Two companies want to lend you $100,000. You need a comparison article to figure out which one.
LightStream offers longer terms. SoFi offers a rate discount if you already bank with SoFi. This is the entire decision tree. A person capable of managing $100,000 in debt should be able to compare two f*cking interest rates without a flowchart, but here we are. Personal finance journalism exists because someone looked at a 0.3% APR difference and had a panic attack.
The article says LightStream "may be better" for longer terms. May be. Not is. May be. They hedged a statement about loan term length. That's like saying a truck may be better than a bicycle for moving furniture. The conditional tense is doing heavy lifting here, protecting the author from the liability of having said something definitive about arithmetic.
SoFi gives existing members a discount. Congrats on your loyalty points. You refinanced your student loans with them in 2019 and now you get 0.25% off your personal loan rate. That's $250 a year on a $100,000 loan. You can retire early now. Maybe buy a jet ski in 2047.
The target audience for this article is someone who qualifies for a six-figure unsecured personal loan but needs a summary box to understand that longer terms mean lower monthly payments. These are the same people who read restaurant reviews with three paragraphs about the ambiance before mentioning the food tastes like sh*t.
Both loans go up to $100,000. Neither company will tell you why you need $100,000 in unsecured debt, because that would require acknowledging you're about to do something spectacularly stupid with money you don't have.
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