Loans Blog

You can apply for a personal loan for pretty much anything these days - all purposes will be given due consideration by the lender so it's always worth inquiring, even if you think your reason is a little unusual.

Some typical reasons that people take out a personal loan for include funding further education, home improvement, wedding costs, holiday expenses, buying a new car and debt consolidation. There are many, many more purposes for a personal loan too.

Getting a car loan is, thankfully, one of the types of personal loan that is still relatively quick and easy to arrange. In most cases the car will act as security on the loan, just like with a mortgage, so the lender is happy with the associated reduced risk.

Andile Mpambani, from Khayelitsha, is feeling hugely relieved to keep his home after his lender had issued him with a sale of property notice all because his bond installments were paid into the wrong bank account!

He was informed that his house was to be sold on Thursday at 10am, but fortunately a bank error was cleared up before he had to clear out.

The mix up happened simply because he'd been given the wrong account number for a personal loan he had taken out, meaning that his payments had unknowingly been going to the wrong place!

The lesson: Type those numbers in carefully and keep track of your statements to make sure everything is going where it should be!!

You can get a personal loan for just about anything (anything legal, that is!)

The main obstacle to obtaining a loan is not the purpose, but rather your ability to repay the sum you borrow.

So, provided you tell the truth about what the loan is for, and about your current personal financial circumstances, you can't go far wrong.

Gullible teens, who's skin tissue has now morphed with their chairs through Facebook addiction - leaving them with only 'virtual' friends, are being targeted by unscrupulous loan companies plaguing the antisocial networking site with dodgy personal loan ads.

Debt charity, Credit Action, claim that regular loan ads are targeting those with bad credit ratings through the geeky world of Facebook.

They urge these vulnerable individuals, who have lost the basic skills of real human interaction, to report any instances to the Facebook web site.

I remember my grandparents telling me how they were taught really useful home economics skills in school. My experience of this lesson was learning how to make a bland lasagne and care for your tupperware. But they actually learned economics - how to manage the family budget and make your money stretch further etc.

Now, it seems, these skills are dying away with that generation as more and more teenagers and young professionals fail to take seriously the long-term implications of spending money they don't have and embarking on a lifetime of debt through personal loan financing. They appear completely ignorant to even the individual consequences of their borrowing habits, let alone those facing the economy as a whole.

According to the Mortgage Introducer web site, “over half of Britain’s young people are in debt by the time they reach the age of 17 and think overdrafts and credit cards are an easy way to spend more than they can afford, setting a pattern for the rest of their life.”

Is it time for a serious look at the curriculum? Somehow, I don't think raising an army of clueless teens with average lasagne skills is going to eradicate the problem.

It's generally regarded as a good thing that we live in a country where we can arrange a personal loan relatively easily, for virtually any purpose.

However, if you ask Timothy Kenealy, from Surrey, he is unlikely to agree. His 44-year-old wife, Zoe, recently took out a personal loan of £4,500 to have him killed by a hitman!

Mrs Kenealy said the loan was for 'home improvements' - this may have been true, in her opinion, but it's no conventional DIY job. Even more surprising is the fact that she was employed as a 'care worker' at the time!

If the plan had worked, she would have cashed in on her husband's £33,000 life insurance policy. However, the obliging neighbour - Lee Waite, 31 - who took £3,000 from Mrs Kenealy to arrange a hitman, foiled her plans by pocketing the cash.

Thanks to the greed (or compassion?) of Mr Waite, Timothy Kenealy's life was spared from the bullet of a 'Loan Gunman'!