Gen Z is drowning in debt as buy-now-pay-later services skyrocket: 'They're continuing to bury their heads in the sand and spend'

When you think there's no future, there's no need to plan for one.

Gen Z knows that they're gonna have bigger problems than debt.

Why isn’t this framed as predatory lending?

Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

In this age where you can quickly spend thousands online (or even in person) without having to actually watch any of it disappear, and corporations are hiring psychologists to make their services and platforms as addicting as possible, you're gonna get a lot of this

I see everyone in the comments saying that Gen Z have checked out and are waiting for the end but I really don't think so.

I think it's never been easier to manipulate a person to separate them from their money and things are deliberately designed that way. Big shiny upgrade now buttons, services forcing you onto 7 day free trials for premium plans upon signing up, expensive yearly subscriptions for products that ten years ago would have been unthinkable as anything other than one time purchases, you name it. Capitalists have used the internet to minmax their penny pinching.

I swear on everything that I've read this article word for word years ago but replace gen z with millenials

Does it matter. It seems that a lot of them have checked out already as they see the world burning around them.

lol time to write an article vilifying young people who somehow aren’t thriving in our flawless economic system. What self-indulgent idiots they are. Where’s my Pulitzer?

If were going to slip into a period of hyperinflation then taking on tons of consumer debt is just good financial planning.

This is really interesting. Layaway purchases in stores used to be popular but went away in the late 90’s. It’s back now as BNPL, with much worse terms.

Permanently Deleted

Stuff like this is why the headline Econ stats do not actually reflect reality.

Sure, there's lots of room for critiquing how the media and the investor class focus on stats that are not actually representative of things on the ground for fairly complex mathematical/economic reasons, but that conversation requires people to have a Masters on Econ to understand.

What does not require this is the much simpler: They do not take personal debt levels and credit scores into account.

People say things like 'inflation is going up' 'i cant afford as much as i used to' and ... the main actual reason for this is usually that they're drowning in debt, but are either unaware or don't want to admit it.

This is a country where 54% of adults read and write at below a 6th grade level. Probably a comparable amount can't actually do their own budget.

...

It doesn't matter if your wages go up 2% in a year if you had to spend that year buying groceries on credit to not starve, and those all have 16 to 36% interest rates.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/personal-finance/buy-now-pay-later-daily-essentials-groceries-young-adults-rcna141718

Who is teaching them financial literacy in the first place? Because they aren't being taught it in schools. Meanwhile, these predatory companies do everything they can to convince people to use them.

I mean, we've been telling them their entire lives that the planet is doomed, and they have no future... So why the fuck not bring on the debt?

I'm going to be brutally honest.

1. Corporations are shitstains and prey upon people's minds and wants.
2. People today are too entitled / greedy.

No. You don't need that phone to survive, solid but low end one will easily carry you next 3-5 years. No, you do not need to go for McD for breakfast - eat a homemade sandwhich. Takes the same amount of time it'd take to get McD served to you.

But today a lot of folk take a lot of shit for granted or worse, needed, and it's pitiful.

Fuck, that also is due to corporate ads and framing. But people need to wake up and stop fueling this shit on their own. And stop blaming schools - this shit is for parents to teach ffs, like the rest of actual household chores.

Also I am not arguing for everyone to live frugally but instead to learn a mindful way of spending. If you actually have free money, money you own and not a credit, then sure, treat yourself.

I hate BNPY so much... I deleted my after pay account, which means I can no long use their services unless I get in contact with support to reopen my account. I did it to explicitly make it near impossible for me to be tempted. It worked. There were times I felt regret, but it was 100% the smartest move.

Then, PayPal introduced pay in 4... All my hard work went right down the drain. I can't afford this shit but fuck it's hard when you're clinically depressed.

Is this actually worse than the five figure credit limits gen x had extended to them? Boomers had store layaway, which really seems ideal for holiday shopping, but there's no money to be made with it so of course it's fallen out of style.

If your outlook on life is "work until you die with nothing left over", might as well take back something first. The debt will pile up one way or another.

So, I'm going to come to their defence a bit here. Most of this is also covered in my comment I made further into the thread.

I don't think previous generations were any less financially literate on average. You've always had those careful with credit and those that didn't seem to care, or didn't understand the ramifications of their decisions.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s and most large stores had their own store credit system with 30%+ APR rates. Plenty of people that were boomers or gen X had those accounts, and would routinely buy more whenever they cleared their credit a little.

You could also get credit cards and each card in terms of spending power would have similar limits to what you have now. And there was no shortage of people that would be sitting on their credit limit all the time. I knew people in the 90s that had no idea how interest worked and would be sitting on their credit limit paying back mostly interest all the time.

I think the difference is the ease with which you can gain access to credit now.

In the 80s and 90s you generally needed to go into the store to get their credit. You needed to go to a bank or fill in paperwork in the post to get credit cards. Crucially here, generally there were less providers of credit. Credit cards were often offered by banks, there were not so many resellers of credit. To gain a line of credit you had no chance to ever repay took more effort and as such wasn't so much of a problem as it is now. It was still a problem, and companies routinely made money from the financially illiterate, even then.

What I think is different now, is that you can get credit from a few screen swipes on your phone now. There's many many more providers of credit too. As such, the ability to get into an irreversible credit position is much easier. I would put money down that the same people with £1000s in various store credit/cards all compounding interest at 30%+ in the 90s, would also be in huge debt if credit were as easy to get then, as it is now.

I am going to blame financial institutions more here (those getting into the mess are not entirely free of blame). There might be over a thousand sources of credit now, but they all funnel up to a handful of large finance institutions, and they're the ones really burying their head in the sand pretending they don't know this is happening and couldn't do anything to stop it. They most certainly could prevent it, if they wanted to. It just works better for them to have a generation that is constantly paying interest on never repayable debt. Even factoring in the few that will be written off.

Yes, ultimately we all have our own responsibility not to get into these situations. But I don't think Gen Z or any generation are or were better at this on average. It's just the conditions that allow it have changed, and continue to change.

It's all well and good to blame the generation that can't afford shit to use payday loan companies to buy shit...but when these companies align with the likes of Dominos Pizza to allow you to buy a pizza and pay off in several weekly installments, maybe it's time to blame prices for being ridiculously high?

Predatory debt gonna be predatory

Yo dawg I heard you like installments:

Recently I noticed my credit card lets me move transactions into installments. So, you can put an installment into installments now. When you go bankrupt you can pay off your debt in installments too.

In other news, the interest rate on unsecured pseudo-credit services is very high.

Now over to Dave with the weather.

It's almost like the "services" are designed just for this...

I thought we did the whole credit crash a century ago.
We had a pandemic, radical credit spending, nazis, the writer is remixing the previous season. Lazy.

Well when the world is about to end in multiple ways at once, why with about debt?

It's easy to spend money when it's all digital. The younglings don't use physical cash.

They’re just waiting for the trickle down

If the outcome is the same whether you save up or not - you'll never be able to afford anything - why now "own" things while you can?

The absolute irony of the paywall

Never pay them anything back!

BNPL is a credit card but in app.

Keep on buying plastic shit, I’m sure it’s gonna be fucken great.

You can actually survive without streaming services and online subscriptions.

genZ is the least empathic gen i have seen yet. gives me hope future generations can learn from that.ql

Dumb gen Z