The check arrived out of the blue, issued in his
name for $1,200, a mailing from a consumer finance company. Stephen
Huggins eyed it carefully.A loan, it said. Smaller type said the interest rate would be 33 percent.
Way too high, Huggins thought. He put it aside.
A
week later, though, his 2005 Chevy pickup was in the shop, and he
didn’t have enough to pay for the repairs. He needed the truck to get to
work, to get the kids to school. So Huggins, a 56-year-old heavy
equipment operator in Nashville, fished the check out that day in April
2017 and cashed it.Within a year, the company,
Mariner Finance, sued Huggins for $3,221.27. That included the original
$1,200, plus an additional $800 a company representative later persuaded
him to take, plus hundreds of dollars in processing fees, insurance and
other items, plus interest. It didn’t matter that he’d made a few
payments already.“It
would have been cheaper for me to go out and borrow money from the
mob,” Huggins said before his first court hearing in April.Most
galling, Huggins couldn’t afford a lawyer but was obliged by the loan
contract to pay for the company’s. That had added 20 percent — $536.88 —
to the size of his bill.“They really got me,” Huggins said.
Mass-mailing
checks to strangers might seem like risky business, but Mariner Finance
occupies a fertile niche in the U.S. economy. The company enables some
of the nation’s wealthiest investors and investment funds to make money
offering high-interest loans to cash-strapped Americans.Mariner
Finance is owned and managed by a $11.2 billion private equity fund
controlled by Warburg Pincus, a storied New York firm. The president of
Warburg Pincus is Timothy F. Geithner, who, as treasury secretary in the
Obama administration, condemned predatory lenders.
‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans
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