Jess Okonkwo, 26, of Barkly Street, St Kilda, can list her six active buy-now-pay-later accounts without looking at her phone: an air fryer, a dress she wore once, a concert ticket, a dress she wore zero times, a vet bill, and a weighted blanket she bought at 1am during what she now refers to only as "the blanket incident." Individually, each is a manageable fortnightly amount. Collectively, they come out of her account on five different days across two pay cycles, in an order she describes as "basically astrology, nobody really knows."
The arrangement had worked, in the loose sense that nothing had actually gone wrong, until reforms introduced through changes to the National Consumer Credit Protection Act brought buy-now-pay-later providers under proper credit laws for the first time, requiring them to run real credit checks before approving new accounts. Jess found out what this meant in August, when she tried to open a seventh account, for a new mattress, and was declined. The provider's rejection letter cited her existing buy-now-pay-later repayment history as a factor, which Jess says is the first time anything had treated her six accounts as one connected fact rather than six separate, reasonable decisions.
Unable to split the mattress into four easy payments, Jess paid for it in a single transaction from her savings. She reports this felt "disgusting, like medieval barter," and also reports that it was, by a comfortable margin, the least stressful purchase she'd made all year, mostly because it required no ongoing memory of when anything was due.
By September, Jess had paid off two of the six accounts and started, unprompted, recommending a debt-snowball method to her friends, a conversion she describes as sudden and total. Her flatmate's sister, who still has an active account for a pair of boots, has asked Jess to stop sending her screenshots of repayment schedules. Jess has not stopped.
Asked whether she'd go back to six accounts given the chance, Jess said she wouldn't, then checked her banking app mid-sentence to see if a payment had gone through, and didn't notice she'd done it.