Maggie

Freshly-cooked meals once more for Maggie and son in Glasgow

“Without a fridge-freezer you spend so much more on food. Buying small jugs of milk, not large ones. Lugging tins about. Popping to the shops every day.”

The cost of Maggie’s food shop shot up immediately when her fridge-freezer broke down, but a £500 loan from Scotcash in April 2022 meant she could replace it and stop worrying about whether she could afford to feed her 15-year-old son.

It’s so much cheaper when you can buy fresh ingredients in bulk and cook proper meals. He’s about to go to college and he’s got to eat properly

A leaflet from her local authority introduced Maggie to Scotcash in 2018. Since then the 52-year-old has taken occasional loans from us in the case of emergency, always for the lowest amount she can manage, and always paid them back on time. “It was a real discovery to find Scotcash,” she says. “I’d used Provident before if I needed credit, and for the same loan with them you were paying back nearly double. Plus with Scotcash there’s noone coming out to your house, I like the way I can do everything digitally and it’s so quick.”

Open banking was a convenient way to “show Scotcash everything they need to see” for a lending decision, Maggie says, calling it an easy way to check her documents “because I don’t get paper statements – I like to do everything digitally. And I know they and I need to understand that I can afford the repayments.” Alongside COPD, which means daily trips to the shops can be damaging to her health, Maggie lives with arthritis, regular migraines and impaired mobility, “which makes it a good thing I didn’t have to go to the Scotcash office,” she says. She calls her recent loan “a lifesaver – when I needed it I got it within 24 hours,” – and is scathing about some of the firms she sees advertising to other people in her circumstances.

I don’t normally leave many reviews online,” she says “but I’ve left glowing reviews for Scotcash because I want people to know they are different

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