Leadpile’s Blog

We all hear the opinions on both sides regarding payday loans. I came across this scenario that really points out the similarities of taking out a short term payday loan and renting a car. According to Ohioans For Financial Freedom commercial (youtube video),

Renting a car can cost about $29.00 per day. But imagine if the government required the rental company to quote an annualized cost of $10,585!

It’s just like the government saying that a $100 emergency loan costs $391 for the entire year, when it only costs $15 for two weeks. If you only need the loan for two weeks.—the yearly rate is absurd.

Leadpile Lead Exchange deals a lot with payday loans, the consumers wanting them and the lenders wanting to provide the loan for them. This scenario I found really makes it a little bit easier to understand the comparison amongst payday loans to something like a credit card or a rental car. There is bad in everything if it is abused. There is a need for short term loans sometimes, and a payday loan is a reasonable loan to take out for that short term need.

In today’s world there are many things that have changed in a advertising sense. One of the largest changes that has happened is in the way in which advertisers advertise towards women. There are more women in the career role, running a business and buying high priced items for their home. I found this article on Phoenix Business Journal very interesting. For instance, they stated:

*Women business owners spend $1.5 trillion on business purchases.
*In today’s world, age is less important than life stage, e.g., 60-year-old women are dating, 50-year-olds are starting new careers and 40-year-olds are having children.
*Women purchase (or influence the purchase of) 85 percent of all consumer goods including automobiles, investments and computers, which were traditionally viewed as male-domain items.
*Advertising that makes a woman feel uncomfortable about her looks or health will have a hard time reaching an audience willing to purchase its product.

More businesses are realizing these facts and starting to adjust how they market their products online, through television, and print media. In previous years, selling your product or service was something you had to appeal to a man, however as we can see things are changing.
With the Leadpile Lead Exchange we deal with all sorts of lead types and all sorts of demographics of consumers and advertisers. The key for our marketplace to be effective is not only diversify what lead types we are working with, but also understand that publishers doing effective marketing to generate the leads is really important. To do effective lead generation, you must know details about the product and service you are generating leads for, AND you must understand who are the potential people you need to attract in this market.

GM is speaking out and getting the facts straight to the public.  Check out this site: http://gmfactsandfiction.com it allows you to write the “myth” you heard and they will provide the “facts”.   

I was reading today that GM is closing four factories.  Although it has not been determined if that’s 100% accurate, many speculate that it is.  GM has announced that they are closing the Janesville Wisconsin factory.  Shutting down doors for approximately 1,200 workers, December 23rd 2008. The other potential factories, looking at their doors closing, are the ones located in Ohio, Ontario, and Mexico.  

Shares dropped horrifically for GM over the last few days. In an attempt to save money, GM is looking at a few avenues to save money. They are looking at closing down factories that focus specifically on GM’s big trucks such as the Tahoe, Suburban and Yukon. This is a way that GM believes will be lucrative in the long run.  GM has confirmed that they are not going to file for bankruptcy.

What do you think?  Do you think GM has an opportunity to come back from this nightmare?  

With all the demand for autos to become more eco-friendly, high performance AND attractive looking, Tesla Motors feels like they have what people are maybe looking for. This high demanded car is the Tesla Roadster. The battery operated car is a 2 seater sports car that you can customize fully. Unfortunately, the price tag is not affordable to most consumers at $109,000. According to their website, there is a 12 month wait to get one built. Their goal is to roll out a 4 door sedan at around $60, 000, which is much higher then the GM’s sedan (Volt)they will be rolling out in 2010. GM is estimating the cost of their battery operated sedan to be around $40,000. I will say there is a very interesting fact about the chairman of Tesla Motors, and that is that he was the co-founder of Paypal. Time will tell if this Silicon Valley start-up can get the auto world headed in the right direction towards a more eco-friendly world.
Leadpile Lead Exchange generates a lot of auto finance leads. Unfortunately, I am not sure we are going to come across advertisers/dealers in our marketplace able to provide this new beauty…..yet. However, we do welcome any company able to generate auto finance leads!

I could not believe my eyes when I saw this article on Yahoo. According to the Associated Press, a Michigan home sold to a women for $1.75 on Ebay. There were 8 others that had a bid on this home, however this Chicago women won out with her under $2.00 bid. It appears there is some work to be done on the home and some back taxes, however no matter how you look at it, it is a GREAT deal.
The sad thing in all this is that someone lived in this home and unfortunately lost their home. The women that purchased the home has not even seen the home, and has no intentions on living there. With what is happening in today’s economy, this is bound to be happening more. At one point or another hopefully Ebay will be more known for it’s bid environment on products, not homes. Time shall tell.
Leadpile Lead Exchange is also a bid environment where we match the buyers and sellers of leads. Fortunately, we will not be matching up someone who lost their home to a buyer for $1.75.

With today’s news about Wachovia Bank being purchased by Citigroup, this leaves pretty much 3-4 major banks out there now. For instance, there is Wells Fargo Bank, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America. According to Business Week, this could mean the cost of taking care of your money, or getting new loans could cost consumers more money. “The larger the bank is, theoretically the more power they have to set pricing and other policies,” said Nancy Atkinson, senior analyst at Aite Group, a financial services research firm. “I expect we’ll start to see free checking accounts start to disappear, and rates on overdrafts could go up. Savings rates could drop, Business Week says.” Also, things such as customer service and answering questions, could be a little hard to get taken care of with these new consolidation of banks. Therefore, those that are maybe wondering how this bank consolidation affected them… maybe soon will see.
Will all these changes cause industries such as payday loans to become more popular, because consumers getting loans with their banks won’t happen as easily? Time will tell how this will affect Leadpile Lead Exchange and the types of leads we are bringing in.

The quality of leads in a lead exchange is one of the most important factors in making the exchange work. Leadpile Lead Exchange currently allows 48 hours for a lead buyer to return a lead for bad contact information. Our quality control department is there to provide feedback from the leads being returned to the business development department. If there is any sort of consistency with bad quality, the issue will be addressed individually with the lead seller/publisher.
However, how does a lead company potentially deal with lead quality if they do not allow returns?
According to the Leadcritic, Lower My Bills has not allowed leads to be returned for some time. However, they incorporate an expected return rate into the cost of the leads. Do you think this is as affective as companies allowing returns?
Each lead company is different on the time frame they allow leads to be returned, and that is another question to address. What is a fair amount of time to allow a lead buyer to return a lead? Is it maybe simplified to do things the LMB way, and just incorporate the cost of potential lead returns into the cost of the leads?
Leadpile Lead Exchange believes that hearing the feedback of the buyers – good and bad – is crucial for us to make this marketplace work effectively. If we do not get feedback from our lead buyers, we don’t know how to fix a “problem” that we might have. We LOVE feedback… good and bad!

I thought it’s interesting to see how the banks are going down… Everyone’s attention is shifting towards the Wall Street, banking and how the bailout is going to turn out. We definitely have to speak out, and please, if you have something to say about this, respond to the post.

Even though Chase is not in “trouble”, I guess they are running into some issues with their site. For few hours their website was down:

We all know the payday loan industry gets a lot of scrutiny for it’s “high interest” rates, however I found this article very interesting about the annual percentage rate (APR) on returned checks.
According to The Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA), “the median interest rate on bounce protection loans to be in excess of twenty times that of payday loans.” When a consumer bounces a check, in essence it could be a lot more expensive for them to do that, than go get a short term payday loan. When a consumer bounces the check they pay a certain fee, and that fee is accumulated daily until the funds are sufficient. Unfortunately, this could sometimes cause a snowball affect, being that charge after charge could lead to more insufficient funds.
Payday loans might not be the only alternative, however a consumer needs to really look at the overall picture. They need to try and determine how they can prevent this sort of situation from happening again. Banks will make their money on fees, however there are certain circumstances that happen where you should look at alternatives that might cost you less in the long run.. like a payday loan, borrowing the money etc.
Leadpile Lead Exchange works with various lead types that deal with helping consumers be matched up with financial institutions to provide that service. Unfortunately, not all consumers reach out for help, and in turn get deeper and deeper in a “hole”. There are resources out there such as the payday loan that can be very helpful in trying times.

How many of you read the fine print at the bottom of your credit card or loan applications? I know I don’t always do that, and I am learning that maybe we ALL need to pay closer attention to the fine print of agreements we sign. The reason we want to make sure and do this is with a practice called “universal default”. According to Bankrate.com, if you are late to ANYONE (lenders) you have the potential of having your interest rate adjust really high, potentially affecting your payment amounts, and maybe even affect your credit. Bankrate states that the complaints about this happening is increasing because more and more customers are feeling the affects of it. In years past some credit card companies and lenders would not implement this practice. However, with tougher times affecting all businesses, they are resorting to “old” practices such as universal default.
An example of this would be if you had a debt owed to creditor A, and you fell 30 days late on it. Creditor A could call up creditor B to inform them that you fell behind on their debt. Because of what creditor A said, creditor B (who you are currently paying on time) could increase the interest rate you are being charged. This is legal because of the tiny print in your creditor agreement where it talks about universal default. Basically it gives the creditors a right to adjust the interest rate on any of your creditors if you are 30 days or more late on another one. In years past this provision was in loan agreements, but not always enforced.
Word to the wise….. read all the fine print and ask lots of questions before doing any new loans or debts.
Leadile Lead Exchange can help those customers that maybe get in the situation where they get behind on their accounts, because of situations like this.

Have you joined the texting revolution? If you haven’t, you are behind the times. Some surprising numbers have been released, and I cannot believe how much texting is going on. How many text messages do you believe were sent this year in the month of June? Would you believe 75 billion? Last June, 29 billion were sent, so texting has increased by 160%. Mobile data revenues for the first half of the year rose to $14.8 billion which is up 40% from last year. Mobile data now accounts for one-fifth of all mobile revenues.

Now a word of caution to advertisers — don’t just start sending a bunch of text messages. Recent studies indicate that internet users that have opted in to receive marketing messages, do not want to receive those messages via text. Only 1% of this group prefers to receive marketing text messages. It is important to use marketing text messages where appropriate, and most importantly, welcomed by mobile users.

We all say…. ” I would never get a payday loan”, however do you realize who the standard payday loan customer really is? According to paydayfacts.org, there are some common factors about those taking out a payday loan.

1. The majority of payday advance customers earn between $25,000 and $50,000 annually.
2. Sixty-eight percent are under 45 years old and only 4 percent are over the age of 65.
3. Ninety-four percent have a high school diploma or better, and 56 percent have some college or a degree.
4. Forty-two percent own their own homes.
5. The majority are married and 64 percent have children in the household.
6. One hundred percent have steady incomes and active bank accounts, because both are required to receive a payday loan.

Do any of these statistics surprise you? At one point of another we will all go through some sort of hardship, and potentially a payday loan or other short term loan might be your saving grace.
Leadpile Lead Exchange understands there are many people who need a little extra “help”, in receiving a payday loan. We generate thousands of payday loan leads each day, and these people I am sure really need the assistance.