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?’”
It says in the article that the loans aren’t high interest. They’re low to no interest.
They work like credit cards. If you pay off the debt then there’s no problem, you are essentially just pulling money from the future, when you will have it, into the past, where you don’t have it, which can be useful if you 100% know you’ll be able to cover your debt by the end of the month.
But if you are going to do that you might as well just have a credit card. Banks love it when you do stuff like that, their all time favorite customers are people who regularly pay off their debts and never require any communication from them. Banks don’t like it if they have too many people indented to them, because a certain percentage won’t pay off their debt. Banks have other less risky means of making money, mostly through safe mortgages and bank fees.
But these loan companies only make money by people having debt. So the risk reward calculation is different for them, so they actively encourage people to get into debt in a way that banks tend not to.