Those who become extremely rich are those that sell and not those that are always buying to feel good about themselves. According to 20-year-old Armani Bryan, she’s now in debt with a dismal credit score all thanks to buy-now-pay-later apps like Klarna. Once you have a credit card, you might be tempted to think that you can buy whatever you and then pay in a few weeks but that’s not how things work in the world of credit.
According to the New York Post;
Last July, Armani Bryan spotted a $2,000 blue Marine Serre dress on posh digital retailer Farfetch that she just had to have — but couldn’t quite afford.
And so, the 20-year-old Miami native used payment-postponement app Klarna, figuring there’d be no harm in purchasing the frock in four installments through Klarna’s seductive “Pay in 4” option.
But for Bryan, Klarna’s updated, glossy take on layaway turned out to be too good to be true. Now saddled with debt and a dismal credit score, she joins the more than 717,000 millennials and Gen Zers commiserating on TikTok over their respective buy-now-pay-later, or BNPL, horror stories via the hashtag #KlarnaCredit.
“I thought paying for this dress in four [installments] would be easy for me, but it wasn’t,” Bryan told The Post.
The financial technology company, founded in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2005, offers its reported 150 million users the option to evenly divide the total price of an item into four payments, and pay off the balance over a six-week period with “no interest or fees if you pay on time,” per its website.
Once a customer agrees to the terms, the system allows the patron to make an initial deposit at check-out, and then it automatically collects the three following payments via the person’s on-file debit card every two weeks.
But the most enticing part of the deal is, unlike classic layaway programs, in which retailers retain possession of a commodity while the customer chips away at the cost over time, Klarna releases the product to its clients immediately after the initial payment is made — a perk that seems to beguile young consumers.
Armani Bryan isn’t the only Gen Z complaining bitterly about such apps, college student Amy Douglas is also in the same soup and she shares her experience too.
In the summer of 2019, the 22-year-old part-time retail worker began treating herself to trendy duds at online shops like ASOS, and using Klarna to defer the payments. Her splurges felt reasonable — a $112 dress here, and $150 coat there — but they added up.
“[Klarna] almost made it seem like I was getting these things for free,” Douglas, who lives in Cumbria, UK, told The Post. But when bills began rolling in, demanding over 40% of her monthly $630 income, she was forced to beg loved ones for loans.
“It was so embarrassing that I got myself into such large amounts of debt just because I couldn’t control what I was spending,” said Douglas, who hit up her boyfriend and her dad before paying off her full balance this past April. “I never missed a payment to Klarna, because I was terrified at the mere thought of a debt collector knocking at my door.”
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