That is the whole allure of most Buy Now Pay Later schemes.
If you have average or good or better credit, they’ll offer you a plan with no actual interest.
But the catch is that if you miss a single payment, you get slammed with essentially fees, that functionally act as quite high to ludicrous levels of interest.
So, if you do a bunch of very small ‘not loans’… this significantly increases the chances you’ll forget one payment.
Also, generally, making successful BNPL payments doesn’t count as making a successful debt payment for the purposes of your credit report/score.
But if you just fuck it up totally, well then it goes to collections, and that significantly hurts your credit score.
… So, tldr, if you can actually use these successfully and never miss a payment, yeah the no interest is good, but if you make a single mistake, massive downsides for you… and this type of credit is targetted at people who tend to have an average stable checking account balance of ~$0.00, so they are statistically more likely to fuck up and make a mistake.
I’m surprised there’s no interest
That is the whole allure of most Buy Now Pay Later schemes.
If you have average or good or better credit, they’ll offer you a plan with no actual interest.
But the catch is that if you miss a single payment, you get slammed with essentially fees, that functionally act as quite high to ludicrous levels of interest.
So, if you do a bunch of very small ‘not loans’… this significantly increases the chances you’ll forget one payment.
Also, generally, making successful BNPL payments doesn’t count as making a successful debt payment for the purposes of your credit report/score.
But if you just fuck it up totally, well then it goes to collections, and that significantly hurts your credit score.
… So, tldr, if you can actually use these successfully and never miss a payment, yeah the no interest is good, but if you make a single mistake, massive downsides for you… and this type of credit is targetted at people who tend to have an average stable checking account balance of ~$0.00, so they are statistically more likely to fuck up and make a mistake.
And even if you don’t fuck it up, the creditor is profiting off you anyway because of the transaction fee they charged the vendor.
Yep, thats the whole thing with just… what, anything that isn’t a debit card or cash, basically?
Almost nobody even realizes that payment processors just functionally get to tax the entire economy.