youthmoney

There aren’t many options for low-income households wanting to borrow money. Credit unions are a very  good choice. Their loans are designed to be affordable. Members can be encouraged to save as they make repayments. Some unions offer financial education and other support. Loan sharks are disastrous. Their loans are illegal, very expensive and very [...]

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Want to help young people compare the cost of borrowing? Lenderscompared.org.uk is a brilliant new site that does just that. It’s paid for by the largest home credit companies, but operated independently by consumer organisations, including the National Consumer Council, Association of British Credit Unions, the Consumer Credit Association. I just tried it. I imagined [...]

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Next week is national credit union youth week. It’s an awareness-raising education thing, for young people. About credit unions, obviously. Slight problem, in that it is in the US of A. First thought is that it would be good to have one here in the UK. But perhaps it would be too limiting to target [...]

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A young mother borrowed £1,000 from a doorstep lender to pay for furniture. Two years later she had repaid the company £3,800 at a rate of £159 a month. She still owed £600. Hers was one of the case studies featured recently at an event hosted by Leeds City Credit Union. The credit union gave [...]

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A couple of weeks ago there was an odd headline in the Guardian’s Money section: “Collapse leaves savers penniless”. The story told of Streetcred, a Manchester credit union, which went bust with debts thought to be around £500,000. “Like the collapse of Farepak last year those hit include savers who fear they will be unable [...]

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A lot of people don’t know what a credit union is. It’s not surprising. There aren’t that many. Only one in a hundred of the adult population in the UK belongs to one. And they don’t get a lot of publicity. Credit unions are non-profit making, co-operative financial institutions, founded on the principle of self-help, [...]

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