By Antoinette Siu, CALmatters
When phone bank worker Melissa Mendez, age 26, felt financially squeezed a few months ago —“I was short on cash and needed to pay rent”— she walked into a Cash 1 storefront in Sacramento and took out a payday loan. The annual interest rate: 460 percent.
That rate would shock a lot of people. Not Mendez, who once worked behind the counter at an outpost of the lending giant Advance America. She had fielded applications for short-term loans from all sorts of people: seniors needing more money because their Social Security check wasn’t cutting it, people in between jobs and waiting for a first paycheck, and people like herself, lacking enough savings to get to the end of the month.
Read the complete story at CALmatters.
