Selling finance

We are always being informed in the media just how easy it is to dig yourself into a very deep financial hole with easy money lending schemes, and last night this was illustrated to me in a phone call.

On sunday evening I was browsing t'interweb looking at finance sites with a view to borrowing about £8000 for a caravan, sorry, holiday home, purchase. The bank sites were on the whole very helpful giving online approximate repayment figures for any term that you chose. It was still very easy to click "proceed" to actually submit an application but I'd hope that at that point the checking and dilligence process would come into play, humans would get involved and a computer wouldn't just send you £8000 tomorrow - I'd hope that is how it works anyway.

But I happened to browse upon another web site that simply promised to organise loans for any purpose, I'd never heard of them and they seemed to be just "fixers" referring you to other loan providers. I started to fill in the first bits then got bored and logged out.

Last night (monday) I got a phone call at home from a chap from the aforementioned loan fixers who wanted to know what I wanted the money for, could he help, etc etc. With nothing to lose I explained what the loan was for and he went away to search my credit history.

Five minutes later he came back and offered me a loan of £25,500.

I explained that I really only wanted £8000, and that was only a "possible" and not a "definite", but he'd seen some old loans and guarantees for the business on my credit history and decided that maybe I'd like to "wrap them all up into one loan".

Apart from the fact that one of the loans was no longer in existance and another loan was actually in the business name and is completed in November of this year, he seemed convinced that it would be a great idea if I "wrapped all this up" with the holiday home loan and spent the next seven years paying a sum which would be in excess of my current mortgage back to his company.

It would be so easy to just say yes.

Especially as the sum of £25500 would buy you a superb "holiday home" after you'd paid off the credit cards.

I didn't say "yes", but its easy to see how people, and not stupid people either, could be seduced by such offers and find that in a couple of years time when they apply for a simple store card or want to remortgage to a cheaper deal that their credit history suddenly looks very grim with a massive £25500 loan against their name.

Its frighteningly easy.