My wife wanted a freezer, and happened to be at a rent to own place with a friend. She noticed the cash price @ the rent to own place for the freezer she wanted was about $700, the rental price was well over $1,000. We went to Sam’s and bought it, and paid just slightly over $200 cash. The rent to own places are a real sucker’s deal.
Sounds like we need to open a rent-to-own store!
Oh they're bad, but absolute pikers compared to the Native Americans. Western Sky loans for a $2,600 loan, the annual percentage interest rate is 139.34% and is set up for 36 months...that is well over 10,000 dollars for a 2,600 dollar loan. The second loan is a 1,500 loan with a APR of 199.98 percent, a little over 7,000 dollars if the applicant takes the full three years to pay it back. And remember, some American don't apply!
Like it or not, when you are poor or have bad credit, most of what you have to deal with are sucker deals.
$200 doesn’t sound like much, but when you are poor, its more than you know you are likely to be able to scrape together.
Financing of some sort is the only way you are going to get it.
Sadly if your income is low and/or your credit is poor, you won’t get financing for any reasonable means, and retailers know it.
Not defending their businesses but that’s the reality of the game. The idea of finding $20 a month for something vs a few hundred all at once is a big reality.
Yes, they’d be better off scraping up $20 a month for 10 months and going to buy it, but like most poor, if there isn’t a bill its dedicated to it will get spent on something else... and no not all of that is frivolous.
Same deal with the tote the not used car places... needs a car to get to work, but credit is terrible, so has no choice but to finance at rates that are insane.. as such spends far too much of their income on transportation, and this keeps them further down than they should be even though they are working.
Poverty is not a fun place to be, poor and bad credit is an even worse place to be.
I don’t think a refrigerator is a want, or a washing machine and dryer... do you absolutely need to own one? Nope, but you’ll drop far more of your time and money at a laundromat every week and living without a fridge is no fun either. Layaway is generally a better deal, but even that is rare to find these days.. KMart still has it year round, WalMart only brings it out around the holidays and doesn’t sell appliances etc.
The only case I’ve seen that was reasonable was a couple that moved into a house across from us. The movers said, “Yeah, we’ve moved you cross country, but you have to pay us the rest of the bill $XXX to get your stuff to the house.”
So they rented essentials like appliances and beds and couches for the two or three weeks until they got their stuff.