A few months ago, I bought a laptop on Amazon.
At checkout, I was given the usual payment options, along with the option to finance the purchase through Affirm. I decided to experiment and selected it.
Affirm is a buy now, pay later service that allows shoppers to split the cost of a purchase into scheduled payments, with financing terms that can vary depending on the purchase and the loan length.
The process was remarkably smooth. There was no lengthy application, no paperwork and no obvious traditional credit-check process. Within minutes, I had been approved and the purchase was complete.
My monthly payment was about $97, including interest.
That was perfectly manageable for me. I could comfortably afford the payment.
But then I looked at the interest rate.
28.8%.
That definitely caught my attention!
For comparison, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada uses 19% as an example of a typical credit-card interest rate. My Affirm financing was therefore almost 10 percentage points higher.
The interesting thing wasn’t that I couldn’t afford the laptop.
I could.
The interesting thing was how easily I had been offered relatively expensive credit as part of the checkout process.
I hadn’t gone looking for a loan.
The loan had come to me.
When Borrowing Looks Like A Payment Method
There was a time when credit was something you deliberately sought out.
If you wanted to borrow money, you applied for a credit card, went to a bank, arranged a loan or consciously decided to put a purchase on credit.
Borrowing was a separate financial decision from shopping.
That distinction is becoming increasingly blurred.
Today, credit can appear directly on the checkout page.
You can pay with a debit card, a credit card, a digital wallet—or finance the purchase through a buy now, pay later (BNPL) provider.
The consumer isn’t necessarily thinking:
I need to borrow money.
The question becomes:
Which payment option should I choose?
That is a subtle change, but an important one.
Credit is no longer necessarily something that sits outside the shopping experience.
It is becoming part of the shopping experience itself.
My Affirm Experience
My experience with Affirm illustrates this perfectly.
The process was very fast and convenient. I entered the information required, received an immediate approval and completed the purchase.
From a consumer perspective, there was nothing to dislike or complain about.
But the interest rate changed the way I thought about this type financing.
My payment of approximately $97 a month was easy for me to manage. I wasn’t worried about making the payments. I wasn’t stretching my budget.
But 28.8% was enough to make me reconsider whether I wanted to keep the loan outstanding.
So I didn’t.
I paid it off before the end of the term.
The monthly payment had been perfectly manageable. The interest rate was the deterrent.
And I think that distinction is important.
The issue wasn’t affordability.
It was the cost of borrowing.
When The Monthly Payment Becomes The Focus
This is one of the things that concerns me about the way financing is increasingly presented at checkout.
A monthly payment is easy to understand.
A $97 payment feels manageable.
An interest rate requires a little more thought.
So does the total amount that will eventually be repaid.
This isn’t unique to BNPL. Car financing, mortgages, personal loans and credit cards all involve the same basic principle.
But BNPL brings the financing decision directly into the moment of purchase.
The consumer is already thinking about what they want to buy.
Then, right there on the checkout page, they are offered a way to make the purchase feel more manageable.
The financing doesn’t interrupt the purchase.
It helps complete it.
Credit for Smaller and Smaller Purchases
Financing a laptop isn’t particularly unusual.
What I find more interesting is how the same model is increasingly being applied to smaller purchases.
Buy now, pay later options can appear when you’re buying groceries, take-outs, clothing, and other everyday goods.
And as the technology makes small transactions increasingly easy to finance, the question becomes:
How small does a purchase have to be before we stop thinking of financing it as borrowing?
A $2,000 purchase financed over time feels like a significant financial decision.
A $500 purchase may feel less significant.
Four payments of $125 feel smaller still.
And what about four payments of $25?
At some point, the individual payment can become so small that the fact that we’re borrowing money almost disappears from the equation.
The Normalization of Borrowing
There is nothing inherently wrong with BNPL.
There are circumstances in which spreading a purchase over several payments can make sense. An interest-free financing option can be genuinely useful, particularly when a consumer already has the money available and is simply choosing how to manage the timing of the payments.
The issue is not that every use of BNPL is irresponsible.
The issue is what happens when borrowing becomes normalized as a routine way to pay for ordinary consumption.
If credit is available every time we shop, it becomes easier to think of credit as simply another payment method.
And once that happens, the distinction between spending and borrowing starts to disappear.
Small Payments Add Up
The danger with small instalment payments isn’t necessarily that any one of them is unaffordable.
It is accumulation.
One $25 payment may be irrelevant to a household budget.
Five or six simultaneous instalment plans are different.
A consumer can have payments coming due for purchases made weeks or months ago, while continuing to make new purchases today.
The individual decisions may have seemed completely reasonable.
The combined obligation may be considerably less comfortable.
This is one of the peculiarities of frictionless credit: the ease of entering into each individual obligation can make it harder to appreciate the total amount of credit being used.
The Problem isn’t BNPL Per Se. It’s Invisible Borrowing.
It’s tempting to make this an argument against buy now, pay later.
I don’t think that’s quite right.
The more interesting issue is the way credit is presented.
If I walk into a bank and apply for a loan, I know I’m borrowing money.
If I apply for a credit card, I know I’m applying for credit.
But when financing appears alongside Visa, Mastercard, debit and other payment options at checkout, the psychological distinction becomes less obvious.
The transaction looks like a purchase.
The financing is happening underneath it.
And the smoother that process becomes, the easier it is to focus on the purchase rather than the borrowing.
Affordability Isn’t the Same as Cost
My own experience is a useful example of why this distinction matters.
The $97 monthly payment was affordable for me.
But that didn’t make a 28.8% interest rate cheap.
Both things can be true.
I could comfortably make the payments and still decide that I didn’t want to pay that much for the privilege of borrowing.
So I paid the loan off early.
That is perhaps the simplest way to think about the difference between affordability and value.
A loan can be affordable and still be expensive.
And a financing option can be convenient without necessarily being a good deal.
A Little Friction Isn’t A Bad Thing
Technology has spent years trying to eliminate friction from our lives.
That’s usually a good thing.
We don’t want to enter our credit-card information every time we shop online. We don’t want to fill out unnecessary forms or wait days for a routine transaction.
But financial friction can sometimes serve a purpose.
A moment of hesitation can give us time to distinguish between:
“I can make this payment.”
and
“I can afford this purchase.”
Those aren’t the same statement.
A payment schedule can make a purchase look manageable without making it financially worthwhile.
And a financing option can make borrowing feel like a normal part of shopping without making the borrowing inexpensive.
Credit Without The Noise
This is one of the ideas behind my book, Money Without the Noise: A Canadian Guide to Clear Financial Thinking in a Clickbait Era.
The book isn’t about avoiding financial products or treating every use of credit as a mistake. It’s about stepping back from the way financial products are presented and asking what we’re actually being offered.
That feels particularly relevant when credit moves directly into the checkout experience.
My laptop purchase was a good example.
The process was fast.
The payment was manageable.
The financing was convenient.
And the interest rate was 28.8%.
The rate didn’t make the laptop unaffordable.
It made the financing unattractive.
So I paid the loan off early.
And that’s perhaps the part of this experience that I find most revealing.
I hadn’t gone to a lender looking for a loan.
I was shopping for a laptop, and the loan was waiting for me at checkout.
The convenience made it easy to say yes.
The interest rate gave me a reason to say, Actually, I don’t want this debt.
As credit becomes increasingly embedded in the checkout experience—and increasingly available for smaller and smaller purchases—we may need to become more deliberate about recognizing what we’re actually choosing.
Because “I can afford the payment” and “this is an affordable way to buy it” are two very different things.
