The Real Cost of Pay in 4 This Sale Season

Becca HartwellOkay, be honest. You're checking out, cart's full, and that little button pops up, Pay in Four. Zero interest, Four easy payments. My thumb moves before my brain does. Same, Every time. It's so smooth, you forget you clicked it three times this month already. Wait, Three? Don't do the math on me right now. I'm Becca Hartwell, and this is Money Unlocked with my co-host, Maya, who apparently has three phantom payments floating around out there. I said don't do the math. We did a whole episode on whether BNPL even shows up on your credit score. The tradeline episode. People still ask us about that one. We're not settling that today. No, but this exact question is about to matter a lot more real soon. Why is that? Because this week, that little button is about to be everywhere all at once. Okay, so mark your calendars. Amazon just confirmed the dates. Hit me. October 6th and 7th, 48 hours, more than 35 categories, and now they're throwing in Alexa for Shopping to help you find deals faster. Great, so it's easier than ever to spend money at 2:00 in the morning. That's the pitch, yeah. But here's the number that actually stopped me. Wait for it. eMarketer and Adobe are forecasting BNPL spending will hit $2 billion during a 2026 Amazon Prime Big Deal Days event. $2 billion! Two-point-oh-four billion, up 5.5% from last year, and that's almost 8% of everything spent during the event. So basically, one out of every $12 is a promise, not a payment. Exactly. That's wild. It's not a side feature anymore. It's baked into the sale. Right. It's the checkout button now. Think about what that actually means for someone scrolling through deals this weekend. They're not just deciding, "Do I want this?" They're deciding, "Do I want this on a payment plan?" And the second question barely registers. Right, because the sale page doesn't show you the second question. It just shows you the four little dollar signs instead of the one big one. Which makes every single item in the sale feel roughly a quarter as expensive as it actually is. Exactly, and multiply that feeling across 35 different categories of stuff you can now split into four payments. Okay, so before we start doing math on five plans stacked in one week, because that's coming, we actually have to answer something we left hanging. The Tradeline question. Yes. Does opening a Pay-in-4 plan even show up as debt anywhere anyone can see it? Because if it doesn't show up- Does it even count? That's the exact thing people get wrong going into this sale. They think it's not a loan, it's a plan. Four little payments, no Big Deal. Except you can have Five of those no Big Deals running at once and never see them add up in one place. Which is basically what's about to happen this weekend to a lot of people. So let's actually settle it. What did we find out about whether this stuff shows up on your credit report? I have notes. Give me a second. Take your time. I will Wait. Okay, so the short version is- No, no, don't give me the short version yet. Walk me through it properly. Fine, fine. So we teased the Tradeline fight in the last beat. Time to actually settle it. Okay, so get this, it's not settled. It just got more complicated. Ugh, of course it did. Back in June of 2025, FICO rolled out two new models, FICO Score 10 BNPL and FICO Score 10T BNPL. Wait, that's an actual FICO product now, not a rumor? Real thing. FICO's own B2B scores VP, a person named Julie May, said it's the first score from a major provider that factors in buy now, pay later repayment. So somebody at FICO is actually looking at my four payments of $37.50? If the lender reports it, yeah. And here's the catch. These new models are built to notice when someone opens a bunch of these short installment loans back to back. Wait, define back to back for me. Are we talking the same day, the same week, the same shopping spree? The modeling looks at loans opened close together in time, not just a single isolated account. It's built to catch a pattern, not one purchase. Because that's exactly what Prime Big Deal Days is designed to make you do. Exactly. But, and this is the part that trips people up, Klarna and Afterpay still don't report to the three credit bureaus. Hold on. So this brand-new score that's built to catch stacked Pay-in-4 loans can't actually see the two biggest apps doing it? Correct. Affirm reports. Klarna and Afterpay, as of right now, don't. That's wild. So depending which app you tap, the exact same five open plans either show up on your file or they're invisible, and it's not necessarily permanent. FICO frames this as a first version of the model, expecting more lenders and bureaus to align with it over time. So right now, it's basically a coin flip which of your five plans actually get counted, but it sounds like that coin's rigged to eventually land on it all counts. Right, which means the tradeline question isn't yes or no anymore, it's which app. Oh, great. More homework. But honestly, whether it shows up on a credit report has nothing to do with whether you can actually pay it back in two weeks. Sure, the bureaus might not see it. Your bank account definitely sees it, which is really the bigger story here, not what's on paper, but what people are already telling researchers they're planning to do with these apps this exact week. Oh, I have a feeling I'm not going to love these numbers. You're really not. Okay, so Maya, hit me. What are people actually doing with these plans right now? Money Under 30 ran a survey heading into this exact holiday season, and 44% of shoppers said flat out they expect to carry debt into the new year. Wait, almost half the room already knows they're not paying it off by January? They're not even hoping. They're planning around it. That's bleak. Kind of. It's less, "I'll dodge this," and more, "I've already made peace with January being rough." That's a very different head space than most of our listeners probably assume they're in. And honestly, it says something about how normal this has become. Right, because if you assume everyone out there is trying hard to avoid debt, you miss the fact that almost half the room has already stopped trying to avoid it entirely. They've just accepted it as the cost of the season. It gets more specific. LendingTree put out a tracker this month, September, and it says nearly half of BNPL users have paid late in the past year. Nearly half. And that late payment number has climbed for a second year running. It's not a blip. It's a trend line going the wrong way. Okay, but late payments I get. Life happens. What's the stacking part? LendingTree also found more users are carrying three or more of these loans at the same time. Not one Pay-in-4, three or more running together. Three at once minimum, and that's rising too? Rising. And here's the kicker. The same tracker says four in ten Americans were considering opening a brand-new one this month. Hold on. Three or more loans at the same time for the same person? That's not somebody who made one bad call. That's a whole habit. Right. And the tracker isn't describing rare edge cases. It's describing enough people that it moved a national number. In September, before Prime Big Deal Days even starts. Right. So layer that on top of the holiday season, and you've got people opening Plan Four and Five while Plan One is already late. Hold on. Let's sit with that for a second. So it was never really about whether one loan shows up on your file. No. It's that a huge chunk of shoppers are already juggling multiple loans at once and already telling surveyors they expect to be in debt past the holidays. And that's before this five sale week even gets going. And remember, none of this needed the sale to even start yet. This is September data, before anything gets stacked on top of. Which is exactly the kicker. Great timing, everybody. Terrible timing. So okay, what do we even call that, juggling five loans across five different sales? Is there an actual term for it? Does anyone track that specific thing, or are we just describing chaos? There's a name for it, and yeah, people do track it. Ooh, don't make me wait. What is it? There's a name. The CFPB, the government agency that oversees this stuff, put out their own report on it. They call it loan stacking. Loan stacking, like Jenga, but with your credit. Kind of, yeah. Their definition is basically what you'd guess, taking out multiple buy now, pay later loans at the same time or spreading them across different lenders. And the report actually looks at how long people keep doing it, plus the total unsecured debt they're carrying because of it. Unsecured debt burden. Say that in a normal sentence. Money you owe that isn't backed by anything. No house, no car, just your word that you'll pay it back on time. Which is exactly what four different Pay-in-4 plans are. Exactly. And the CFPB isn't just noting that people do this. They're tracking how persistent it gets. Like, does someone stack once during a sale and stop, or does it become the normal way they shop? I feel personally attacked right now. I'm not naming names. So here is my question, though. Why does this even happen? Nobody wakes up and says, "Today, I will stack four loans." No, it's sneakier than that. Every single checkout feels like its own little decision. You're not thinking about the other three plans running in the background. You're just thinking, "Is 30 bucks every two weeks fine?" And the answer is always yes. Because 30 bucks is nothing. Right, on its own. That's the actual mistake. People never add it to a running total. Each plan gets judged completely by itself, like it's the only bill that exists that week. So it's not that people are bad at math. It's that they're never doing the math in the first place. That's the whole mechanism. Nobody sits down and adds plan one plus plan two plus plan three. They just keep saying yes to the next 30 bucks. Which sounds fine four separate times, and then absolutely does not sound fine once you add it up. And that's exactly the math I want to actually run right now, what this looks like for someone doing it during a week like this one. Oh, no. Get the calculator. Get the calculator. Okay, walk with me on this one. Say it's this week and you're bouncing between Five sales, Amazon, a shoe site, whatever's blowing up your feed. Five sales Five sales, Five checkout screens, and Every single one is offering you the same button. The little split it up button. Right. And Nobody's out here consciously deciding to open Five loans. It's just this one's Twenty-two dollars a pop, that one's Forty, that one's whatever the shoes cost divided by Four. Each one on its own feels like Nothing. Exactly Nothing. That's the whole design. But say each plan runs the standard Four payments over Six weeks. Six weeks per plan. Right. And you opened them on different days across the week, so they're not lined up. Plan One's second payment hits the same week Plan Four's first payment hits. Oh, No. The calendar doesn't know you were being responsible and spacing out your purchases. It's just tracking due dates as they land. Right. And none of that cares that you opened the plans on different days. The payments just start landing whenever they land. Yeah. By week Three or Four, you've got Three, sometimes Four of these plans all demanding money out of the same paycheck. So it's not Five bills. It's basically a second rent payment stacked on top of your actual bills, just made of little slices. That's the picture. Nobody sat down and budgeted for a second rent. And the scary part is you don't necessarily notice it happening in real time. You just notice your checking account feels tighter than it should and can't immediately say why. Because there's no single bill that says BNPL total. It's scattered across however many apps you used, each one only showing you its own little piece. Nobody signs up for that on purpose. No. And that's the whole scenario this week sets up perfectly. A listener who's genuinely excited about Prime deals ends up holding five separate Pay-in-4 plans from five separate sales, and every one of them looked small in isolation. Five plans, five sales, one paycheck. One paycheck that doesn't know what hit it. And none of this required anyone to do anything wrong exactly. Nobody lied on an application. Nobody ignored a warning. It's just what happens when five harmless decisions land in the same few weeks. That's exactly why read the terms isn't really the fix here. The terms were fine. The problem is nobody's adding across accounts. So if that's the trap, opening plan after plan because each one feels harmless on its own, what actually stops it? There's one rule. It's not complicated. Okay, wait for it. Tell me. Okay, so here's the rule, and it's stupidly simple. Before you tap Pay-in-4 on anything during the sale, you check your existing total first. Like actually add it up? Actually add it up. Open the apps, look at what's already scheduled, get one number. And then what? If that number's already non-zero, if you've got even one plan running, you pay cash for the new thing or you skip it. No new plan on top of an old plan ever. Ever. That's the whole rule. I like that it's a yes or no test, not a budget spreadsheet. Right, because nobody's opening a spreadsheet at checkout with a countdown timer on the deal. Fair. And this is exactly the week that test gets used because that LendingTree tracker we talked about found a real chunk of people already weighing a new loan this same month before Prime Big Deal Days even opens. So the rule isn't hypothetical, it's this week's problem. It's this week's problem. Great. I love that for us. Okay, so that's the checkout rule, but I wanna give people one more thing, something they do before Prime Big Deal Days even starts. Go. Make a list. Every open BNPL plan you've got right now on one page, app, amount, due date. Like a little inventory. Exactly like an inventory, because you can't run the check your total test at checkout if you don't already know the total. So the list is what makes the rule actually work. That's the connection. The list is the tool. The rule is what you do with it. Okay, so walk me through it. It's Tuesday night. I've got three tabs open, a countdown clock, and a coupon that expires in ten minutes. If your list says you're already carrying two plans, you close the tab or you pay with the card in your wallet. And if the list's empty? Then go for it. That's what Pay-in-4 was built for. One plan, one purchase, paid off before the next sale rolls around. So we've gone from one click that felt harmless to a real running total to a definition to the actual math on five plans and now down to two things you can literally do tonight. Check the total before you click. Write the list before the sale even starts. That's it. That's the whole segment. I kind of wanna go build my list right now. Go. We'll wait. So if you take one thing from this whole episode into Tuesday's sale, before you tap that button, know every plan you're already carrying, and don't open a new one on top of an unpaid one. That's it. That's the whole rule. That's the whole rule. Okay, if that saved you from a rough January, do us a favor. Send this episode to whoever you know is about to open five tabs this weekend. You know who you are. We're back every Tuesday, so follow the show if you don't wanna miss it. And hey, go check your apps right now. I'll Wait. She means it. See you next Tuesdays.