{"id":3128,"date":"2013-04-12T08:02:08","date_gmt":"2013-04-12T13:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mdmproofing.com\/iym\/weblog\/?p=3128"},"modified":"2013-04-11T20:02:33","modified_gmt":"2013-04-12T01:02:33","slug":"turn-small-loans-savings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mdmproofing.com\/iym\/weblog\/2013\/04\/turn-small-loans-savings\/","title":{"rendered":"Employers Turn Small Loans Into Savings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Now here&#8217;s a PBS video which I think illustrates at once a horrific concept, and a fabulous one:<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"article-video\">PBS: <a href=\"http:\/\/video.pbs.org\/video\/2364991049\" target=\"_blank\">Savings and Loans: Employer Plans Encourage Saving<\/a> (~12 minutes)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s horrific? People borrowing money from their employers. Now, if your employer&#8217;s a bank, then hey, fine, whatever; it&#8217;s what they do. When all hell blows up on them, taxpayers pick up the tab, and no one much gives a crap after a year or so. (Especially if the stock market is tagging record highs.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Outside of that, if your employer isn&#8217;t a bank or similar, then they shouldn&#8217;t be in the business of making loans.<\/strong> Just my opinion. That&#8217;s what banks, credit unions, pawn shops, check-advancers, and your neighborhood loan shark are for. Though of course it&#8217;s the employers&#8217; money, and they can do with it what they want. (In the video, the employer is more &#8220;facilitating&#8221; the loans than they are &#8220;making&#8221; them. The loans are actually made by local credit unions, with interest rates in the 17 percent range.)<\/p>\n<p>In my modest personal experience, watching how these sorts of employer-as-lender policies are treated in workplaces, I&#8217;ve found that even when these loans turn out well, they tend to be used by the same folks again, and again, and again. Maybe I&#8217;m wrong, but I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s the goal.<\/p>\n<h3>The Part I Applaud<\/h3>\n<p>In the video, we&#8217;re told that the employers in question made an interesting policy tweak: Loan payments are withheld directly from employees&#8217; paychecks over time, and once the loans are paid back, the <strong>default option is for employees to continue having those same amounts withheld, but deposited into savings accounts so that they begin building savings.<\/strong> Employees can opt out of this &#8220;forced&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mdmproofing.com\/iym\/babysteps.html\">Baby Step #1<\/a>, of course, but most (we&#8217;re told) do not.<\/p>\n<p>This part of the plan, I adore. <\/p>\n<p>By the time the loan is paid back, I&#8217;d imagine that you as employee would have at least a decent chance of realizing that you really COULD live without that small chunk of your paycheck. It wasn&#8217;t so hard, was it? Lo and behold, the saving you thought you could NEVER EVER do turns out to be achievable &#8212; cold, hard cash in a bank account. When the next little emergency pops up, perhaps you&#8217;ve got it covered. <\/p>\n<p>(Though I&#8217;d argue that the peace of mind savings provides is probably worth as much as the actual money itself. And the less someone has experienced actual &#8220;saving,&#8221; the more important that peace of mind is.)<\/p>\n<p>Given the context that&#8217;s presented in the PBS video, I might be willing to revisit my &#8220;Employers shouldn&#8217;t be making loans&#8221; stance. I could see where both parties really could benefit from such an arrangement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now here&#8217;s a PBS video which I think illustrates at once a horrific concept, and a fabulous one: PBS: Savings and Loans: Employer Plans Encourage Saving (~12 minutes) What&#8217;s horrific? People borrowing money from their employers. Now, if your employer&#8217;s a bank, then hey, fine, whatever; it&#8217;s what they do. When all hell blows up [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,64,55,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-debt","category-saving","category-short-term-loans","category-working"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Employers Turn Small Loans into Savings<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.mdmproofing.com\/iym\/weblog\/2013\/04\/turn-small-loans-savings\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Employers Turn Small Loans into Savings\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Now here&#8217;s a PBS video which I think illustrates at once a horrific concept, and a fabulous one: PBS: Savings and Loans: Employer Plans Encourage Saving (~12 minutes) What&#8217;s horrific? 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When all hell blows up [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.mdmproofing.com\/iym\/weblog\/2013\/04\/turn-small-loans-savings\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Money Musings\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-04-12T13:02:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Michael\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Michael\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" 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