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It’s no longer up for debate: the United States is in the grip of an affordability crisis. Americans of every kind have less money to cover their core expenses. But while rising prices and stagnant wage growth is challenging for any household to manage, these challenges hit people with disabilities especially hard. What tools are available to those of us who get caught in a personal crisis on top of the broader affordability crisis? Unfortunately, the answer is: not many, and many of the most accessible ones are also profoundly predatory. In this commentary, The Century Foundation and the Center for Responsible Lending have teamed up to look at an increasingly popular, but exceptionally dangerous, set of financial products and their impact on the disability community—payday loans. When the Only Options Are Bad Options It’s important to first establish that while we’re talking about consumer products that one can “choose” to use or not to use, in practice, there often isn’t any meaningful choice in the matter at all. Many of us have been there, especially in this economy: you’ve been making it work, paycheck-to-paycheck, but something comes up—an unexpected medical or vet bill, car maintenance, a heat wave spiking…

$6 b in overdraft fees; $2.4 b in payday loan fees; $.7 b in car title loan fees. These enormous sums are extracted every year from families as the result of onerous triple-digit interest rates. Purveyors of high-cost loans like payday loans and auto title loans claim that they are providing funds for households to cover unexpected and occasional emergencies like medical bills or car repairs.