What to Do When You Can’t Pay Your Title Loan

There might be situations where you might find yourself unable to pay off your car title loan or keep up with your monthly title loan payments. The reasons can vary – from not having the required amount coming in from your paycheck to having yet another financial emergency that you need to attend to soon after settling the first one. It can be a difficult position for you, but there are still some things that you can do in order to manage such a situation:

Below are 5 options that may help you navigate through this situation:

1. Talk to a LoanMart service representative to check if you may qualify for assistance. Despite signing the agreement that you will pay a certain amount of money every month on a certain date to pay off your car title loan, if you are fairly sure that the money coming in this month will not be enough to meet the amount due, you can check if you qualify for some assistance, which will primarily depend on your prior payment history, current account status, and what assistance you’ve previously received. Assistance can range from a simple due date change to better align your monthly payment with when you get paid, to more advanced assistance tools such as a payment deferral.
2. Evaluate if you can get someone to temporarily assist you with your payments. If you think that you will need support from someone else to pay off the loan, you can ask close friends or relatives for support, or even ask them to make a payment on your behalf. This can be your spouse, a concerned sibling, or an ever-supportive parent – whoever it is, do not be afraid to swallow your pride to ask for help so that you can meet the monthly payments by the due date.
3. Look for ways to make extra money on the side. You might have some skills that can be monetized in order to come up with the balance for your monthly payments. These can be graphic design, teaching a martial arts class every Saturday, tutoring after school, selling baked goodies, etc. Whatever it is that you can do well, find ways to monetize it! Your target amounts should only be the balance you need to fulfill the monthly loan fees. For example, if your monthly fee is $240 and you can only afford to set aside $200 from your salary, then you only need to focus on generating an extra $40 to meet the total amount! If you make more than that from the venture then well and good: you have extra money to set aside for the following months’ dues!
4. Do a drastic lifestyle budget cut to quickly pay off your title loan—it might be hard to give up your daily soy latte from the neighborhood café, but if it is necessary to say goodbye to it for the number of months that you have to pay off your loan then by all means do it. Going for a lifestyle downgrade is temporary and is much easier to deal with than having your loan balloon to an amount that will require emergency intervention. Look for ways to cut back on your expenses. Cancel all your memberships (Gym, Netflix, etc.), decrease your monthly payables (electricity, internet, gas, food, etc.). If it feels very hard to accomplish this, be motivated by the fact that it is only a temporary situation and pretty soon you’ll get back to your regular routine.
5. See if there are some things that you can sell to make instant money. Look around you and see if you have any possessions that are gathering dust and can already let go of in order to make money to meet your monthly payments. It can be that expensive (but rarely used) camera you have gathering dust. It can be your motorcycle collecting cobwebs in the garage. You may even consider selling a few bags or shoes that are just taking up space in your closet. Hold a yard sale of things that you can part with. Not only will you have found a way to find money to meet your required payments, but you have also decluttered your house in the process!

Finding out that you cannot make the payments for your monthly title loans can surely cause some people to develop anxiety. After all, there’s nothing as stressful as feeling like you won’t be able to fulfill an obligation – especially if it is a financial one. After giving yourself time to feel stressed, the next step is to concentrate on what you can do to fix this situation. These fix tips show you that all is not lost and there are some things you can do to help yourself. And because most of these solutions require you to act, you should already know that the power to do something about is already in your hands. So, take charge, assess the situation, and make an action plan for all the things you can do to fix your situation and meet your monthly payments!