A couple of months ago, I did a post on payday loans. Well, they’re back in the news as some people turn to them to help them cope with resetting mortgages. And Newsweek’s Jane Bryant Quinn sheds more light on the sinister nature of payday loans:

The debt spiral isn’t entirely your fault. These loans are designed to be easy to get into but hard to get out of, say three former employees of Check ‘n Go, the nation’s second largest payday chain. … In a phone interview, [William] Harrod spoke of a customer who had paid $8,000 on a repeating $375 loan. "That made the picture clear to me," he said. He quit.

And, a Federal law just went into effect that caps annual rates at 36% for military families (everyone else still pays up to 500%). In Utah, payday loans may no longer be available at all to service members because lenders are refusing to qualify military families because the rate isn’t high enough.