Critics of "payday loans," which charge a median rate of 521 percent annual interest in Utah, say they can easily lead to bankruptcy and misery. Patty Bailey could be their poster child.

But the payday loan industry itself would rather point to borrowers like Tammy Ruiz, who uses such loans rarely for emergencies and views them as a godsend.

Most payday borrowers, like Megan Pedersen, are likely somewhere between those extremes. She occasionally has landed in trouble with the loans but has managed to work out of it and still uses them. But she only uses them when she has no alternative in emergencies, she says.

Following are their stories:

Patty Bailey

Bailey, of Kearns, says she lived paycheck to paycheck. Once when finances were especially tight, she walked into a payday loan store on State Street.

She presented a bank statement, a paycheck stub and identification — and was instantly loaned $300. She faced no credit checks and avoided the embarrassment of asking family for money. She was thrilled.

But she paid more than 500 percent interest on that two-week loan. She says she probably did not realize the interest rate was that high as cashiers glossed over terms quickly and asked her to sign.

"I paid it back in two weeks, and managed to handle the first loans I had. Then things got out of hand," she said.

She hated her job at the time. She decided to take out payday loans to help her invest in work-at-home programs, which did not work out. She found she could not pay off her payday loans when due, so she extended them by paying two weeks' worth of interest at a time. One $300 loan would end up costing $1,300 over time, she later figured.

After buying more time on loans each payday, she found she often didn't have enough to live on, so sometimes she would take out yet more payday loans. At one point, she says she had seven to nine of them.

"About half of my paycheck was going to them," she said.

It was stressful, and she suffers from stress-induced diabetes. She soon became ill and could not work.

"Then everything fell to pieces," she said.

She could not afford to pay interest on loans, which were then considered in default. Lenders attempted to deposit the post-dated checks she had given as security, and they bounced.

Lenders attempted to redeposit checks several times, and her bank charged her a fee of $22 for non-sufficient funds each time. Some lenders attempted, as she had agreed to in the fine print of her loans, to take out money from her account by electronic means. That brought more insufficient funds fees.