Second Chance payday loans

Brenda Woods did not want to move and leave the garden she had tended for some 40 years. But the roof on the manufactured home that she and her husband Larry had shared all those years was falling in, and their bank would not give them a loan to buy a replacement home.

Brenda is still tending her garden, though, thanks to a loan the couple received from the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). It allowed the Woods to replace their home with a new, safe and affordable energy-efficient manufactured home.

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Nearly 700 families were able to finance homes through the Community Loan Fund, which won a .5 million award from the Wells Fargo NEXT Awards for Opportunity Finance for expansion of an innovative financing program for manufactured housing mortgage loans. The NEXT Awards recognize innovative CDFIs that responsibly serve low-income and low-wealth people and communities.

Community Development Financial Institutions, which include banks, credit unions, loan and venture funds, are making loans where others may fear to tread. “We are looking for those loan opportunities that are most likely to play a transformational role in someone’s life, especially someone low income and low wealth, ” says Mark Pinsky President and CEO of Opportunity Finance Network, a national network of CDFIs.

Interesting facts

• Payday loans in Australia are part of the small loans market, which was estimated in 2008 to be between $800m and $1bn a year, although it seems likely that the true market was and currently is higher than this.
  The growth of this market mirrors the growth in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Because the market for small loans...
• The Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) is a nonprofit organization non-partisan research and policy group based in Durham, North Carolina and with offices in Washington DC and Oakland, Calif. Its purpose is to educate the public about financial products and to push for policies that curb predatory lending. On its website and elsewhere, CRL...