term financial help and will hopefully be seen as the great service it is.

You can either do your taxes yourself or you can go through Check City's tax services.  With money as tight as it is and the economy getting increasingly worse it is time that you saved yourself more money and taxes are one of the ways that you can do that.  If you get as frustrated as the normal citizen does when doing their taxes then it time to let some one else do it.

Check City's tax services specialists are experienced veterans of the tax world and have seen all different types of situations.  Since tax law is always changing and complicated besides, it helps to have someone on you side that understands how it works.  Why do it yourself when it can be done, quickly, efficiently  and without any significant effort on your part.

At the very least, if you have any interest whatsoever in taking advantage of these tax services then call Check City or visit and ask the tax specialist themselves roughly how much money they could save you.  You might be surprised at how much money you could get back.

Come down to Check City and see how we make our customers lives easier providing tax services that are both helpful and easy to understand.

The restriction of payday loans in Washington is gaining some traction in the State Legislature this year. There are at least nine bills in the House and others in the Senate. Some are not that bad, only restricting loans to 30% of a borrowers income, and others are awful, restricting APR on loans to 12%.

Rep. Sherry Appleton (D-Poulsbo) introduced the harshest bill. Her bill would cap APR on payday loans at 12%. In her words, "It's time to do something, we can't wait. The economic times are bad." So the solution is to make them worse?

MoneyTree, a payday lender, employs 850 people in the state of Washington. Putting them all out of work to protect morons from borrowing irresponsibly is going to help the economic times? Economic prosperity only happens when the government allows us to succeed and to fail.

The Olympian anecdotally refers to Jeanne Henderson. She and her daughter became homeless and turned to payday loans to help cover clothes, food and shelter. It started as a $300 loan. Then it became simultaneous loans from two different lenders that ballooned into over $2,000 she owed back.

Again, is the problem here the payday loan? Or could it perhaps be the sheer ignorance of borrowing money when you are homeless that you have no way of paying back? For every Jeanne Henderson there are 99 responsible borrowers who payback that $300 loan, plus the $45 in fees, on time.

Let's see what happens with a 12% APR cap. That translates to 1% per month. So for a two week loan, you're looking at 0.5% in interest. Simply put, if you borrowed $100 for two weeks, you would only have to pay back $100.50. That's a whopping fifty cents in fees.

How can anyone make a living offering such loans? Let's look more closely at how interest and term work together.

Suppose you want to buy a house. The bank agrees to fund your loan for 30 years at 6% interest. This is very common for a home mortgage. Now, at 6% per year, times thirty years, that's 180% paid in interest.

So if you buy a $200,000 house, you have to pay back $560,000. That's because 180% of 200,000 is 360,000. So add the interest plus the principal and you've got how much you pay back. Granted, these are broken up into monthly payments which would be about $1,500.

Now let us examine a payday loan. Suppose you need $200. The payday lender agrees to give you the money for 14 days at 365% APR. Simple math tells us that 365% over one year translates to 1% per day. So over the 14 day term, you pay 1% per day in interest. That means after 14 days, you pay back $228, or 14% of the loan in interest.

Ok, this is a complicated math question, but which is greater, 180% or 14%? So you see, the APR means absolutely nothing when not put into the context of the term. You should be more interested in how much you pay in interest at the end of the term of the loan.

Sherry Appleton and other legislators ignorantly criticize payday loans and use uneducated borrowers like Jeanne Henderson to prove their point. They ignore the mountains of evidence that show payday loans aren't driving people into bankruptcy. Hopefully other legislators don't get caught up in this fanatical lynch mob out to ban payday loans.

A money order is a payment order for a pre-specified amount of money.  Many people don't like to use, or even have, personal checks, and many businesses won't accept them.  However, money orders are accepted by most businessess, government agencies, or banks.

 Money orders also provide an easy way to send money through the mail.  In more recent years it has been a little more risky to send personal checks through the mail, and pretty much ridiculous to send cash.  Getting a money order can be an easy solution to this problem.  

 Check City provides this service for no charge!  To get a money order through Check City, you simply have to stop by one of your local stores and a representative will help you.  The money order is purchased for a specific amount.  Another reason that money orders are so widely accepted is because it is prepaid,   Businesses won't have to worry about a bounced check or declined card, etc. 

Check City works with Western Union to get you this service.  Money orders provide an easy, reliable way to make purchases or pay bills.

The Center for Responsible Lending is a group against predatory lending that is fixated with banning payday loans. The idea of such an organization is a good one, but what about a Center for Responsible Borrowing? Oddly enough, a Google search of this term brings up the Center for Responsible Lending as the first search result.

The website for CRL is just classic. They say their research shows that payday loans are designed to keep people in debt, not provide one time assistance. But then they quote their own research as showing that borrowers who receive five or more loans a year account for over 90% of a payday lender's business.

So are we to understand that these loan shars, these predators, these evil payday lenders are only making 10% of their business from people getting 4 loans or less in a year? What about all this business from the borrower who is perpetually in debt? Isn't that how these terrible establishments make all their money? Guess not...

They then go on to say that payday loans cost Americans $4.2 billion in fees each year. The last figure I saw from the New York Times had payday loans reaching a total of $28 billion per year. So borrowers pay exactly 15% of their loan in fees.

That means if I borrow $100, I will pay back $115. But what about these 400% annual percentage rates! Aren't they just so completely unacceptable? Turns out it is easier to measure the length of a staple in millimeters than miles; meaning, why measure the interest rate of a two week loan in years?

Of course 400% APR sounds like a lot, but when you're dealing with two weeks instead of fifty two weeks, it makes a difference. You would think a group that focuses entirely on lending would understand that one...

My favorite are their poster child borrowers. Earl Millford, for example, appeared in the New York Times. Each month he had to travel 30 miles to 16 different payday lenders to pay off interest alone! What a terrible tragedy!

One- why on God's green earth did someone get SIXTEEN payday loans before paying off the first! Two- rollover laws prevent lenders from charging interest after 12 weeks. After that, all payments count toward principal. Three- SIXTEEN different loans....unbelievable. You don't ban payday lenders from lending, you ban people like this from borrowing!

If we had a Center for Responsible Borrowing, perhaps people like Millford would have known better. Perhaps they would have understood that you pay off a loan before you get another one. Perhaps thousands of people in payday loan debt across the country wouldn't be if they had just known to borrow less.

But no, CFL insists on regulating payday lenders out of business. Why? To protect people, of course. Because it is the government's job to protect us all from any possible potentially stupid thing we could ever do...like borrowing way more than we should.

People die in car crashes, do we ban automobiles? People drown in water, do we ban boating? People die from dog attacks, do we ban dog ownership? The whole idea that banning payday loans is to protect people is totally bogus.

Payday loans, like cars, help people out. Most people use them responsibly. Yes, like cars, they have the capacity to be abused and misused. They are capable of doing harm and good. But let's be honest- banks and credit unions wnat payday loans banned so that they can compete in the short-term loan market.

So just say no to a ban on payday loans. Let's educate people about their options, not limit them.

Our current credit crunch and financial crisis has brought upon us a new way of thinking about money in the form of prepaid debit cards. Credit card debt has been getting people into problems for years. People have had enough and are turning to prepaid Visa cards to help.

A prepaid Visa debit card functions much like your ordinary credit card. The card can be used at merchant locations across the world where Visa is accepted. Cards can also be used to make purchases online or over the phone.

But the biggest advantage is that you cannot go into debt with these cards. Since they are prepaid, you can only spend as much money as you load onto the card. There are thousands of retail locations where prepaid cards can be loaded. They can even be loaded online via your already existing bank account!

Check City is proud to offer prepaid Visa debit cards as one of our many versatile financial products. The Cash-In Card is a great alternative to credit cards. If you have found yourself trapped in the debt cycle of credit cards, then ditch them and switch to prepaid. Check City can help!

Just come into any of our store locations and you can receive your card in less than five minutes. All you need is a valid ID and a social security number or Driver's License and you are good to go! Come in today and start enjoying the benefits of a prepaid debit card!