Kevin Morris12
Active Member
230 messages
joined Mar 2020
You can find a ton of info online regarding Ally and their loans, including copies of the actual paperwork they send out to customers. To put it bluntly: those figures you see advertised on their site—like borrowing $5,000 and paying back $5,097—only apply if you already have a co-signer. But let’s be real: most people turning to these types of lenders don't have one. In those cases, they redirect you to a separate insurance and guarantee firm (which, they claim, has absolutely nothing to do with them) that ends up charging you an average of 60-70% of your principal for their services. Naturally, the longer the repayment term you choose, the higher the interest rate climbs. So, a loan of, say, $667 over 6 months could end up costing you a total of roughly $1067. Out of that, only about 40-$17 (plus the principal, of course) actually goes to Ally Bank, while about $383 goes straight to that guarantee firm they try to distance themselves from.
Yes, it’s a massive amount of money. However, both parties—Ally and that guarantor—lay everything out in black and white in the contract before you ever sign. You get a full repayment schedule, just like when you take out a legitimate loan at a major institution like Chase or Wells Fargo. If someone goes through all of that and knowingly puts their signature on the contract, agreeing to every single condition listed, are they really being defrauded just because they opted for an incredibly expensive loan? I don't think so.
Even though this ends up being an exorbitant amount of cash, I believe it's actually a good thing that these offers exist in the market for people who have no other way to access credit and need it urgently. We can speculate all we want about whether a loan like this will dig an even deeper hole for them, but I truly believe it helps many people in the long run. The key is that the individual needs to be fully aware of what they are signing up for, rather than waking up to the reality only when the bill comes due.