Who’s your lender?

TUNDE OYEDOYIN   

Tunde Oyedoyin is a London-based personal finance coach and founder of Money Intelligence Coaching Academy, a specialist academy of personal finance. He can be reached as follows: +447846089587 (WhatsApp only); E-mail: tu5oyed@gmail.com

“FCCPC Fumes, as loan apps violate regulation amidst rising payment defaults,” was among the stories that caught the eye in the Guardian of Tuesday, February 6th. Will come back to why Adamu Abdullahi and his crew at the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) are not happy with this crop of lenders. Come with me.

It’s no longer news that the costs of living are going up like umbrellas do when it’s rainy. But unlike umbrellas, they don’t seem to be coming down and neither do the harsh economic climate look promising. In other words, the rate of inflation seems to fancy going north.

Coupled with that, employers are not necessarily increasing what they’re paying out as wages and salaries to their workforce. That’s leaving many people short of money and therefore playing catch up with meeting their living costs.

If you then mix the current situation with the availability of easy access to digitally borrowed money, it then becomes clear why many hard pressed Nigerians are taking shelter in the arms of “cowboy digital lenders” through their apps.

Talking of rain, as King Odewale said while addressing the people of ‘Kutuje’ in the late Ola Rotimi’s “The Gods Are Not To Blame”, rain falls on whosoever it sees. The same can be said of inflation. Though the effects might be different, nobody and nowhere is out of reach.

Yours truly felt the long arm of citizen inflation a couple of weeks ago, when grabbing a copy of the Mail on Sunday from a branch of WH Smith. As it turned out, my card was debited £2.10, instead of last year’s price of £2. But thankfully, the cost of a McDonald’s tea is still the same. It was still ninety nine pence as at last Friday, when I was at my usual outlet in West London to unwind with a medium size cup of the thing, while on the road to work.

But seriously, the rising cost of living has pushed many people to the doorsteps of cowboy digital lenders. According to the Guardian story referenced in the opening, FCCPC isn’t happy with the way the loan apps providers are operating. These cowboy lenders are using unscrupulous and unethical means to demand for the repayment of their monies from borrowers.

While yours truly won’t be painting all digital lenders with the same brush, it is very important to know who’s behind the organisation you want to borrow money from. Irrespective of how hard pressed you may be for cash, and how easy it is to apply for a loan on your phone, take the time to not just know who that lender is, but how long they’ve been in business. Better be sure they’re not going to be pressurising or intimidating you to pay back their money if you default.

As for me, I’ll rather stick with old fashioned high street banks and others, like microfinance institutions. Simply put, irrespective of how much of a battering you’re taking as a result of the prevailing economic crisis, don’t go asking for a loan to pay your children’s school fees from some unscrupulous lenders that make money available at the touch of a button on your phone.

Be good to your mother. Ordinarily, you would expect everyone to be good to their parents. But it seems you can’t take that to the bank anymore.

According to a short story in the Metro newspaper of January 29th (p.9), the offspring of an elderly Chinese woman couldn’t be bothered to visit her when she was ill.

As a result, the Shanghai citizen “has left her £2.2 million fortune to her pets – after changing her will to leave out her children.” As it turned out, madam Liu said it was her “cats and dogs” who “gave her constant affection,” during that time of her life.

Here’s the thing. Even if you have figured out that your parents don’t have anything to their name and won’t therefore be leaving anything behind for you, it is still in everyone’s interests to visit their parents, especially when they’re sick.

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