Why are some people better with money than others?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I think you’re kind of joking here and also agree with Anne, taking care of yourself, and loving yourself doesn’t mean buying yourself fancy things, it actually means working out what you really want and that often doesn’t really cost anything.

One of the first things I taught my partner about money is, when considering buying something for say $100, ask yourself - is this going to make me $100 happier? If the answer is yes then go ahead and buy it, if the answer is no - is there something similar for $50 which would make you $50 happier? Keep going till you find the right level - which sometimes means not buying anything at all.

I’m still not convinced that all of the shopping in the world is going to make someone happy, no-one feels like they have an extravagant, lavish lifestyle - we all think we only buy the things we need, and being richer or having more stuff over a certain baseline has been demonstrated not to increase happiness. I can’t find the study proper but this is the crux of it:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Wealth-Does-Not-Equal-Happiness-148690.shtml

Honestly, my partner and I do have a pretty good lifestyle, we don’t deny ourselves anything we really want and we use about 30% of our net income to pay down debt or save (i.e. increase our net worth). I think as long as we continue to do that - as a percentage of our income - we’re likely to be ok in retirement, and be able to take care of our children but when I was a kid we had nothing and I think a lot of my money skills stem from that. My much younger half sisters have never wanted for anything and I don’t think they’ll ever be properly independant from their parents - I guess we’ll see though…

22

It’s a learned skill and a lifestyle. My father is an accountant, so he spent my childhood getting me children’s books about finance, making me put 10% of my allowance away for “taxes” (ie: to help pay for house stuff), and teaching me that I should always save, save, save and NEVER take out debt unless you absolutely have to (or it’s a controlled circumstance intended to build your credit. . . but of course, that explanation came when I was older heh).

I talk about this stuff a lot with my friends because they are constantly asking me for financial advice. I’m 26, have no debt, have a retirement fund, and also have a lot of fun money to travel with. I don’t make an outrageous amount of money or anything, it’s really just how I spend it.

Anyway, the one thing I’ve universally noticed in talking to my friends is that the ones who are worst with their money are the ones whose parents never taught them about it. Now, the parents either never taught them due to ignorance (they themselves didn’t know) or by happenchance (they just never got around to it because of. . . well, life), but there ya go. Couple that with the fact that schools don’t really teach personal finance anymore and you’ve got a whole bunch of people who make absolutely abysmally stupid financial decisions.

I’ll give you a perfect example: for years, I slept on my ex boyfriend’s old full sized mattress. A few years ago, I was casually mentioning to my friends that I was thinking of getting a new bed (mattress, headboard, frame- the whole shebang), but that I was going to 1: shop around and 2: save up (I was just out of college). A friend interjected that Furniture Store X offers NO INTEREST!!!111!! for 12 months if you finance through them. I pointed out to her that their prices are higher to compensate for that and (MOST IMPORTANTLY!) that you should never, ever buy luxury goods on credit. EVER. I mean, I had a bed that worked, I didn’t need a new bed, I just wanted a new bed. She honestly could not understand this logic and went back and forth with me for half an hour. Ultimately, I’m sure she still thinks I’m a moron, particularly since she furnished her whole house from that place (a store that WAY marks up cheap furniture). Oh well.

My point is: there’s a huge disconnect and I think it’s a matter of early (and on going) education.

23

That’s great Diosa! That’s exactly my attitude too, and it’s wonderful that your dad taught you such great money skills.

I also think that banks and financial institutions set you up for failure, example - when my partner and I bought a house we ended up having to put it in my name only, because of his credit rating (or pay an outrageous interest rate.) My income at the time was pretty low and I borrowed the absolute maximum I could to get us over the line. I think the broker listed my living expenses at like $100 a month on the loan application. I also cancelled all of my credit cards (easy because I didn’t carry balances on them). After we moved in it was inconvenient not having a credit card at all so I asked the bank I had the loan with to send one out. They didn’t tell me how much it was for so I was anxiously awaiting the paperwork, hoping it would be at least $2,000. When I got the card it was for just under $15,000!!! I was really shocked because they knew I was mortgaged to the hilt and moving into a new house is when you really want to buy new furniture etc - I felt they were setting me up for failure and behaving pretty irresponsibly.

I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me “if I couldn’t afford it the bank wouldn’t give me the money”. The days of banks having your best interests at heart are long gone but people still believe that the bank is the expert so they’d rather listen to them than common sense. SMH.

24

One thing I’d do is talk, talk, talk with them, early and often, about money. They should know how much you make, certainly as soon as you can trust them not to blab about it to everybody (most teenagers, even young teenagers, can and do keep secrets). Better yet, they should know how much you make and about how much you spend per month. When they move out on their own should not be the first time they see an electricity, water, credit card, or phone bill (like it was for me). Let them see you paying bills and discussing major purchases. Let them see how you do your taxes. If you buy a house, rent a new apartment, or buy a new or used car while they’re living at home with you, let them see how the process of making the financial part of that decision works. Let them see the mortgage or car loan paperwork, if there is any.

As soon as they are old enough to understand, tell them why making only the minimum payments on credit cards is a bad idea. Credit card bills (in the US, I don’t know how it is anywhere else) now have to tell you how long it will take to pay off the whole thing and how much you will end up paying, if you only pay the minimum. Credit card bills are also a good way to demonstrate how lots of small purchases add up.

Give them an allowance. You can’t learn to manage money without any money to manage, any more than you can learn to play the piano without a piano. Let them make mistakes with it, and experience the consequences of those mistakes. I wouldn’t make them pay for anything necessary out of their allowance at least until they’re a little older (money for school lunches should come from a different pot, for example), but a kid can experience not having enough money to buy something they really, really want. It won’t hurt them, quite the contrary.

Don’t hand out money to them every time your family goes to the mall. It might be better not to take recreational trips to the mall at all, but if you do, don’t give them money every time you do. My parents did this. My sister and I both ran into some financial issues when we got out on our own, and we think those two things are connected. In the real world, you don’t get money just because you go to a place where people like to spend money.

Teach them to cook. Eating out all the time is a good way to get into money trouble, with possible health problems thrown in for good measure (restaurants often serve too-large portions of food that is high in salt, sugar, and calories). Boys and girls all need to learn to cook. They all eat, don’t they?

Talk about the difference between wants and needs, early and often. They should sometimes hear the word “no” from you when they ask for something they want (not if they ask for something they need, of course). “No” is not a bad word. How will they learn to say no to themselves when they want something, if they never heard it from you?

Talk with them about advertising, and how the purpose of advertising is usually to make you want something that will cost you money. If they have an experience where a toy isn’t as cool as it looked in the commercials, or a cereal that they begged for doesn’t taste as good as it looks, that’s a teachable moment.

Be sure to teach them that if something sounds too good to be true, it almost always is. If they absorb this lesson, they won’t be as likely to fall for stuff like the “Spanish bank” your mother-in-law is investing in. Concrete, real-life examples are a great help here. Don’t be afraid to tell them about a time you fell for something you shouldn’t have.

Work on your own bad money habits. Your kids are watching you. What they see you do is going to be more of an influence on them than what you tell them to do, or not to do.

25

IMO, it’s about 1/4 knowing how to spend and not spend your money, and 3/4 about abstract reasoning. Numeracy, organization, planning, remembering deadlines and events over time. Those abstractions have to be real and tangible to you, or your money is going to fly through your fingers - often without you doing a thing.

26

When your kids are teenagers, they will need to hear this story. You will need to tell them how it could have turned out badly, too.

Don’t let them think financial problems only happen to bad people, or to dumb people. That’s a comforting thought (at least as long as you don’t have any financial problems), but the world does not work that way.

27

This is a really good point Anne, most of the poor decisions I’ve seen people make are when they feel they don’t have many options or are in a desperate situation, but not always. MIL made her “investment” because she felt she didn’t have enough money and she had to start earning big bucks really quickly. My dad, who is pretty well off, made a terrible investment decision because he trusted his accountant and didn’t consider the downside (margin lending) and, even when he doesn’t agree with this accountants investment advice will still go along with it - everyone makes mistakes but if you don’t think it’s a good idea why would you do it? Just because someone in a suit told you to?

And thanks for your tips on teaching kids money skills too - it’s really great advice :slight_smile:

28

There are people out there who do take advantage of people in bad and stressful situations. It’s not a nice thing to do, but people do it. Tell your kids about payday lenders, and why they do what they do.

People who give you investment advice, or offer you a loan, or try to sell you stuff, do not always have your best interests at heart. They have their own best interests at heart. Sometimes those coincide with yours, sometimes they don’t. There’s no guarantee that an investment that someone is trying to sell you is a good idea, nor is there any guarantee that all investments will not lose money. This is true even if the person who’s trying to sell it to you is wearing a suit or works for a company you have heard of.

There’s no guarantee that your salary will always go up. There’s no guarantee that houses always increase in value (as so many people found out in the past five years). There is no investment that is guaranteed to increase in value.

There are high-pressure salespeople in the world. They are often trying to sell you something you don’t really want or need. If this were not true, they probably wouldn’t be pressuring you so hard on it.

29

I read an article a while ago (it might have been this one) that mentioned that the brain activity of savers and spenders is different.

Clearly, that’s just one factor. But it’s much easier to delay gratification when your brain is set up to mourn the loss more than celebrate the gain. I look at my parents, who were spenders and have exerted a huge amount of effort to get their financial house in order and save more (and have mostly succeeded), and I know that it’s much harder for them to do so than for me. They both understand compound interest. They’re both smart people.

I am completely the opposite. I get buyers remorse after almost every significant purchase. I have had to train myself to expect this, to decide long before any given purchase that it is what I want, and to ride it out. The upside of this is that I’ll certainly have saved enough, and hopefully will be able to retire early. The downside is that I’ve definitely missed some opportunities because I didn’t want to spend the money, or had less fun because I kept second-guessing the expenditure rather than putting the decision behind me and concentrating on enjoying what I now have.

30

For the record one of the people in the couple I talk about in my post is my brother. We were raised together in the same home with the same parents, and are only 2 years apart in age. We’re equally bad at math.

So at least in our case it’s not just math skills and it’s not upbringing. It’s something else.

31

This is not a particularly compelling example given that a bed is, strictly speaking, a “luxury good” anyway. Plus, depending on how much the price was marked up, it may not have been a bad deal to jump on such an offer. It’s really a decent amount more complicated than you are making it. You derive value from having things you enjoy, maintaining open credit lines, etc. Just saying you should never buy things you don’t NEED on credit is too strict a rule, and would actually result in a lot of unintended consequences if everyone acted this way. If people did this en masse, many businesses would not grow, and fewer people would go to college. Those, I think, would be bad things.

The problem in my mind is that because judgement of financial prudence is typically results-based. We are not evaluating the process of decision making, we are judging the outcomes. A hedge fund manager that has a good year is prudent and wise, when they have a bad year, they are profligate and reckless. It makes sense people look at it that way because we cannot see the steps people take to arrive at a decision, we can only see the outcomes. “Being good with money” largely means an alignment of risk tolerance and resources that result in a positive outcome. That doesn’t really tell you much about how wise such decisions are. I don’t say that to deny that there are people who make terrible financial decisions, or that can’t delay gratification, but if people are trying to take a stand against financial imprudence, the anecdotes should not just be about when poor people make bad decisions, as their relative worth should not inform the debate on fiscal wisdom.

The problem is complicated today by the fact that upward mobility largely rests upon how well one can leverage their resources and capital. People without either of those things have a much lower ceiling than those with it do. The vast majority of the time, a guy who a 100k salary will do better long term than a guy with a 35k salary regardless of how financially savvy or frugal the lower paid guy is.

32

Their cheapest mattress was $1100. Their cheapest bedrame/headboard was $700. So, the cheapest I was walking out the door that day was for $1800.

I ended up buying the exact same headboard and bedframe set for $300 about a month later. And the exact same mattress on sale for $300. So, that day, I spent $600 by shopping around, waiting a month, having cash, and haggling.

Again: I didn’t NEED a bed, I WANTED a bed. Sure, there’s a value on things we want and the pleasure we derive from those things, but I suppose that my value in having that bed on that day was far, far lower than $1200. You may feel differently, but I’d say it’s generally a bad idea to finance something you don’t need just so you can have it instantly.

To give another bed-centric example: a friend and her boyfriend are just outright dumb when it comes to money. They wanted a new bedroom set, so I pointed them to Craigslist, as well as various discount furniture stores in their town. But because they are apparently utterly unable to save up some cash to buy things outright, they ended up going to a rent-a-center place. For a used bedroom set (two side tables, mattress, box spring, bed frame, headboard, and dresser), they signed an agreement to pay $130 a month to “rent to own” this used furniture. The term of the contract? FIVE YEARS. So, they will- in the end- pay $7800 for used furniture-- all because they valued having a luxury good (they had a place to sleep, the just wanted a full bedroom set) that very moment over saving for a few months. If they really wanted a used set, there were plenty of gently used ones in great styles for a few hundred bucks on Craigslist (and those prices are negotiable).

So, I suppose that brings up another point worth discussing: instant gratification. A lot of folks in our society put WAY too much emphasis on instant gratification and the value of it.

33

Why do you attribute the difference in price to the no-interest credit they offered? It may just be a more expensive store. Not having been there, I trust you made the decision you were comfortable with, but your contention that no-interest loans are always a hidden way to screw you is generally not borne out by the facts.

It’s a decent rule of thumb, but your ignoring context is where I would have an issue.

Yes, rent-to-own store are generally a bad idea, but your kneejerk reaction is not really appropriate. How much was the set they got worth at the time? How much were they able to save each month? Etc, etc? The proper course of action is to figure out the cost difference, assign a value to both decisions, then see what comes out ahead. I have no doubt your friend did not do that, but you shouldn’t immediately assume you are getting screwed whenever someone offers you credit. Your friend, it would appear, made a value judgment you disagree with. Assuming she did this with both eyes open, with a clear understanding of the true costs of both courses of action, I don’t see that as a necessarily imprudent. At least, no more imprudent than people living in expensive areas, going to expensive colleges, or wearing expensive clothing, or going on vacations.

I recall you saying you save your money to travel. Travel, strictly speaking, is a net loss in the vast majority of circumstances. If I were to say to express horror that you go on vacations instead of saving your money, you would reasonably respond that it’s worth it to you even if it doesn’t make financial sense. I guess it mostly bothers me because this is largely a matter of not wanting people to make decisions they can’t afford. That’s a laudable goal, but it has little to do with financial logic broadly speaking, as rich people make just as many bad decisions as poor people do.

I agree. But there is often an excluded middle in discussions like this. I don’t think anyone suggests buying everything you want as soon as you can get it, but it’s rational, logical, and understandable that people place value on instant gratification.

34

Then there are people (myself included) who are contradictions. My mom, for example, is penny-wise but pound-foolish. On a daily basis she will scrimp and save in every way, to the point of counting toilet paper sheets…but then throw away a couple grand on a get-rich-quick scam.

I’ve known people who will buy something simply because it is on sale-- even if they don’t want or need it-- and then claim they “saved” money. Others will drive 10 miles out of the way to save a few cents on groceries, not realizing that any “savings” was lost in gas wasted (not to mention time&trouble).

I myself am relatively frugal, don’t buy name brands, don’t use credit, have no use for “bling,” and rarely buy on impulse. But I’ve easily blown a hundred thousand bucks or more on drugs and alcohol. Even clean&sober, I will occasionally splurge on a charity event or some fancy food item because “it seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

35

In my experience being good with money is a complex mixture that touches on what others have mentioned:
[ul]
[li]ability to think long term[/li][li]spending less than you earn[/li][li]understanding want vs. need[/li][li]aversion to spending - saving mentality[/li][li]defense against the dark arts (marketing / advertising / everything always available)[/li][li]never pay full price.[/li][/ul]

Case in point - someone I know - bless her heart, she is naturally “bad” with money. I am naturally “good” with money. Over the years I have tried to give her pointers and she has tried to adopt the principals but is often falling short of the mark. She now is a firm believer in never paying full price, and has started saving - but the want/need meter still needs adjusting. She will now spend months comparing prices, looking for discounts and sales, and finding the absolute lowest price - for a cruise vacation.

Now, everyone deserves a vacation, and finding the absolute best deal is great! But, but, but, can she actually afford a cruise vacation? Not really. Has she saved for a cruise vacation? No - that’s what credit cards are for, yah? Can I convince her to consider NOT taking a cruise vacation? Nope.

While we’re on the subject of credit cards, I don’t list them as a deciding factor in the good/bad spectrum. They can be toxic for someone, indeed. Or they can be a useful tool in the right hands. I don’t subscribe to the “no debt” mantra, debt can be a valuable tool, just as savings can be a valuable tool.

36

That’s a good point - I’ve worked with people who bought coffees and breakfast, snacks at two coffee breaks, and lunch at work every day. I did the math on that, and figured they were spending almost $4000 per year on eating at work, instead of packing a lunch most days and drinking coffee from home and the coffee machine at work. That’s about six extra mortgage payments for us!

I shouldn’t be surprised to hear this, but I still am - the banks are not your friends. The banks are skilled at figuring out exactly the point where you will pay them the most interest, and not default on the loan. I have an adversarial relationship with my bank (I assume that what’s good for them is bad for me and vice versa), and it’s been working fine for me so far.

I’m quoting all of this because it is such good advice.

I agree - if the prices are the same and you can buy something with a no-interest loan, you don’t take a hit for buying it that way. I think where the downside of no-interest loans comes in is that most people aren’t disciplined enough to make sure that the balance is paid off before the interest comes due.

37

I don’t think those things are mutually exclusive, you can have value (and pride) in what you own and take trips/buy yourself new things while still being financially secure. Life would not be very enjoyable if I had lots of money in my account but never took a vacation or bought myself a new piece of technology. On the other hand, if I didn’t have much money in my account, it would be pretty irresponsible of me to take a vacation or buy myself something I don’t really need.

To answer the OP, yes, I have a “rainy day” fund. I actually have two savings accounts. One that I put extra money into in case I need it to pay a surprise bill or the car breaks down, etc., and one that is specifically for my goal of buying a house someday, or in the event I lose my job, I have 6 months worth of bills I can pay.

I have always paid my bills on time, and have never had to borrow money to get by. I’ve been blessed with having very supportive family and friends, and there have been times I’ve been given great gifts. For instance, my family helped to pay for repairs to my car in the past, and they bought me my first car. Once a friend loaned me $300 to get something I had been trying to save up for. I hadn’t even asked her for the money, and I think it ended up taking a year to pay her off in $25 increments, but I have always been extremely grateful for it.

I’ve definitely had harder times and easier times, but nothing on either extreme. Surprise bills have come up, and every year when I get my tax return things are little more flush. Though I usually just use that to pay my credit card down.

I think it’s a combination of upbringing, knowledge/education about budgeting, and personal goals/desires. I try to find a balance between letting myself spend money and enjoy it, and making sure I always have enough in the bank to cover my bills.

38

Another thought about the way the mind of people who are good with money works (prompted by my previous post where I mentioned that all those coffees and snacks equalled six mortgage payments for us) - if, for example, I make $15 per hour, I tend to see things in multiples of those hours. Dinner for two out, $45? Three hours of work. $30 blouse? Two hours of work. I don’t know if this is a function of being raised with not much money, but I see the value of work, money, and things and the exchange rates between all of them.

39

I’m not sure I can put my finger on it. Even reading this thread has left me more :confused: than anything else.

Let me just ramble a minute and see if I come up with anything.

• I know several people, one an exBF, who have this attitude sometimes that “I’m not payin’ that!” And I cannot wrap my brain around it. The exBF in particular; I couldn’t understand his thinking. He once bought a ukelele because he wanted to learn how to play. He already had ten other instruments that he’d tried to learn and abandoned. So he bought the uke. A couple weeks later, he wanted to come over and use my computer. I asked what was wrong with his. Well, his power had been cut off. Because he’d spent his last $60 on the ukelele instead of making at least a partial payment to the utility company. So he sat there in the sweltering heat, in the dark, playing his uke. I cannot wrap my brain around this thought process: A) I have X dollars. B) I have Y bill coming due before my next paycheck. C) If I do not pay Y bill with X dollars, I will be sitting in the dark, sweating balls while I play my ukelele. D) So I’m going to go out and buy some frivolous purchase and just let the lights go out. Bwuh?

• I think sometimes people do not realize that, if you have $100 in your account, but the bill you have to pay is $200, you can actually call your creditor and make a partial payment. I even advised my ex at that time, even if he couldn’t make the whole payment, to give them something. Even $5 might be enough of a good faith payment that will keep the lights from getting turned off. My mom taught me that when I was first out of college and juggling a student loan, a credit card, and a car payment. Sometimes, I had to send Citibank only $5, but I always sent them something. My credit score is over 800 because I’ve never missed a payment. I might not have made the full minimum payment, but they got something.

• Some people don’t add up or apparently understand the costs of making short-sighted decisions. It cost my ex $150 to get the power turned back on. Instead of spending his $60 on the lights and AC, he had to spend $210 on the lights and AC. Plus $60 for the uke. Why couldn’t he have found a cheaper uke on Craigslist? Why couldn’t he rent one from the music store? Why couldn’t he have played one of his other ten instruments while saving up the $60 after all his bills were paid? Why couldn’t he have sold some or all of the ten instruments he wasn’t playing to come up with the money for both?

I don’t get it. Why would you blow what little money you have on something you don’t need when you KNOW you will have to pay for something long before your next paycheck? I would view that decision a little differently if he’d had some terrible medical problem and needed the $60 for an ER copay, but that was not the case.

So now we’re talking about values. What one person values is simply not important to another person.

• Same exBF whined and cried constantly about his crappy job and how little it paid. But he’d forgone college and didn’t have any education credentials and was stuck with $10/hour jobs. So he attempted to go back to school. I asked him to pull his credit report because he got turned down for student loans. Turns out, one of the reasons he had such terrible credit was because he’d defaulted on a college loan years ago. “I paid that back!” he claimed. Then you should have a receipt and it should be easy to verify you’ve paid it back and get it off your credit report. So tell me about this $200 you owe to the cellphone company. “Oh, I’m not paying that! Those people were assholes!” I can’t understand spending your way through life not expecting the bills to come due. Or acting like it’s a complete surprise when they do. Or trying to punish creditors for giving you goods and services by not paying them back and calling them assholes when they try to collect.

• That said, I didn’t have spendy parents. They would only pay for needs and never for wants. It’s all too easy to deny myself luxuries and frivolities. Every now and then I will indulge that urge for instant gratification out of rebellion against how I was raised. A perfect example is vacations. If I can afford to go, that means I’ve budgeted for some percentage of my money to just be blown. When we were kids, we never stayed in hotels; it was always camping. We didn’t eat in restaurants; always had to cook by the campfire. There were no souvenirs. There was no stopping to see this sight and check out that event if there was an admission. We could only do that which was free. When we went to Niagra Falls, all we could do was stand there and look at the falls; no Maid of the Mist trips, no wax museums. Hell, I don’t even have a t-shirt to prove I was there! :slight_smile: My sister and I both make sure, if we go somewhere and do something, that we budget enough money to treat ourselves so we can experience the vacation* the way we always wanted to*. As an adult, I always come back from vacations with some little trinket or t-shirt and a memory of an experience that cost me money to have. And I try to order room service in nicer hotels at least once because it’s the sort of frivolous luxury that would have made my parents lose their minds. I also try to travel on good packages deals and fly coach and all that. I might stay at the 4-star place one night and the other nights in a La Quinta or something (I like the waffles and La Quintas are usually dog-friendly so I can save on kenneling). My trips are generally budget-budget-budget-SPLURGE-budget-budget-budget. Ooo, room service and a t-shirt, call the financial police.:smiley:

So maybe there’s something to “it’s how you were raised,” but I’m not so sure about that. When I look at exBF’s parents, they were not irresponsible people who refused to pay for stuff. Neither is the parent of my friend who makes terrible choices about her money and blows it the minute she makes any. Maybe people make bad money decisions when their sense of entitlement collides with their inability to delay gratification. Perhaps many people just make bad decisions because the consequences do not make them suffer all that much. So what if the creditors call constantly? They just let the phone bill die a slow quiet unpaid death. That solves the creditor problem. So what if they can’t get a car loan, they can just get rides. Or borrow a friend’s car. That solves that problem. So what if I have to play my ukelele in the dark, sweating balls, my girlfriend will let me check my email on her computer, sit in her AC, watch her cable… People manage to get other people to pick up the slack for them, so there’s no incentive to do it for themselves.

That’s all I got, which seems like a whole lot of nuthin’.

40

We charge everything we can - and we make between $500 and $1,000 a year off our credit card. Of course we pay it off every single month. Putting our home improvements on the card, and paying it off, paid for Christmas pretty much.

The problem with debt is that people don’t get the difference between going into debt as an investment (like college or a house) and going into debt to buy stuff that is not an investment, like toys.
BTW, 0 interest for stuff is fine so long as you have the money to buy the stuff outright. We bought a TV at Sears this way (it was also on sale and cheap) never paid a penny in interest and made money by having the balance stay in our investment account. Given that so many deals are structured on the assumption that the purchaser has no self control, you can do quite well if you have self control.