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Comment by fsh | Hacker News Reader

I just don't get this obsession with taking on debt. "Financing" doesn't make a product any cheaper. If you can't pay $5000 now, you probably shouldn't buy the product.

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It's better-than-free money. The 0% interest rate means, accounting for inflation, you're getting paid to use Apple's money instead of your own.

I can afford the lump sum, but it's a lot nicer to smooth out the cash flow using Apple's money instead of mine. As long as you're responsible, what's the harm?

This is America baby, I don’t have a debit card I have a credit card. Jokes aside, if I’m going to pay the $5000 anyway and they let me pay for it over 12 months with no interest, I might as well do that and get a little credit score bump as well. I can afford the product, I just decide to pay it in 12 small chunks instead of 1 big chunk.

You can invest the money in the meantime, leading to anywhere from guaranteed 5% to likely 10-30% returns.

I still don't understand why an effective 5% "discount" (not counting the effort to actually invest the money) makes the $5000 pill any easier to swallow. The money is still gone.

You're right about the pill thing, I considered that myself after I wrote my other comment. It's something psychological; I know I'm still paying $5000, but it's easier to do that when I'm only paying $400 per month over 12 months versus one big payment of $5000. Even though I can afford the $5000, it's much harder to convince myself to pull the trigger when I'm looking at that amount of money. I guess that's why it works and all of these big online retailers are doing financing.

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