Or you are like me and even though I can afford to pay cash for my bikes...I do 12 months interest free which frees up my money to put into my interest gaining investments.

These are essentially just store credit cards though, right? You charge the purchase and if you pay off the balance in 6 months (or 12 months), they won't charge you interest. If you don't pay it off, they hit you with some ridiculous APR hike.

Furniture and department stores have been doing this for decades. No one is repossessing store merchandise when people fail to pay off these cards on time. They just apply penalties, ding your credit and eventually turn you over to a collection agency.

The difference with auto financing is that the bank actually holds the title of the car until the loan is paid off. You don't really own it, the bank does. So if you stop paying on the loan, they're gonna come get their car.

I would never purchase a bike on credit....I prefer to pay cash.

The cards I have say Trek and Specialized on them with the store name.

https://d.comenity.net/ac/trek/public/home

https://www.specialized.com/us/en/s-card

I just purchased a Catrike Expedition from Utah Trikes. They were offering 18 month no interest financing via Synchrony Bank so I took advantage of the offer. I could have paid cash but why do so when you can get free financing. I have not paid interest on a car in well over a decade. I always buy new cars and shop for 0% financing. This is one reason I will never buy a Mercedes or BMW as they never offer 0% loans. My last four cars have all been Mazdas.

The serial number could be marked as stolen, and the next time the S/N pops up, who ever is holding the bike is out of luck, potentially even if it wasn't reported stolen until after the person bought it.

The same thing is currently happening in the cell phone world. Many cell phones are financed in one way or another. There is a risk that a person will acquire a cell phone by one method or another. Then resell it before anybody noticed that it is either stolen or not paid for. Then the cell company will "brick" the phone leaving the buyer with a non-working phone. Many E-Bay sellers don't guarantee their IMEI is "clean".

The ironic thing about that is the cops will return the bike to the person who originally reported it stolen.

Hopefully it will have been sold a time or two so the guy who the cops took it from doesn't report you as the one who sold it to him.

Monthly payments on a bicycle ???....No way

Actually, I have seen furniture stores and Best Buy occasionally enforce their right to repo for failure to pay on a store card balance. It's pretty rare, but some of the items they sell are big ticket.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p...erest-pmsi.asp

Coming this fall to A&E ‘Bike Repo’…

‘There it is, the Pinarello Dogma F8 we’ve been looking for. The owner is in the coffee shop berating the barista for not having fair-trade almond milk so we’ll sneak up and try to grab it … oh no he has Time pedals! … We’ll have to replace the cleats in these shoes, good thing I have a skin suit to get some distance once we get going.’

I’d probably watch that!

I don't mean to brag, but I can walk into a store and buy whatever I want without having to ask how much things cost. Thanks, dollar store.

If it's reported to the police and the s/n entered into NCIC as stolen, it's not likely to be run unless a buyer insists upon having a police officer present at the sale to run it. And then, if you hold onto it for a year, you're free & clear because items such as bicycles are automatically purged from NCIC computers after a year.

Nebraska Furniture Mart (regional gigantic furniture warehouse outfit) is pretty notorious for being hard asses about collections and/or repo. My understanding is that it's a policy decision -- even if you don't come out ahead, financially, by paying a lawyer to go to court to enforce your rights on a $500 TV; if you do that for every single past-due account I guess they come out ahead.

But they also have their own financing agreements as opposed to boilerplate unsecured loan agreements, and the local debtors' attorneys all know that in most cases it's not worth the trouble to fight them so they'll encourage their clients to surrender the collateral.

I don't have much experience with these third-party point-of-sale financing outfits like Affirm and Synchrony. They got big after I'd stopped doing insolvency law. I'd guess they probably write most things off and sell off the bad debt. That's what Visa does.

Why not? Interest free financing that allows me to put extra money monthly into my 401k/IRA which have been averaging 10% return over the past 30 years.

Dumb not to if it's offered.

My question is: why would you buy a bicycle on credit? No one NEEDS a 3,000$ bike so if a potential bike buyer only has 1,200$ then buy a 1,200$ bike or save money.

It's not about needs. It's about wants.

You only live once. You aren't promised today, tomorrow or next week. Splurge away and have fun.

There is no logical distinction between needs and wants, so it's kind of pointless to bring it up.

Rule #12 applies.

So many self righteous cash buyers in this thread.
Obviously not many with a finance major though :rolleyes:

You don’t need a finance degree to know that borrowing at 2% so that you can invest at 10% is a smart move.

I have very little good to say about finance. There is a lot to be said for being debt-free. If nothing else, it cuts down on spending.

Craziness never ceases to amaze me. Going into debt for a bike. Whew.

Yeah that's why most Americans have so few assets when they want to retire. Idiots.

This is a rather simplistic view, and not at all supported by actual principles.

One simple example: how many people can afford to buy a house without borrowing money? And yet, many people wish to own houses, they are generally pretty good investments, and we all need somewhere to live. Postponing that purchase until you have saved up the entire purchase price would involve missing out on a great many benefits - both financial and intangible.

By the same token, student loans are generally very wise financial moves, as long as certain conditions are met - such as that the degree is actually earned and has a reasonable market value.

I was talking about consumer loans, not houses. It's pretty clear this thread is about consumer spending, not anything with tangible value. Housing certainly is one area where I'm never paying cash, but it's not a $10000 bicycle either. My insistence on buying bikes with cash limits me to $3000 bicycles, plus or minus.

We have plenty of investments and are also debt free, the kids made it through college without taking any loans and that combined is probably worth at least another $50k in stress reduction and happiness to me. And that's a very generous estimate of what I might have made with the money had I engaged in debt arbitrage.