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A comment on Being Poor (2005). Parent comment

Re:Being Poor (2005) by foobar33333 on Saturday May 22, 2021 @05:42AM (#27245015)
Ok it sounds like this is a locality thing. In Australia you can just about buy a pack of gum on these apps and have monthly repayments of 50c. They have been pushed as almost replacements for credit cards.

They are absolutely a trap but if you were financially smart, you could use them to your advantage to overcome the initial investment vs lifetime cost problem.

The issue is not so much that these people have no options, but that they do not have the knowledge to pull them out of the endless traps that get marketed to them.

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Re:Being Poor (2005) by kwhitefoot on Saturday May 22, 2021 @08:12AM (#27245750)
> if you were financially smart,

The problem is that when you are strapped for cash your freedom of action is limited and it is hard to be financially smart due to the stress.

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Re:Being Poor (2005) by foobar33333 on Saturday May 22, 2021 @07:54PM (#27251291)
I agree. But it's still a different problem to the original quote. The problem these days is not that rich people can afford long lasting items that poor people can't because new financial services could be used to overcome the initial investment problem.
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