Hello dear reader,

Fall is officially here in the southeast and with that comes my return to work, as well as my first sap at energy to keep up with the blog. There’s always something! But I promised you a blog every week and damn it if I’m not going to try. Returning to work after maternity leave has been hard, though luckily I get to do it remotely, with my baby at home being watched by family, which has definitely taken some of the pressure off. I spent the last few weeks of my maternity leave furiously modeling out all of the different scenarios to get us to early retirement faster and faster (which I’ll blog more about in the future) because I couldn’t bear the idea of trading my time to a company in lieu of spending time with my baby. But hey, hopefully I learned the lesson about sticking to my guns around saving because there’s chance that had I been more diligent in the last few years I would be even closer (like maybe even a year to a year and half, sigh). But baby is keeping me honest and keeping my head on straight. So with her help, I’ll be there sooner than if I had waited to have kids.

Today I come to write to you about voluntarily getting into debt. Not because I think you should join me, but because I feel like I would be remiss to exclude this recent financial escapade in my finance blog.

There is a good chance that you have seen that in the last couple years the options to purchase things with 0% interest loans has become SO much more accessible. Like definitely to a dangerous point because almost anything you buy online now can be bought for “X easy payments with 0% down!” In fact it’s become so ubiquitous that even my Chase credit card allows me to go back to large purchases (greater than $100) and sign up for deferred payments on things after you’ve already purchased them. I think there can be a fee involved, but if your credit rating is high enough, they let you do it for free.

While I think generally that this practice is predatory-ish (like promoting credit cards in the first place) I also know that with every monetary option, if you’re disciplined enough, you can actually benefit from these offers: like people who do credit card hacking to get all the points. I’ve decided to engage in this experiment because:

• Inflation is ridiculous right now and my money today may actually be worth a lot less than my money in the future
• I could purchase these things outright if I needed to pay them off immediately

So far the experience has been pretty lackluster to be honest. I really don’t like having to relive large purchases over and over again by paying off debt. I also don’t like needing to factor spending that would normally come from my savings into my checking account to make sure that I don’t have some sort of unaccounted overdraft. And lastly I don’t like seeing debt on my net worth that isn’t mortgage or student loans, but consumer. I’m currently ~3 months into the experience and it’s taking a lot of willpower not to just pay these off and not look at them anymore.

That being said, I’m aware that end of year means an inflation raise for me and my husband and therefore we will literally have more money every month to purchase things with, including paying down these debts. I’m also aware that at 0% I’m technically making money by preserving my current investing rather than paying them off. And who couldn’t use a little free money?

If you want to use this as a how to, I’d recommend the following for taking out 0% loans:

1. Don’t take out more money than you can afford already today. You’re already saddling yourself with future payments and management, don’t borrow against your future self‘s working time as well
2. Make sure that you know the terms of the loan! Ensure the auto-payments you set up can be paid by your account each month and that you are paying at least the required minimum to pay off before interest kicks in based on the term length
3. Do not use these loans to buy something that doesn’t last beyond the terms of the loan. Imagine how terrible you’d feel paying on something in the future that is already non-existent.
4. Avoid consumerism where at all possible, but especially in these loans. Believe me, you will spend your future money, so don’t find an excuse to spend it now (and if you don’t, hey you just saved)

I’ll continue to update here as the experiment continues. Just know, I don’t think I would recommend it, in spite of the (hopefully) 3-7% I can make.

I think I can honestly say just writing this article has made a convert of me to NOT take out 0% loans again 😂