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Traditional Asian Lending Circles Get New Life with Modern Twist

nbcnewssquareFour Asian American-Pacific Islander (AAPI) community-based organizations — in Minnesota, Ohio, Georgia, and Hawaii — will be expanding a national network of organizations offering Lending Circles, also called rotating credit and savings associations, thanks to a grant from the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development (National CAPACD), putting a traditional practice into wider modern circulation.

by Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

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Are Banks Too Expensive?

New-York-Times-Social-LogoIT was a slow afternoon at Check Center, the check casher/payday lender in a storefront on a busy corner in downtown Berkeley, Calif., where I worked as a teller. My manager, Joe, and I were both dressed in red polo shirts embroidered with the Check Center logo. Joe took advantage of the lull to tell me how to sell prepaid cards — reloadable cash cards that operate like debit cards but aren’t linked to a bank account — to customers.’

by: Lisa Servon

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Lending Circles Weave Disadvantaged Borrowers into Credit Mainstream

nerdwallet logoTwo years ago, Javiar Giron went bankrupt. The 46-year-old father of three had been doing fine since he came to the U.S. in 1985: He learned English on the street, bought a house and managed a carpet business. He began buying and selling, or “flipping,” houses on the side, but that tanked with the housing market and he lost two of his properties to banks.

by: Teddy Nykiel

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Zero to 789, in 26 months

New-York-Times-Social-Logo“Shweta Kohli has always paid her own way. Her straight-A average won her a full scholarship to San Francisco State University at the same time she worked a 40-hour week as a waitress at a cafe. But when she applied for a credit card after graduation, she was turned down because she had no credit history”.

by: Patricia Cohen

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