That gave me a laugh. Is there anywhere in Philippines that you can quote who only charges 6% per year interest on borrowed money? Anyone? Anywhere in Philippines? Rhetorical question they do not exist.
60-70% seems to be the going rate for car loans. A Filipina recently asked me if I would be willing to buy a new car and gave me a list of cars with their finance rates. Pretty sure what they were offering was illegal. The Mafia would have better interest rates.
Your customer dies and whatever you thought you had for collateral disappears. When you lend money to older expats it happens more often than you might think.
It is also incredibly easy to disappear in the Philippines. There is basically no way to know what someone's credit history is and many locals have absolutely no intention of ever paying the full amount. I imagine that debt repossession work is insanely dangerous on top of that.
There is also the better side and completly opposite to noreco. Fil products will give you 20% if you pay a year in advance and 10% for 6 months payment. Most utilities are pretty crap as we all know here,i would have thought an incentive would have been better to get paying bills on time than charging extortionate interest rates. Anyway i doubt will ever happen as there is no logic here.
Can you pay two months in advance Jim? We pay our Fil-Products 2 months at a time (it is prepaid - no contract) so if we miss one month for any reason we still have a month's grace, doesn't stop them dropping off the monthly Bill each month even when we are another month ahead! But to date we have not been cut off and as far as I know from memory of what was explained to me, if you do not pay your Bill on the due date, you get one month extra before they do cut you off, so should be no problem if you inadvertently forget to pay the bill a few days/ or a week or so after the due date.
If you have your own transformer that is not tapped off of other folks then you should have fairly solid voltage. Another thing that folks seem to forget is a properly grounded system; you get 220-240 from your pole mounted transformer...you need your neutral and ground (grounding and grounded conductors) purposely "bonded" together at your main panel with a ground rod. Surges on your electrical system in this scenario are minimized. I can get into more detail if needed on other options for additional surge arresting. My wife did away with cable TV so our internet comes in on a single pair of what is basically telephone wire...I have not had any issues with lightning but it could be an issue and personally should install a lightning arrestor to be safe but have not gotten around to it yet (very cheap...but have not looked at sourcing them in the PI). We've had no issues with voltage drop, surges or anything short of geckos messing up any electronics. Shawn
