Every time a new iPhone drops people are desperate to get their hands on it. A new ad from Best Buy seems to let Canadians do just that, offering the phone for seemingly $0.
The tech store is now marketing the brand new iPhone XS for only $0 down, which at first glance seems like an amazing deal. However, a Best Buy employee is now warning people that the deal is actually too good to be true.
Posting on Reddit, the mobile sales associate claims that while the phones are being advertised at a really low price the fine print suggests otherwise. The Best Buy ad shows that you can get the latest iPhones for only $0 down but there are a few catches.
The main thing is this means you're going to have to finance the phone and pay regular monthly payments. Depending on which phone you getting these are going to be around either $17 or $23. That additional monthly payment is on top of your already existing phone plan, and doesn't include the $40 admin fee or interest on the payments.
In order to get the phone for $0, you are essentially borrowing the money from Best Buy, just like financing a car or getting a mortgage on a house. That means there's going to be interest on it and in this case, it's a whopping 19.9%.
The ad has a solution for this though. In order to avoid interest for 24 months, which is at least how long you'll be paying this phone off for, you can make the payments with a Best Buy financing card, i.e. another credit card. Of course, if you don't pay off the credit card there is interest on that too. So every month you'll essentially be borrowing money from Best Buy to pay back the other money you owe them for the phone.
In their Reddit warning, the employee says that every day they see people coming in and applying for theses credit cards to get these "cheap phones". They warn that borrowing this much money is a bad financial decision and doing so could even hurt your credit score and your future.
Beyond that, they direct their warning at millennials who they say are most likely to buy these phones without understanding what they're getting themselves into.
If all this financial talk has been a little hard to follow the Best Buy employee included a handy little TL DR with their warning saying "don't hurt your financial well-being for a new phone." To add on to that, if it's too good to be true, it probably is.
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