Gary Coleman Selling Debt

If you watch any television these days, you cannot have missed all the commercials offering pay day advances. It seems like they run two or three of them during each commercial time out.

The funny thing about these commercials is that they talk like they are actually trying to help people. They explain all the benefits of getting an advance on your next paycheck and how it will help you pay bills and get creditors off your back.

The point that they forget to mention, or omit on purpose, is that these services often leave people worse off than when they started. If you cannot afford to pay your bills this week, how is borrowing money and creating a new monthly payment going to help your situation?

As consumer debt continues to rise in America, there seems to be little action taken to stop the trend. An average household now has over $10000 in credit card debt. How does borrowing more money to pay off bills help with anyone's debt problems?

Instead of having a million commercials offering advance money, why do we not have commercials offering services to truly get people out of debt? The problem lies in that companies do not stand to make any money by helping people get out of debt. Debt is what makes our economy thrive.

Large corporations know that if people only bought what they had money to afford, then no one would every buy anything. Therefore, by continuing to promote heavy spending, businesses are ensuring our future debt.

I saw a glaring example of this last weekend when I saw Gary Coleman hawking a pay day advance company. The funniest thing about it to me was that they offer a loan at 99.25% APR. You don't see this unless you look at the fine print at the end of the commercial.

The example they gave was for a $2600 loan with payments over 42 months. The monthly payment was listed as $216.55, which over the 42 months would turn into $9095.10. That is what people will get for taking a small pay advance to take care of the short term.

If you want to improve your financial standing and plan for the long term, you cannot make uninformed decisions right now. Planning your financial future requires each individual to look at where they are now and where they want to go.

As our economy has weakened over the past few years, we as consumers have been much of the cause. To remedy the current situation we need to stop looking to these quick fix establishments and look toward making smarter financial decisions.

If you are looking for help in improving your financial wellbeing, visit:
http://dollarandsense.net.