One cold morning Sam Black woke up with a sharp pain in his chest. Troubled by this new condition he went to his cardiologist. Little did Sam know that a few hours later he would find himself on the operating table en route to triple bypass surgery. The surgery went as expected, but it wasn't the last. Sam was sent to many specialists and rehabilitation centers, building a large bill, with which they had no money to pay them. He still pays several thousand dollars a year for his prescription drugs. Years after the surgery, Sam and his wife Elsie narrowly escaped foreclosure, but the most troublesome debt they have are hundreds of short-term loans with triple-digit interest rates. Elsie once said in an interview regarding the loans they had to take out, “You really can't keep up with them” (Wright, 2011). Nearly a decade later, Sam has difficulty speaking and has to carry an oxygen tank with him. This is an ordinary couple who got caught in the continuous cycle of payday loans. Like millions of other Americans, the Black family settled for shady, overpriced, short-term loans. Those who struggle with poverty know that there are few opportunities for change and ways to get money. With a rising poverty line causing huge numbers of poor people to live in inadequate living conditions, it becomes difficult to obtain basic necessities. Many factors lead to this ever-increasing tragedy. Many of those living in poverty have few resources needed to acquire money, leading to the decision to obtain money through payday loans or fast cash. Despite the amount of money that payday loan companies lend to the lower classes, they actually cause more harm to those receiving assistance than they actually help them. ...... middle of paper ...... reenberg, J. (2013, November 21). Service members remained vulnerable to payday loans. Retrieved from The New York TimesEitzen, S., & Smith, K. (2009). Experiencing poverty. (2nd ed., pp. 1-5). Pearson.Jost, K. (2012, January 20). Financial misconduct. CQ Researcher, 22, 53-76.Melzer, BT (2011) The real cost of accessing credit: evidence from the payday loan market. The Quarterly Journal of Economics.Mumford, K. (2012). A Bayesian analysis of payday loans and their regulation. In: Yacine Ait-Sahalia, Jianqing Fan, Han Hong, Cheng Hsiao, Peter Robinson (eds.), Journal of Econometrics. 1st ed. Amsterdam: Elsevier. pp.205-216.Peterson, H. (n.d.). 6 scandalous facts that show how payday lenders rip off consumers. BusinessInsider. Wage slavery. (2013, November 15). Retrieved from WikipediaWright, K. (2011). Bad Credit: How Payday Lenders Avoid Regulation. Nation.