211–220 of 298 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If $X spooks someone for a discretionary spend item, then in most cases it’s a bad financial decision for them to pay $X just spread over Y months.
This is a problem with the whole credit system, right? Yes it is a bad system.
This is kind of OP's fault, right? I don't think it was appropriate to initiate a charge back on a payment to affirm since they provided their service to OP, that is they already paid for whatever OP was buying. I have a feeling that timing between OP opening the chargeback and the shipping of the item was actually coincidental. I'd think if you paid affirm and the merchant hadn't shipped the item, then your recourse…
I used Affirm for a Casper mattress back in the day. Much the same scenario, it said "make X payments in Y months" and I was like "Ok". I think that's Affirm's wheelhouse, providing smaller merchants of largish ticket items an easy way to do financing. So OP may not have had an option outside of Affirm to do the financing. I'm not sure how much Affirm would care about the issue as they're pretty much a 3rd party to t…
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mattress/comments/ejx6za/my_casper_...
I guess it would have been smart for OP to think of that purchase as an attempt to get that item from that merchant, and just to eat the $ rather than spend a lot of time and get their credit dinged. It isn't totally different from getting a physical mattress that may or may not work, especially since they eventually did ship the item. Actually, if the mattress caused back pain and I had to go through the trouble of disposing it, that would be worse than getting nothing.
I worked at a large OTA (Online Travel Agency) who adopted Affirm a few years back. I vehemently opposed it and told everyone I could up the chain of command. A vast majority of the folks who used it, are the ones who shouldn't use it. Taking out a two year loan for a 3 day vacation.
Why? It's actually extremely smart financially as stated in another thread where investing that money over 2 years can actually result in a slightly cheaper item.
People in the poverty class are concerned with budgeting decisions to reduce their consumption as much as humanly tolerable. Reducing consumption is a game of psychological warfare between your future self and your present self.
The smart financial play is irrelevant to someone who needs to be making budgeting plays. Cheap credit leads to good financial decisions and bad budgeting decisions.
There's a misconception that when you initiate a chargeback through your credit card, then you're good, you have your money and the merchant just has to eat it. But the chargeback doesn't erase your debt with the merchant, so they are free to collect that debt by other means, including sending it to a debt collector. Adding a third party like Affirm makes this messier - Affirm (presumably) fulfilled their service, th…
All these SV fintechs are horrible at customer service. At the very top of that list is Paypal and SoFi. If you want to be in a consumer facing business, we need to force these guys to have min level customer service staff based on number of accounts.
This is kind of OP's fault, right? I don't think it was appropriate to initiate a charge back on a payment to affirm since they provided their service to OP, that is they already paid for whatever OP was buying. I have a feeling that timing between OP opening the chargeback and the shipping of the item was actually coincidental. I'd think if you paid affirm and the merchant hadn't shipped the item, then your recourse…
Yikes, I can’t believe all the comments blaming OP. It was clearly the retailer in breach of Affirm’s terms, not OP. Charge backs also have a limited window to claim - I can’t see anything that was done wrong here by OP. Yes, OP could’ve attempted to resolve with affirm up front, but why should that be necessary?
Yes, and that's why the payment to the retailer should have been the one in dispute, not the loan payment to Affirm. This is how it always works when you finance through a third party... it works the same way for a car loan, a mortgage, a credit card, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> helped lay the foundations to rebuilding my credit Does Affirm report paid-off loans to credit agencies?
Yes. They also report each payment (had an Affirm loan for an Aviron row machine, as it was the only way to buy it, which is a whole other story).
There's not a single Affirm tradeline on any of my credit reports.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. They also report each payment (had an Affirm loan for an Aviron row machine, as it was the only way to buy it, which is a whole other story).
I have had at this point at least a dozen Affirm BNPL loans, all paid. There's not a single Affirm tradeline on any of my credit reports.
https://helpcenter.affirm.com/s/article/reporting-to-credit-...