1) In honour of our new sponsors Wonga, a pint at home matches will now cost £2 before kick off, £50 at half-time and £4000 after ninety minutes.
2) Newcastle United are proud to announce that the new Wonga sponsored home shirt is now on sale priced at £39.99 or twelve monthly payments of £179.99.
3) Following the announcement of Wonga as our new sponsors, all NUFC box office purchases will now be subject to a hidden 4063.9% APR surcharge.
4) Alan Pardew has told his players to forget about all the commotion over new sponsors Wonga and go out their on the pitch and give 4,107%.
5) In an uncharacteristic display of openness, Newcastle have revealed that the new Wonga sponsorship deal is worth £6 million a year, although we will have to repay £12 trillion at the end of the contract.
6) Finally, this last one is a fact, not a joke. If you borrowed £100 from Wonga and made no repayments, in less than six years you would owe more than the US national debt (£10 trillion).
Personally, for all the talk about how the Wonga sponsorship deal is bad for the image of football, etc, I think it’s worth pointing put that a week ago very few people would be able to tell you what interest rates Wonga charged. Now though, pretty much everyone knows that Wonga charge over 4,000% APR.
So to summarise, we get a reported £24 million over four years and St James Park restored to its true name (not that it was ever called anything else), and added to this we also have increased public awareness of Wonga’s business practises, thereby allowing borrowers to make a more informed choice as to who they borrow money from in future.
Sounds okay to me.
Footnote: I'll be posting my tips for Sunday's match against the mackems on Thursday.
Lucky Alan didn't ask them for the actual interest rate charged on our average loans. They'd only have given about 16% effort...
ReplyDelete(p.s. it's worth pointing out we charge 1% interest per day on loans of up to a month.
Nobody pays 00s or 000s per cent interest and there's no way you can borrow from Wonga for anything like a year - let alone 6 or 7.
APR distorts the interest for short-term loans as it is an annual measure that compounds interest (i.e. shows what happens if interest is being charged on interest).
We do neither. The average Wonga customer borrows for 16 days, so pays 16% interest...)
Firstly, your figures are misleading. You forgot/omitted to mention that you also charge fees, in addition to the interest. A quick check on your website reveals that if you were to borrow £1 for one day, the total fees and interest to pay would be £5.56!
ReplyDeleteSecondly, virtually all high street banks use APR, so if you use a daily interest rate then you’re not comparing like with like which in itself is misleading. My cousin used to use this trick when she worked as a car salesman and she would quote an interest rate other than the APR to make customers think their interest rates were better than they actually were.
Thirdly, people don't choose Wonga because they think you represent good value. People use Wonga when they’re in financial dire straits and have no choice, or when they're financially inept.
Finally, the general outcome when your sponsorship of Newcastle United was announced is that now everyone knows that you charge over 4000% APR. However, one thing that didn’t perhaps get the coverage it deserved is that you returned St James Park to its official name. Obviously it was always called St James Park whatever Mike Cashley tried to call it, but the fact that you at least wanted to make it official deserves some credit. As a fan, I say good on you for this.
However, this credit got overlooked because all the focus was on the fact that you charge over 4000% APR interest. So if I was you rather than trying to make 4000% APR sound like a good deal (which is a bit like trying to describe Mount Everest as a small hill), I think you would have been wiser to instead focus on the fact that you restored St James Park to its proper name once again.