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It's easy to spend money when it's all digital. The younglings don't use physical cash.

This is really interesting. Layaway purchases in stores used to be popular but went away in the late 90’s. It’s back now as BNPL, with much worse terms.

I hate BNPY so much... I deleted my after pay account, which means I can no long use their services unless I get in contact with support to reopen my account. I did it to explicitly make it near impossible for me to be tempted. It worked. There were times I felt regret, but it was 100% the smartest move.

Then, PayPal introduced pay in 4... All my hard work went right down the drain. I can't afford this shit but fuck it's hard when you're clinically depressed.

Stuff like this is why the headline Econ stats do not actually reflect reality.

Sure, there's lots of room for critiquing how the media and the investor class focus on stats that are not actually representative of things on the ground for fairly complex mathematical/economic reasons, but that conversation requires people to have a Masters on Econ to understand.

What does not require this is the much simpler: They do not take personal debt levels and credit scores into account.

People say things like 'inflation is going up' 'i cant afford as much as i used to' and ... the main actual reason for this is usually that they're drowning in debt, but are either unaware or don't want to admit it.

This is a country where 54% of adults read and write at below a 6th grade level. Probably a comparable amount can't actually do their own budget.

...

It doesn't matter if your wages go up 2% in a year if you had to spend that year buying groceries on credit to not starve, and those all have 16 to 36% interest rates.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/personal-finance/buy-now-pay-later-daily-essentials-groceries-young-adults-rcna141718

BNPL services are downright criminally exploitive. The fact that I find Klarna logos on restaurant menus is completely insane.

Taking on debt to pay for large purchases can make sense. Buying a car with cash is impossible for most people, but paying off a car note over several years gives you the chance to buy the car without fronting the cash first.

But this whole industry is built on the idea that you can just borrow from your future self to fulfill yourself today. Quite frankly, if you don't have the money to eat out at a restaurant, you shouldn't be taking on debt to do so.

It's one thing to have a credit card where you pay to improve your credit score, or earn rewards. Ideally you are using credit strategically, even if you're using it for most/all of your daily purchases. It's another thing to have a restaurant menu literally tell you that you can "pay for this meal in 4 easy payments". They're openly asking you to keep buying luxuries even when you're too broke to foot the bill.

I mean, we've been telling them their entire lives that the planet is doomed, and they have no future... So why the fuck not bring on the debt?

I'm going to be brutally honest.

1. Corporations are shitstains and prey upon people's minds and wants.
2. People today are too entitled / greedy.

No. You don't need that phone to survive, solid but low end one will easily carry you next 3-5 years. No, you do not need to go for McD for breakfast - eat a homemade sandwhich. Takes the same amount of time it'd take to get McD served to you.

But today a lot of folk take a lot of shit for granted or worse, needed, and it's pitiful.

Fuck, that also is due to corporate ads and framing. But people need to wake up and stop fueling this shit on their own. And stop blaming schools - this shit is for parents to teach ffs, like the rest of actual household chores.

Also I am not arguing for everyone to live frugally but instead to learn a mindful way of spending. If you actually have free money, money you own and not a credit, then sure, treat yourself.

Who is teaching them financial literacy in the first place? Because they aren't being taught it in schools. Meanwhile, these predatory companies do everything they can to convince people to use them.

So, I'm going to come to their defence a bit here. Most of this is also covered in my comment I made further into the thread.

I don't think previous generations were any less financially literate on average. You've always had those careful with credit and those that didn't seem to care, or didn't understand the ramifications of their decisions.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s and most large stores had their own store credit system with 30%+ APR rates. Plenty of people that were boomers or gen X had those accounts, and would routinely buy more whenever they cleared their credit a little.

You could also get credit cards and each card in terms of spending power would have similar limits to what you have now. And there was no shortage of people that would be sitting on their credit limit all the time. I knew people in the 90s that had no idea how interest worked and would be sitting on their credit limit paying back mostly interest all the time.

I think the difference is the ease with which you can gain access to credit now.

In the 80s and 90s you generally needed to go into the store to get their credit. You needed to go to a bank or fill in paperwork in the post to get credit cards. Crucially here, generally there were less providers of credit. Credit cards were often offered by banks, there were not so many resellers of credit. To gain a line of credit you had no chance to ever repay took more effort and as such wasn't so much of a problem as it is now. It was still a problem, and companies routinely made money from the financially illiterate, even then.

What I think is different now, is that you can get credit from a few screen swipes on your phone now. There's many many more providers of credit too. As such, the ability to get into an irreversible credit position is much easier. I would put money down that the same people with £1000s in various store credit/cards all compounding interest at 30%+ in the 90s, would also be in huge debt if credit were as easy to get then, as it is now.

I am going to blame financial institutions more here (those getting into the mess are not entirely free of blame). There might be over a thousand sources of credit now, but they all funnel up to a handful of large finance institutions, and they're the ones really burying their head in the sand pretending they don't know this is happening and couldn't do anything to stop it. They most certainly could prevent it, if they wanted to. It just works better for them to have a generation that is constantly paying interest on never repayable debt. Even factoring in the few that will be written off.

Yes, ultimately we all have our own responsibility not to get into these situations. But I don't think Gen Z or any generation are or were better at this on average. It's just the conditions that allow it have changed, and continue to change.