Story 27 of 52

By M. Snarky

I heard a commercial on the radio this morning about financing corrective eye surgery which got my attention – not because I was in the market for the procedure – but because it seemed to me that if you can finance your eyeballs, you can probably finance anything, right? This got me to thinking about this current trend of financing all of the things all of the time in today’s instant gratification society here in the good ol’ US of A.

The euphemism for this is “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) which is dominated by fintech companies like Affirm, Afterpay, Klarna, Sezzle, and Zip. Each of these companies has their own flavor of terms, but you should probably read the fine print carefully and choose wisely or that $25 box of Best Cat Toys Ever will end up costing you like $1,000 and the money will get sucked out of your bank account faster than a politician denying sexual misconduct allegations.

Financing traditional big-ticket items like cars, trucks, RV’s, and boats makes perfect sense because most people don’t have the $60-$100K (or more!) of loose money lying around to buy them outright. But, if you’re going to finance something, you better pay attention to your FICO score, or you’ll get nailed with a significantly higher interest rate. This is where the salesperson will ask you, “What do you want your monthly payment to be?” This is also how they bury you with 120 payments at 15% interest and now that $100K RV will actually cost you $193,601.95 over ten years, but you got the RV of your dreams, right?

But nowadays you can finance small-ticket items too like appliances, tires, teeth, computers, smartphones, cosmetic surgery, weight loss surgery, shoes, clothing, jewelry, camping gear, guitars, hardscape, office equipment, and pretty much anything else you can get on Amazon. Apparently, most people don’t even have a few thousand bucks lying around to pay for what they need…or what they want. Therein, I think, is the underlying problem.

The thing about financing all of the things all of the time is that if you fall on hard times and miss a payment or ten, the finance company will dispatch repo-men who will descend upon you like green bottle flies on fresh dog poop to repossess what technically (legally, anyway) belongs to them, of which you obviously can no longer afford, like the car, boat, diamond ring, eyeballs, teeth…stuff like that.

And now you are forever labeled as a deadbeat and your FICO score will drop faster than the value of a memecoin.

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