Life provides small emergencies that can strike at any time and when they find you without a ready supply of cash, these small emergencies can loom large. Say your transmission went out on your car or the dishwasher has suddenly gone silent while your credit cards are maxed out. What do you do? You may be in the market for a personal loan.
Personal loans, once a tiny part of lending institutions’ portfolios, are growing in significance and now make up more than twenty percent of non-mortgage loans. Loans in the order of one to two thousand dollars were not very popular with financial institutions who tend to favor credit cards. Pay off a personal loan after your emergency subsides and you may be lost forever to the issuing bank. Credit card customers tend to stick around longer.
Credit cards as short term loans are risky business for consumers as we tend to make the minimum payment, locking ourselves in for n extended period of time and extended interest payments. On the other hand, personal unsecured loans have fixed pay-off periods and (usually) lower interest rates.