Payday Loan Addiction ... The Challenges And Possible Solutions

This will be primarily an audio blog post this time.  You never know what is going to come back around for you in life.  I went to elementary and junior high school with some great people, and the friendships continue all these years later.  One of them was Steve Fischmann, who went on to UCLA business school, a management career at Levi Strauss, and four years as a New Mexico State Senator.  He now works on a variety of projects including a weekly radio program out of Las Cruces that discusses local issues that seem to pop up pretty much everywhere.

One of the interests Steve and I share is trying to help people free themselves from the trap of payday, car title, and tax refund anticipation loans, as well as other predatory lending practices.  I'm as excited as anyone to see businesses succeed, in fact I've made a career out of helping people turn their business dreams into reality.  But ... as with any right, one's right to operate a business is limited by one's responsibility to not hurt the rights and opportunities of others.  These loans can be as addictive as any substance, as I have learned from hard experience over my 35 year career, as well as from life in general.

Steve did an hour segment of his radio show on this topic today.  His guest for the full day was

Alan Webber, a candidate for New Mexico governor.  He was going to have a second guest as well, but that one didn't show. So my phone call to the show to give an experience grew to being asked to stay for the full show.

If you don't want to listen to the whole thing, here are some highlighted times you can go forward to as you like to these approximate time points:

10:20 I'm introduced.  For 4 minutes we have fun talking about our life long ago and how several of us were into business even as children.

14:30 We move to the main topic, for the first of three discussions that run 7-9 minutes each.

23:20 Commercial break, which runs to 28:00 at which point we have fun for 2 minutes before returning to the topic.

30:00 Second discussion begins.

39:30 Commercial break, which runs to 44:20, followed by about 2 more minutes of recap before 

46:25 beginning the final segment, which runs seven minutes to the end of the show at 53:30.

This is my first time on radio, and listening to myself, I don't know that I have a "radio voice".  Thanks for putting up with that part of it.  But it was fun, and hopefully will lead to some solutions.  Might take a long time, often does, and that's OK.  Tortoise steps forward beat no steps forward every time!

Radio talk show credit:  Thanks to Steve Fischmann, Alan Webber,

http://www.ksnm570.am and feeds.ksnm570.am

Photo credit:  http://www.stockfreeimages.com/p1/payday-loan.html

And for the final word, here's a sixth grade picture with a few of the people Steve talks about on his show.  Steve is on the back row, fourth from the right.  His twin brother Scott is on the left end of the second row.  Brad Bobbs is third from the left on the back row, and I'm standing just to the left of Brad.  If you want to know who the rest of the people are, Peggy Sonoda, who is basically front and center in the plaid skirt, posted this to her Facebook page in 2010 and everyone is identified there.  

Cheerio!