What do you do when your child pours a bottleful of fizzy soda into your laptop - the laptop where you store all of your business accounts and client details?
Welcome to Gemma’s world. A young single mum with two primary school-aged children, she’s much in demand as a freelance fitness instructor/personal trainer and women’s health professional specialising in “hypopressive” physical therapy. That’s a form of exercise developed by the Belgian physiotherapist Marcel Caufriez in the 1980s, when he was studying women’s urogynaecological recovery after childbirth. Gemma is one of the few health professionals in the UK to have qualified in it.
Despite her hectic daily work schedule visiting her clients and teaching in various local gyms, Gemma still manages the twice-daily school run, bringing the children home, feeding them, playing with them AND doing her daily accounts on her beloved Lenovo Yoga 900 laptop while the two boys are watching TV before bedtime. Having had several laptops over the last few years that all suffered from various glitches, Gemma has become an informal ambassador for this device.
Disaster struck just after the boys’ supper time: five-year-old Fintan decided that he was now a big enough boy to pour his own tumbler of orangeade. While Gemma was placing freshly laundered clothes in the airing cupboard upstairs, Fintan put his tumbler next to mummy’s laptop on the kitchen/diner table, took the 1.5l bottle of orangeade from the fridge, stood on a chair and attempted to pour himself a drink.
Except it didn’t quite work out like that. Instead, he found handling the large bottle more difficult than he’d anticipated, and he managed to tip the overflowing tumbler and most of the contents of the bottle into mummy’s computer.
Thankfully, computer repair technicians were able to save Gemma’s data, but not the laptop. She desperately needed a replacement - fast. But as a young freelancer “flying solo,” money was tight. How could she raise the £1,160 she needed to replace her laptop (which she hadn’t insured)?
Fiercely independent, Gemma was averse to borrowing from her parents. However, she suddenly realised that she may have the means to buy the new Yoga 900, just not in the form of cash. Her mother had given her a beautiful Antique Deco 16.7-carat diamond sapphire platinum bracelet (45.8 Grams NR) after she’d completed her training in hypopressive techniques in Belgium seven years ago. She felt sure she could raise the cash by pawning the bracelet, then purchasing it back on an instalment by instalment basis.
At peer-to-peer lender Unbolted, we would have said “Great idea, bad move.” That’s because our secured asset loans offer unbeatable interest rates. Whereas pawnbrokers charge stinging representative APRs (typically ranging from 69 percent to a stomach-churning 162.54 percent), our equivalent is just 40.3 percent. As a digital, online p2p lending platform, we can keep our rates low because we have none of the overheads of running bricks-and-mortar premises such as banks and pawnbrokers.
Our expert valuation partners would probably have valued Gemma’s exquisite bracelet at around £1,660 - more than enough to act as collateral for the £1,160 Gemma needed for her new laptop. We would have collateralised the bracelet as security for the loan (therefore, there’d be no intrusive credit searches), held it safely in secure storage, and returned it to Gemma when she’d repaid us.
