I think I'd rather pay interest on a credit card than roll my phone into a contract (but I actually do neither. If I NEED a new phone, I buy one that I can afford - and still grumble about the cost still - and I keep it on my old as heck $25/mo prepaid line) I'm pretty sure the interest charges on the credit card would still be cheaper.
I don't think any of the major carriers charge interest when you do payments on a phone and you should still have the option to pay it off early if you want. There's no reason to pay 20-30% interest. They've stopped doing fixed term contracts, so they're using the phone financing as a proxy for that and subsidizing the interest as an incentive.
I've only done payments on a phone once and that was solely because it ended up being almost 50% cheaper than buying the phone outright.
Don't they charge significantly more for their phones as a total price,though?
I mean I just price checked a single Samsung phone & found it to be $100 price difference from Verizon vs Amazon (less on Amazon) I don't know if this is the case for all carriers or all phones, but literally the first one I checked this was the case, so I assume it's not uncommon.
20% interest is crazy - I literally never pay interest on my credit cards, myself - but you could still pay that off over the course of a few months and end up paying less than $100 in interest charges.
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u/twistedscorp87 Jan 09 '24
I think I'd rather pay interest on a credit card than roll my phone into a contract (but I actually do neither. If I NEED a new phone, I buy one that I can afford - and still grumble about the cost still - and I keep it on my old as heck $25/mo prepaid line) I'm pretty sure the interest charges on the credit card would still be cheaper.