to be hacked off that the Brighthouse vultures are opening a shop in our town?

[Meglet]

I know they charge extortionate interest rates so had a Google and am disheartened that they can take advantage of people like they do.

A washing machine is a massive purchase for anyone working, paying cash, credit whatever.
I couldn't easily lay my hands on £300 this month if ours broke so we'd be using the laundrette, certainly not a cheap option but there are plenty of them so they must be providing a service.

There are no launderettes in this area at all - none. The nearest ones are 15 miles away in the city.

Everyone has a different attitude to these things.

I've had to hand-wash clothes for months. I've had no heating in minus temps in February with a ten-month old.

My sister stops paying utilities in October, spends what she likes over Christmas and New Year on crap and her children freeze and have even worse food than they normally have for months afterwards.

She thinks Christmas is like a priority debt and is quite proud of the fact that it comes "first" before considerations such as food or warmth. In her eyes it makes her a "Good Mum". There are plenty of people who are of the same opinion.

Not my opinion and we help, but no doubt she finds my mindset strange too. We had nowhere decent to sit in our last house for months until we saved for a sofa whereas she budgeted the child benefit to come for as yet unborn baby to go to DFS for two years.

Takes all sorts, but I would like to see people protected.

Its true about freecycle and washing machines. The previous owner of my house left one behind so I put it on freecycle along with the fridge freezer he'd also left and they were both gone by the end of the day. I had over 100 responses for the machine within a couple of hours and the fridge freezer was similar. I held on for 24 hours and had nearly 300 responses overall for the machine. It finally went to a lovely singe mum who had a special needs son with incontinence. Our builder kindly dropped it over and plumbed it in for her and apparantly she cried through the whole process - seems she'd been dragging huge washes to the launderette on a daily basis for months :(

"but I would like to see people protected"

What from themselves ?
On the so called benefits bashing threads we are told that people should have free will and that food tokens are degrading, yet really that's the only way you can save people (and more to the point their children, without whom they wouldn't get all this money).

I think the Brighthouse and the Provident should be illegal. They're just so immoral, unethical, just horrible horrible people...

I'd like to see them protected from extortionate credit rates, with a clear responsibility on the part of the retailers to explain with APR means long term - no problem at all with having places like that, providing they are not charging over the odds, and that the customers know exactly what they are getting into.

In many cases from themselves mamatomany, yes. But what Maisie has so eloquently expressed is also a factor.

actually i think what BH and the like demonstrate is that with all the national curriculum and whatever, there is a huge void in education where basic life skills should be. and by life skills i mean budgetting and how not to be ripped off.

and yes actually, food tokens are bloody degrading.

i think trisha might even be sponsored by BH. its on straight after the wright stuff which dh thinks is complusory viewing. the adverts even depict people at home, watching telly, during the day.....do the maths.

We have a community furniture project in town and IIRC they test and re-sell white goods to people on certain benefits. Not sure how much cheaper they are though.

they are loan shark scum.
yanbu.
have just found out one of our lovely local charity shops is turning into a 'cash convertors'. Am equally narked.

Does anyone remember renting a TV from RadioRentals? That's what we used to do to be able to have things like a Colour TV. I don't think you ever owned the TV though think after a certain period of time you could buy it - anyone remember?

When I first moved my own home I couldn't afford a washing machine. No laundrette in my village, had to travel 15 mins to a town. Was not great and certainly would not have been fun with children in tow. Even worse if I didn't have a car. So I can see why people now consider a washing machine to be an essential and thus will use stores that provide such goods on credit - whatever the APR.
If you rent your home - what has to be provided? Is a washing machine something that has to be there? Maybe if more whitegoods had to be included in rental property (private or council) then there would be less need for these stores to exist.

In all seriousness Nick, I used to be area manager for the British Gas Energy centers if anyone remember them ? A cooker and washing machine is cheaper to buy today than it was 15 years ago, there's no excuse for needing this type of arrangement for the essentials.
Bright House I bet sells 20 play stations and leather sofa's for every washing machine.

I remember RadioRentals, my father used to get all sorts of crap from them, computers, TVs etc, he rarely kept up with the payments though, so we always ended up losing our stuff. Probably why I'll never deal with Shitehouse and the like myself, horrible to use those bastards. You'll never find white goods included with council properties either, unless a previous tenant has dumped them left them there.

You're right mama, at least from what I've seen. I know a few people who have used these loan sharks and none of them have bought essentials from there, it's all gaming shit.

YABU personally

For heavens sake like previous posters said there always secondhand .freecycle etc

im on benefits and of reasonable intelligence but id rather have second hand etc than brand new at a fraction of the price

if people are that daft/stupid/snobby then more fool them theres nothing BH sell that cant be second hand,all to often have to have the best then complain when they have to pay it back

isnt it time we took responsibility for something

Meglet YANBU
i was so disheartened when a BH store opened where i work.
i saw a shitty sofa advertised for £900, with the repayments it would have cost about £1500 iirc
horrible pisstaking thugs in my opinion

"I'd like to see them protected from extortionate credit rates, with a clear responsibility on the part of the retailers to explain with APR means long term "

Which is fine, although you have to accept that it will leave a lot of people, mostly the people you're trying to help, unable to get any credit at all. One person's extortion is another's risk premium, and there's no evidence that these sorts of places are actually making vast profits.

There's a social problem, though, and for those with a copy of Bruce's Nebraska to hand, the key track is Used Car. Generalising wildly, people with money buy second-hand cars, supermarket own-brands and clothes from charity shops, because they don't have to. People who actually have to do this reset it wildly. Some of this is purely practical: I can run old cars because I have the cash to repair them on hand, and if I absolutely had to I could go and buy another one; that means I can run an old car (current has ~100K miles, one previous one got taken to ~180K) and take the occasional knocks in exchange for not paying all that depreciation. We also have two cars, so the practical implications of one of them needing prolonged work are limited. If I hadn't got the money on hand, buying a cheap new car with a three year warranty and servicing pack on a high-interest loan sort-of makes sense: it's three years of getting to work for a roughly fixed outlay, plus perhaps a couple of front tyres.

The same goes for domestic appliances. If you have the money, you have two options: buy a sequence of dirt-cheap ones, and accept the fact you might need a washing machine pdq, or buy Miele with a ten-year guarantee and forget about it for a while. But for people with a fixed, small income, a new Hotpoint with a few years' warranty makes a certain amount of sense. It even applies to food: I can buy cheap own-label coffee, which is usually fine, but if on the odd occasion it's shit, no biggie. But that's where it's not actually about practicality: that's where I can choose to buy cheap stuff, without impacting on my self-worth, whereas for people who are forced to buy cheap stuff, it's rather different.

reset => resent, of course.

Hang on a minute, for those saying they can't afford a washing machine what about hand washing, that's what my mother did before I was five and I wore real nappies, or nappies as they were called. In our first house we only had carpet in the lounge for a year.....

Why can't people wait? Young parents or a young parent living alone in a flat does not need a washing machine or a microwave.

"what about hand washing, that's what my mother did before I was five "

Where/how did she dry them?

I think discussing the necessities of washing machines and cookers misses the point. Everyone I've known who has been in trouble with the Brighthouse has owed on flat-screen TVs, playstations and oversized sofas...

Really - you think handwashing is something to aspire to? Just out of interest Posie, does she still handwash, or did she get a washing machine just as quickly as she could?

I remember Radio Rentals - we used to rent our TVs through them, plenty of people did, and they certainly weren't shite. RR would come out and fix them if they broke down and you would get a new set after a couple of years.

"Which is fine, although you have to accept that it will leave a lot of people, mostly the people you're trying to help, unable to get any credit at all. One person's extortion is another's risk premium, and there's no evidence that these sorts of places are actually making vast profits" - limiting credit rates will not stop anyone getting credit, it's only the credit checks that do that, and BH don't do credit checks. Legislation to limit the credit rates will help in the long run as less people will get caught up in the trap of borrowing at horrendous rates and then not being able to pay back.