Lunchtime Short Term Loans Being Sought By Many

A sandwich or salad many not be enough as many professionals turn to arranging lunchtime loans to sort our their urgent cash flow problems or to get a time-sensitive bargain.

Hundreds of thousands of professionals are turning to Wonga.com during their lunch hour as a means of sorting out urgent cash flow needs or bagging time-sensitive bargains.

New data from the online short term loans lender Wonga.com show that so far this year more than 200,000 applications have been received between 12pm and 2pmfrom people in full-time employment – a rate that’s 50% higher than other times of the day, with the peak being at 1.15PM most days.

Wonga.com offers loans of between £1 and £400 for up to a month and the speed, convenience and flexibility of their online service makes it the ideal way to apply for a “lunchtime loan”, as the new phenomenon is being called.

It seems office workers are using lunchtime loans both to meet short-term cashflow needs, saving the need to queue in a bank branch or listen to call centre hold music, and to take advantage of time-sensitive offers online, such as those on eBay or for tickets for travel or events.

Errol Damelin, founder and CEO of Wonga.com, said: “There is a new generation of hard working people who are no longer interested in spending their lunch hour meeting bank managers or explaining their financial situation to a call centre worker.

“Our focus has always been to offer a simple, fast and transparent service, giving customers the ability to borrow what they want, when they want. They can also see a clear, upfront cost and repay early at any time.”

He added: “To do this in minutes we developed the world’s only fully automated loan processing technology, which crunches thousands of pieces of information about every applicant and means we make the most responsible decisions possible.

“The speed and convenience this internet technology enables means we’re attracting customers away from the high street banks and less than a quarter of our customers have previously used an equivalent short-term or online loan .”

MoneyHighStreet comments: “The average decision time on a loan from Wonga.com is just a few seconds, beating even the 2 minutes or so for payday loans for example.

With many people turning to a short term loan, whether it’s a service as offered by Wonga.com or such as PayDay Bank, ensure you are in control of your borrowing and are in a position to pay back your loan as agreed.

The big plus for most is the fast access to cash but to achieve this the interest rates are high. For example on just checking on Wonga the representative APR is 4214% and for PayDay Bank it is 1737% (variable). You must be clear in your mind that the speed of access to cash means that it is worth you paying such rates.

Remember too that a short term loan is not a solutions to financial problems. While they can tide you over an unexpected hurdle, if you’re slipping into debt it could be time to seek help.

Of course, using the cash to get a good travel deal or some concert tickets may well be worth the cost – but you still have to make the repayments!