>Yes, with financing there’s a trade off. In exchange for paying interest, you have the item that much sooner.
Except then you want your next item and can't buy it because your credit limit is maxed out. So you have moved your "item queue" forward once or maybe twice, and now have one more rent to pay. You still have to wait for the next item, it's just instead of waiting for your savings to reach $100, you wait for your debt to drop to N - $100 where N is your credit limit.
It makes sense for strategic items, like a house or a car. But doing it on a daily basis is just poor financial planning.
>Alice has to sit on the floor because she doesn’t have a chair.
Motivated Alice should go around garage sales and find a used chair for $5. Or research how to make a makeshift one from whatever she has. Or borrow it from a friend. Or read in a library and eat cheaper food for 2 weeks, and save $100 right away.
All these are problem-solving and prioritization skills, and they are crucial to one's long-term success. And the difference in life quality between America and Zimbabwe is because the previous generations of Americans possessed these skills and applied them wisely. Except now the big players realized that they can make more money off people without these skills, so the popular culture is instead praising impulsive decisions over carefully weighed plans, and pushing people deeper into poverty.
> And the difference in life quality between America and Zimbabwe is because the previous generations of Americans possessed these skills and applied them wisely.
The grossly misrepresents what's happened in Zimbabwe.
I believe your intention was to suggest that by corrupting certain skills or values around finance or thriftiness or learning to build, etc etc, that the USA is on course for a significant decline in quality of life?
However, Zimbabwe's problems are rooted in a different, and much more pernicious, sort od corruption.
Except then you want your next item and can't buy it because your credit limit is maxed out. So you have moved your "item queue" forward once or maybe twice, and now have one more rent to pay. You still have to wait for the next item, it's just instead of waiting for your savings to reach $100, you wait for your debt to drop to N - $100 where N is your credit limit.
It makes sense for strategic items, like a house or a car. But doing it on a daily basis is just poor financial planning.
>Alice has to sit on the floor because she doesn’t have a chair.
Motivated Alice should go around garage sales and find a used chair for $5. Or research how to make a makeshift one from whatever she has. Or borrow it from a friend. Or read in a library and eat cheaper food for 2 weeks, and save $100 right away.
All these are problem-solving and prioritization skills, and they are crucial to one's long-term success. And the difference in life quality between America and Zimbabwe is because the previous generations of Americans possessed these skills and applied them wisely. Except now the big players realized that they can make more money off people without these skills, so the popular culture is instead praising impulsive decisions over carefully weighed plans, and pushing people deeper into poverty.