Monday morning Afterpay and Qantas issued a joint media release announcing their new partnership.
Whilst this partnership sounds like a good idea it’s actually a bad one.
The biggest winners are Afterpay, Qantas and some retailers.
The losers are us.
Buy Now Pay Later providers like Afterpay already make it easy to buy things you can’t afford.
We are the losers from this partnership in that it makes it even more rewarding to use credit to buy things you can’t afford. The more rewarding, the bigger the craving next time you see something you want, and the more difficult to resist that temptation.
This is how our culture subtly promotes overspending now, in preference to building financial resilience and saving for what really matters to us.
Without becoming an off-the-grid recluse it’s hard to opt-out of that culture, and thankfully we don’t need to. Nor do we just need more discipline.
Instead, we need to implement a money management system to navigate the culture using the same behavioural science for us rather than against us.
- Make it hard to overspend by restricting access to money
- Make it unsatisfying to overspend using visible trade-offs
- Make it easy to save using automation
- Make it rewarding to save using visible progress
In my e-guide Atomic Money Habits I expand on 8 key elements of a budgeting system you can stick to. Message me for a free copy.