I agree they also have benefits like extended warranties, IMO the way to go is to have two lines from the same bank, one with low interest and a high limit locked to only be used for emergency expenses, and another card with a low limit that has good rewards
One can be a financial cushion and the other can be habitually used to skim rewards with relatively lower risk of ending up in debt
Yeah it’s definitely needed to start building a credit history but a low enough limit to avoid getting into debt unless the person getting it has a lot of restraint and diligence about tracking their finances lol
Bankruptcy button
The only good payment plans I’ve seen are the ones attached to an Amazon credit card that charge 0% for up to a year as long as no payments are missed (the trustworthiness of this probably varies by region). Which you select manually from a reliable website frontend.
The consequences of missing a payment for all of these are the same, they hit your credit score. But at least from the Amazon Credit Card ones I’ve seen, the payment is just part of your normal credit card bill payment.
A lot of people have problems with Affirm and other credit card companies fucking up auto-payments on their end and blaming the user, with automatic hits to their credit scores. At least with a credit card bill payments are reliable.
IMO saving up is always better, credit cards should be avoided, payment plans should be avoided, most people can only be trusted with the lowest interest card they can get with the smallest limit they can get away with. I also wasted a lot of money not understanding how my bank’s overdraft protection worked in the past.
Never do payment plans on basic necessities like this from Costco, they’re basically payday loans that know you won’t be able to pay them off. If you have to use them you can’t afford them.
Edit: basically avoid credit cards and financing as much as humanly possibly
I used one for paying monthly bills and utilities and didn’t redeem rewards for a couple of years, it was a few hundred dollars by the time I got to it which was really nice but also risky to hold because my bank could arbitrarily recalculate the value of the rewards points