Post #1324293
2026-04-17 22:26 UTC
Replies (1)
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@sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-04-19 12:54
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 peoplr who are statistically likely to fuck up and make a mistake.