'Buy now, pay later' is sending the TikTok generation spiraling into debt

It seems like the "TikTok" generation is lacking financial literacy. I was too at that age. In the US, we don't typically have a class covering money in the US, which is unfortunate and expensive early in life.

Article&#x27;s a bit of a mish-mash. Mostly points finger at Afterpay and the dark patterns it used both in the marketing campaigns and in app.<p>Unfortunately it also misses one major point aside from the lending regulation and reporting of debt&#x2F;late repay to credit scoring agencies, which is how the hell didn&#x27;t these people underwrite their users properly? In the end it&#x27;s the company&#x27;s money that is put upfront.

Nothing worst then being a debt slave for worthless shit. They will learn.

Hasn&#x27;t the economy for the last twenty years been mostly funded by consumer debt?<p>With rising housing prices and stagnant wages, this how trickle up happened

&gt; ... high-level staffers at Affirm and Afterpay ... emphasized the accessibility of these services, especially for younger consumers looking to bolster their credit and consumers working to restore their credit scores<p>Something about that feels pretty dystopian.

Nothing new... Debt based consumerism has been around for long time. This is just new more streamlined and simpler version. How long has selling stuff for instalments been around?

Assuming you have the money why is using these services a bad financial decision? Isn’t a good idea to postpone payments in an inflationary economy when there’s no interest?

It&#x27;s things like this that make me believe that open democracies like the US are doomed to be outcompeted by countries run like China&#x2F;Russia&#x2F;Singapore (some work better than others). Buy Now Pay Later for consumer goods is obviously bad. An effective government should be able to just say &quot;it&#x27;s gone&quot; because it&#x27;s bad. But in the US there would have to be a law passed, which would be essentially impossible, and even if it was, it would be extremely hard to define the boundaries.

Really?<p>I thought these ‘financial instruments’ were used only by the very wealthy… ;)

People have been falling for these scams forever. Naturally a generation which lives online will be more vulnerable to attacks coming through platforms they pay more attention to. Is there anything fundamentally new, though?