Payday loans: Why the industry says they're a good deal

Payday loans can wreak havoc on a person's financial life. These loans carry sky-high APRs and the penalties for late or missed payments can be extreme. Many consumers, who turned to payday lenders in a time of need, later find themselves worse off than when they started. In this series, WalletPop takes a look at the payday lending industry and some of its players: those who dole out the loans, the regulators who try to rein them in and the people who desperately take out these loans hoping for a fresh start. This is the second installment of our payday lending series. You can read the first part of this series here

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Believe it or not, there are people who feel that payday lending does a service for cash-strapped customers, that the interest and terms are nowhere near as bad as their detractors make them out to be, and that the government should stop trying to kill the industry with regulation. Of course, most of those people work for the payday lending industry.

But in writing this series of stories, we wanted to give both sides of the story. After all, the market for payday loans is huge -- especially these days -- and not everyone finds themselves in the situation that Joylynn Jossel, the woman whose payday loans spiraled out of control, did. Even if the critics are right, and the terms are harsh or unreasonable, it's clear that some segments of the population around the country rely on these short-term loans as a financial lifeline.