Astra Taylor
Aug 3, 2016
“Leah Knight, a single mother who works from home in the college town of Athens, told me that she got trapped in a ballooning installment loan from a company called Security Finance, which has storefronts throughout the South. She originally borrowed three hundred and eighty-five dollars, in November of 2014. Across eight months, she paid the company a total of six hundred dollars, but still owed substantially more than the amount that she had originally borrowed.
Knight was able to get out from under her debt burden only after finding a revolving loan fund called Common Wealth, which is run by the Ark, a small nonprofit in Athens. The program allows borrowers to pay off the original lender in full, then reissues the loan at a manageable three-per-cent rate, in collaboration with a local credit union. Knight called the program a “life saver.””