re: #1 SpaceJesus

Only 180%? Man, you must’ve went to a discount lender. I once went to a place, due to a paycheck bouncing incident whacking my budget upside the head, I was staring down the barrel of an annual interest rate of well over 600%. But it was either get the payday advance or run up against my landlord’s eviction process, neither of which are precisely an enviable option to contemplate and yet are very different in end result.

Needless to say, I paid that bugger down as fast as humanly possible. It took me about 3 paycheck cycles to completely winnow things down to zero, but it was a very high priority. (And no. I never did get that check back. They ended up going bankrupt two months later, and I wasn’t on the final list of creditors. Their insurance company, however, was listed first. Go fig.)