Of money. Do you think pension advances should be regulated like those products for people who really need the money . Some sort of Interest Rate cap . I mean, are we making a mistake by outlawing these as opposed to just making them behave like moral human beings . That would be a good start. I think that the, first of all, you have to distinguish between the payday lenders and the other products, prid tory products out there. What is unique about these pension advance companies, and it was a great surprise to us was that they are much smaller in size. Many of the other predatory lenders are now, you know, publiclyheld companies, and it these were pretty much dimly capitalized corporations that had no skin in the game. What we found out with each of these entities was that they only loaned out what they were able to get in from investors. So the individuals who were running the show. It was like a bookie, just take being the big. Just taking the big. I dont know how i knew that word.
Will it be a major vehicle that nasas going to use to establish priority . And then what kind of challenges did the agency face that caused a oneyear delay to the issue shans of the road map . Thes a stro biology road map that again will come out shortly, the reason that its taken longer is because this science is evolving so rapidly. And how the Scientific Community looks at it, bringing in all these multiple disciplines that want to have a voice in astrobiology because you might have thought ten years ago if youre a helio physicist nothing you do has anything to do with astrobiology and now you say, wait, i can contribute. We have been trying to get the best science from the Scientific Community, get it properly reviewed and get it out as soon as we can and so were happy that its done and its about ready to go. How we use those road maps is definitely comes in several different ways. Basically, when anybody then proposes to nasa whether its to do research, to do a mission, they then
Interest with our pension advance than we would have paid if we simply paid off the interest over time on our existing debt. Moreover, we learned after the fact that there were alternatives we could have used to reduce our debt load while avoiding the high fees charged by structured investments. We have fully paid off structured investments. Looking back on our experience, it is clear we made a mistake. We should have been more aware of what we were buying. We also want to make clear that we accept that we signed the contract and accept responsibility for that. We should have known better. As we said, ours is a cautionary tale. We want to make two points to those who may find themselves in a situation similar to ours. First, you have other options. You should explore those options and resist the urge to reach for easy, immediate cash. Second, had we known what we now know, wed never have taken out the pension bands with their unreasonable fees. We wish we could do everything over again
The reason why this is important is because the number one complaint that we received was the failure of vfg and its agents to redisclose the redirect risk. Because its illegal to sign away your pension, they could direct the escrow company, the Pension Company to redirect the funds back to a different account and no longer to that es ko account or if the pensioner got into financial trouble, the pension would get caught up and no longer go to the escrow account. They were no longer getting that monthly return. They were never warned that this was possible. A lot of the investors were Senior Citizens and thats how this was packaged to them. They were safe. You get a return each month. Some were told it was government insured, which was patently false. Another miscommunication and lie from vfg was the failure to disclose the fees involved in these type of products and youve heard some about that. They failed to disclose a fee break down on both sides. A pensioner never knee what their p
Or the person giving up the pension, but on the investor, on the other end of the transaction, so you looked at it as if it were a security, whereas the Consumer Credit Protection Bureau in my state would look at it as a Consumer Loan. My point, however, is this. You were able to close down this bad company in arkansas and protect the people of arkansas from this bad actor, but pointed out, he simply set up shop in another state. Does that mean that we need to have some sort of federal regulation or legislation in this area . Well, i certainly, its very limiting what we can do as a securities regulator, because you are right. We were looking at it from the investors standpoint. And unfortunately, with the nature of mr. Gamber, and it sounds like from other types of Pension Companies like this, they do shut down in one state, and although we believe mr. Gambers tilstill in arkansas, s formed companies in texas and that seems to be quite common. I cant state to Texas Security laws. But s