Loans for divorce that is. The Mainichi Shinbum is reporting that a small bank in Gifu Prefecture is offering divorce loans:
Love is grand. But divorce is 100 grand. At least! But now there’s a bank out there to help the growing number of Japanese couples who want to untie the knot, notes Sunday Mainichi (10/21).
Ogaki Kyoritsu Ginko, a small bank based in the sleepy Gifu Prefecture outpost of Ogaki, started on Oct. 1 to offer Japan’s first-ever divorce loans.
Anybody aged 20 to 66 with an annual income in excess of 2 million($17094) yen who’s thinking about ending an unhappy marriage can borrow up to 5 million yen to cover the cost of pulling the plug on a partner.
The bank came up with the idea after seeing that 257,475 Japanese couples divorced in fiscal ’06 — that’s virtually every second Japanese marriage — on top of the widespread belief that ending a marriage costs a small fortune. Not that the bank’s looking to make a killing on its loans called the Re Life Plan, charging just 5.825 percent interest as opposed to the 18 percent to 20 percent consumer finance loansharks would normally charge to lend out similar amounts on no-collateral lending like the bank’s divorce loan.
That’s what I call a sub-prime loan!