After racking up thousands of dollars in debt, some borrowers are deleting the apps from their phones to avoid getting prodded to spend more.
Many consumers find buying now and paying later a godsend when cash is tight. Others are wishing they’d paid upfront to avoid pain later.
Tia Whiteside, 27, knew she was spending more than she would have without buy now, pay later services — the popular loans that let borrowers split purchases into installments with little or no interest. Planning a day trip to the beach with her 2-year-old son last year, she spent $800 on Amazon purchases including a tent, new outfits and a high-end sandcastle kit with the BNPL provider Affirm.
Whiteside, a Greenville, South Carolina-based behavioral analyst who treats childhood autism, makes good money; she and her husband bring in about $110,000 per year combined. But the $6,000 in BNPL loans she’d racked up over roughly two years felt frivolous, she said, especially because they’re planning to buy their first home.
“I was just seeing my paycheck continually eaten up,” said Whiteside, “and I was like, ‘Where’s my money going?’”
So you shouldn’t take super high interest loans to buy crap online?
Nvm it was clearly unavoidable.
Also racist and sexist 🤡
It says in the article that the loans aren’t high interest. They’re low to no interest.
They’re no interest if you make the payments, if you miss one and keep a balance they can be 30%, which is how the services make money
I’m sorry but you’re wrong. The specific BNPL loans being discussed in the article really are 0% interest and don’t have late fees. The entire point of the article is that this is so appealing to people that they overextend their finances to get things they don’t really need, and then get stuck making payments for years.
In Netherlands they limited the maximum interest rate. Plus borrowers should check if people are credit worthy without that credit score. Basically it is assumed there are enough people who are terrible with their finances. The last bit is preferable over victim blaming.
I have a 800-810 credit score. I have positive networth. I have no mortgage, no student loans and one car loan with less than 5k left. The best interest rate on a credit card i could find was over 18%. I didn’t actually apply so the rate might go lower but still, that’s criminal imo.
All credit cards are 0% if you pay the balance in full every month. Then it’s just a matter of if the perks are worth the fees (if that’s not something you’re already taking advantage of).
Edit: reworded to not use the word balance twice in different contexts.