Bryn Mawr, Pa., is one of those grand American towns that double as showrooms for grand American dreams. Teeming with tennis courts, specimen trees and stone mansions raised from the dirt by 19th-century railroad barons, the suburb makes wealth feel like weather, an ozone layer shrouding everything — ambient, constant and vital.

Elysia Berman’s parents owned the smallest house on their block. But they worked hard to catapult their daughter into the moneyed circles of their neighbors. They sent her to a pricey Philadelphia private school where kids fished Louis Vuitton Neverfulls and Hermès Constances out of Porsche convertibles; Berman, meanwhile, toted her books in an L.L. Bean backpack bedecked with Wite-Out. Her envy and unease only mushroomed when she moved to New York City, at 18, to study illustration at the Pratt Institute. While she spent spring breaks clocking hourly wages, her friends — heiresses and overseas noblesse who kitted themselves in off-runway Gareth Pugh and their off-campus apartments in $3,000 sheets — were gliding down alpine slopes.

“I’d grown up around enough wealth to know how to correctly pronounce ‘Gstaad,’ but I’d never been there and I probably will never go,” Berman told me. Embarrassed by her own yearning, she thought often about a line from “The Great Gatsby,” when a reproachful Nick Carraway accompanies Tom Buchanan to a plush soirée: “I was within and without.”

In 2014, when Berman was 25, she landed her dream job as a designer at the fashion magazine InStyle — a place where employees’ appearances ventriloquized their ambitions. The accessory du jour was the Proenza Schouler PS1, a strappy, angular $1,000 satchel. Berman found one in orange snakeskin for $430 on The RealReal. She hesitated. Was she being ridiculous? Her salary barely covered the rent on her teacup-size apartment. But then, on the checkout page, a little line of text under the total amount caught her attention: “Pay in four interest-free installments with Affirm.”

She’d never hit a button so fast.

“I felt like that bitch in that bag,” Berman remembers. After so many years “seeing everyone around you have a nicer life than you,” she was overjoyed to get a taste for herself. Taking home such a treasure for only a small cost upfront felt like stumbling upon a cheat code — “a kind of unlock.”

Affirm is one of several companies lending money to customers through a “Buy Now, Pay Later” model: Users make a fractional payment on a purchase while postponing the rest of the balance for several weeks, or sometimes even months or years. Under this delay-pay system, the lender typically scoops 2 to 9 percent of each transaction from the retailer, while the customer gets to enjoy her wares right away instead of having to wait until she’s paid them off in full, as was the case with layaway plans of decades past. When the time comes to cough up on an installment, the lender plucks the money automatically from the user’s linked financial account. Though B.N.P.L.s advertise “interest free” financing, the interest rate on longer-term plans can go as high as 36 percent; when payments fail to go through, late fees also pile up.

“I felt like that bitch in that bag.”

Elysia Berman

An estimated half of Americans have used B.N.P.L. at least once. Promising instant gratification to an economically eager audience — half of users are early-career individuals under the age of 33 — B.N.P.L. has scaled quickly as an industry, with the total value of purchases ballooning to around $120 billion in 2023 in the United States alone, up from just $2 billion in 2019. Affirm’s myriad competitors include Afterpay, Sezzle, Zip and the best known of the bunch, Klarna.

These days, B.N.P.L. options exist for everything from refrigerators to lipsticks to monster trucks to Labubus. Nearly two-thirds of Coachella concertgoers this year used it to afford their tickets. You can Afterpay a vacation: flights, cruises, Airbnbs, the whole shebang. You can Klarna a burrito. And despite the staggering amounts of capital that B.N.P.L. companies extend to novice consumers, they operate without much oversight, enjoying a regulatory Wild West as policymakers scratch their heads over how to keep up with these nouveau intermediaries reshaping commerce in real time.

Berman carried her Proenza handbag everywhere. It cracked and frayed; no one ever taught her how to take care of exotic leathers. But this wasn’t a big deal, because she could now buy other bags — especially after downloading a suite of other B.N.P.L. apps, including Afterpay, Klarna and PayPal. Her Visa credit card had a strict $2,000 monthly spending limit, but Klarna alone offered her $12,000 to use at any given time.

Armed with all this new financing, she quickly swapped her Forever 21 jeans for a brand-new, milieu-approved wardrobe. She began splurging once, twice, three times a month, delighted and amazed at the sheer amounts she could amass — and all of it sanctioned by friendly-looking companies that promised transparency, joy and a dedication to helping people achieve the literal stuff of their dreams.

When she signed up for TikTok in 2020, Berman saw everyday people, not influencers, raving about gorgeous “must buys” she had never heard of. Soon she was cycling through her B.N.P.L. apps, dropping thousands a month on splendid novelties: dinners at in-the-know restaurants, luxury sweat sets, an Equinox gym membership, model-approved facials at Manhattan’s Rescue Spa — whose shelves stocked Augustinus Bader, so she went out and bought some of those luscious potions too. Other TikTokers endorsed using B.N.P.L. to cover such extravagances, posting flip remarks like: “Afterpay is for the girls! It helps us feel better about our poor financial decisions!” and “P.O.V.: Me on the phone to Klarna telling them I couldn’t pay all that money back after overspending again ????.”

Reassured, Berman shopped more and more. With B.N.P.L., everything she ever coveted was suddenly up for grabs. In retrospect, she told me, “it was like throwing gasoline on a burning fire.”

Each day, Berman woke up to notifications on her phone, announcing how much money was being automatically siphoned out of her bank account. The amounts seemed totally arbitrary — $17 first thing Monday, $250 later that night, $141 Tuesday — with no explanation of what items she was even paying for. She would learn $600 was leaving her account to Sephora or Saks, but she had a hard time finding any easy-to-read tallies of balances on the B.N.P.L. apps. “You never know what’s going on,” she told me. “And you can’t budget, because you don’t know what’s leaving your account on what day.”

The more money Berman spent, the more theoretical it all seemed. Amounts became fanciful, unreal. Sometimes she got alerts that her bank account was running low, so she redirected her B.N.P.L. apps to draw from her credit card instead, not realizing she was accruing two sets of interest that way.

Though B.N.P.L. fintechs have been around for more than a decade, they really only became mainstream during the stress-shopping, jobs-losing vortex of the pandemic. Getting approved for them typically requires no minimum credit score: All you need is a cell number, proof that you are 18 or over and a payment method (bank account, debit card or credit card). “Klarna,” in Swedish, means “to become clear” — an irony not lost on Berman, who told me she had never felt so adrift, confused and depressed as in the years she was spiraling into B.N.P.L. debt.

“It was like throwing gasoline on a burning fire.”

Elysia Berman

Yet mortgaging one’s whole lifestyle through an app, or what some people glibly refer to as “Klarnamaxxing,” is increasingly common among social media users seeking to cosplay in the glamour they see online. And they’ve turned their very indebtedness into braggadocio. In a viral video this year, five friends giggled about how the person with the highest Klarna balance should pick up their dinner bill. TikTokers impart “Afterpay hacks” and swagger through “Afterpay hauls.” A user’s screenshot of cascading payments captioned “SLOW DOWNNNNNNNNN @KLARNA” got 62,000 likes on X. It’s as if the frictionless ease of these services has turned the whole concept of owing money into something funny, even farcical.

B.N.P.L. services themselves are shrewdly lighthearted about it all. “Why pay the old way?” crooned one Klarna tagline in a cutesy pastel. “Eat the whole tub of ice cream and spread the calories over six weeks,” Afterpay urged in a TV ad.

While “it’s traditional consumer psychology that $365 a year feels bigger than $1 a day,” Dionysius Ang, a University of Leeds professor who studies marketing and purchasing behavior, told me, these services also go beyond the “temporal reframing.” For one thing, they bill themselves as “anti-credit-cards” — kinder, gentler and more honest. “It’s sold as the smarter form of credit: no hidden fees,” Ang says. “Consumers might think it’s the more transparent way of paying, especially those who tend to shy away from credit cards because they associate it with debt.” For another, B.N.P.L. also plays hard into the “present bias,” the documented human tendency to see today’s decisions as more important than tomorrow’s repercussions.

Ang and her co-researcher, Stijn Maesen of Imperial Business School, observed the spending patterns of 275,000 consumers at a major American online retailer and published a study last year reporting that people were 9 percent more likely to make purchases if they chose a B.N.P.L. option. Moreover, consumers who opted into B.N.P.L. ended up spending more money, leaving the website with purchases totaling 10 percent more, on average — possibly the online analog of impulsively snapping up candy bars at the cashier’s counter — as well as coming back more frequently to make further purchases.

Indulgence is the name of the game, for lenders and buyers alike. Dovetailing with B.N.P.L.’s rise is the TikTokian ascendence of “financial manifestation” — an idea, seemingly stemming from Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 book, “The Secret,” that living beyond one’s means can engender real future success. (That “The Secret” has been debunked as pseudoscience has not swayed an enraptured young audience.) It’s a kind of magical thinking that also animates “girl math” and dupe culture, two online trends promoting luxury consumption as self-care. Just a decade ago, only the richest of the rich knew the words “Loro Piana”; now anyone with internet access can find out that the designer’s cashmere pants are a high-class status symbol, then use services like Klarna to cop these symbols for themselves.

“Everybody’s getting sucked into creating a lifestyle that’s bigger than them, bigger than what they can afford, and finding ways to finance it that their future self probably won’t be happy about but their present self is really pleased with,” Dior Bediako, a life coach who has made videos on entrepreneurship and personal finance, told me. Bediako recently warned her peers against B.N.P.L. services, cautioning that they can be a slippery slope. She was floored by the defiance and defensiveness in her comments. “The mind-set was like: ‘What do you want us to do? Everything’s expensive! So, what, we shouldn’t have things? You’re saying I shouldn’t have things?!’”

One of Berman’s biggest buys was a pair of slick, silvery R13 boots. They cost $2,000 — a sum initially too daunting to consider even if split into four or six payments. But Klarna proposed 18 installments of $110 each, due over the course of a year and a half. Berman remembers gawking and laughing at the offer: one-eighteenth, a fraction so small and random-seeming. It felt as if “they just made the rules up as they went,” she told me.

At that point, she had also leveled up in her career: Through a series of media and advertising jobs, she had worked her way into a higher salary band, and thus into formidably more spending power. She’d also fallen in love and married. But she hid her B.N.P.L. addiction from her husband, friends and colleagues. She was afraid of what they’d think if they knew how avidly and rashly she shopped — both through the screen (egged on by endless algorithmic riches) and in person (B.N.P.L. services issue virtual cards for mobile wallets, which users can swipe at real-life cash registers).

“Everybody’s getting sucked into creating a lifestyle that’s bigger than them, bigger than what they can afford.”

Dior Bediako

Sometimes Berman was able to pay off the entire balance for an item without a hitch. Sometimes she wasn’t. Whenever she found herself confronted with more installment bills than her bank account could handle, she would either foist payments onto her interest-laden Visa or apply for a debt-consolidation loan — a nifty stopgap she learned about online — which would satisfy the B.N.P.L. services enough to reset the high spending limits, plying her with fresh credit.

In 2023, when Berman finally steeled herself and sat down to total all her balances on a piece of paper, she learned she was $50,000 in debt.

Tumbling down the B.N.P.L. hole might seem like a simple case of getting what you sign up for. From the services’ perspective, the delay-pay model is a boon for people crunched for cash. Asked to comment for this article, a spokesman for Klarna denied that the practice encourages bad spending habits, citing research showing that B.N.P.L. helps consumers avoid credit-card debt and default less on traditional bank loans. A rep for Affirm pointed out that the company abides by financial regulation, markets modestly and does not charge late or hidden fees.

And yet, even among the power users of these apps, confusion reigns. A 22-year-old told The Wall Street Journal how she ended up owing nearly $4,600 after spending what seemed like just “$20 a month here and there” on things like groceries, eyelash extensions and a new mattress. A woman on TikTok rued how she racked up $32,000 in debt by buying “everything under the sun” on B.N.P.L., not realizing how steep the interest rates could get on longer-term loans.

When the Federal Reserve scrutinized B.N.P.L.-using households this year, it found that individuals employing delay-pay have “lower overall financial well-being” than their peers. For many, it was “the only way they could afford” their desired purchases. A similar 2025 paper from Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority discovered that B.N.P.L. users were “on average, younger, less credit-worthy” and “have higher levels of unsecured debt.” In other words, B.N.P.L. users tend to be both less financially educated and less financially stable — and thus a vulnerable population deserving of protection, not a group that should get five-figure credit lines tossed at them like Halloween candy.

Some people arrive at the wake-up call on their own. While thousands crow about their Klarna-subsidized wares on TikTok, another corner of the app is full of people begging others to stay away: “It’ll make you broke!” pleads one user who is trying to claw out of $10,000 of debt. “Thirty-six percent interest on food should be illegal,” says another, expressing his dismay over people B.N.P.L.-ing their groceries and takeout orders.

But it is all perfectly legal — thanks to a regulatory system that struggles to categorize what B.N.P.L. services even do.

Credit cards went through this crucible already. In the mid-1990s, Visa, Mastercard and American Express came up with a wily recruitment idea: They would set up booths in college quads and lure excitable teenagers with pizzas and T-shirts. It worked. Within a decade, university students were amassing huge balances, defaulting and overdrafting bank accounts like there was no tomorrow — prompting Congress to finally ban card issuers from hawking free gifts on college campuses. In addition to putting guardrails on marketing, the Credit CARD Act of 2009 mandated that all credit-card applicants under 21 provide either a co-signer or proof of independent income to qualify for the sophisticated financial instruments.

B.N.P.L. services aren’t subject to any of that. By taking out bubbly ads on Instagram and cutting promotional deals with popular merchants like Uber, eBay and Amazon, they can put themselves literally into college students’ hands. They push out scads of sponsored content, too, paying young creators to sing their praises online. “I was horrified,” Oghosa Ovienrioba, an influencer who used to work with Klarna and stopped after she saw young followers sinking into heavy debt, told the BBC in 2021. “I felt this incredible pang of guilt at what I’d done, and what I’d supported and promoted.”

Because many B.N.P.L.s position themselves as short-term installment plans, they can float in a regulatory gray area — skirting not only the CARD Act but also other rule books like the Truth in Lending Act, which requires loan-based financial products to provide clear and intelligible language around interest rates, fees and repayment if the loan period is longer than four months. (A typical B.N.P.L. term runs for four or six weeks, although many can stretch much longer depending on the specific item and user — making it unclear what rules apply and when.)

The United States’ Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the entity responsible for overseeing financial products like credit cards, probed B.N.P.L. companies in 2021 and found major inconsistencies in dispute resolution, disclosures and data-collection practices. Under its director, Rohit Chopra, the C.F.P.B. demanded that B.N.P.L. services obey all the same rules and practices as credit cards, with Chopra warning that these “new competitive offerings” should not be “sidestepping the longstanding rights and responsibilities enshrined under the law.”

One week into Donald Trump’s second term as president, though, Chopra was removed from his post. The C.F.P.B. reversed course. Though it had just issued research pointing to alarming risks around B.N.P.L., the bureau is now putting out contradictory materials downplaying those same risks and rolling back its earlier credit-card-like enforcement.

Yet this fall, the credit-score company FICO will start dinging B.N.P.L. users for loan histories — a move set to wreak financial havoc on all the young shoppers boasting on Instagram and X and TikTok about high-end gaming consoles or limited-edition sneakers they’ve been able to snap up without consequence.

“We’re getting to a point where everything is just going to be a ‘payments’ industry, full stop.”

Ted Rossman

Affirm’s chief executive, Max Levchin, has said that “what we have is a business model that is just perfect for these frankly uncertain times.” Retailers might agree: Though the merchant fees they have to fork over to B.N.P.L. service partners are nearly three times higher than to credit-card companies, studies like Ang’s and Maesen’s have shown that the B.N.P.L.-fueled spikes in consumer spending can more than compensate.

That might be why other, non-B.N.P.L. financial services are now crowding into the market and trying to become B.N.P.L. Old-school credit cards, sniffing lucrative possibilities in the air, have introduced a litany of B.N.P.L.-ish features — like Citi Flex Pay, Chase Pay Over Time and American Express Plan It, the latter of which has been particularly beloved, per a J.D. Power study earlier this year.

“The lines are blurring,” Ted Rossman, a senior industry analyst at the consumer-finance firm Bankrate, told me. “We’re getting to a point where everything is just going to be a ‘payments’ industry, full stop. It’s the super-app thing.”

Not to be outdone, Klarna this summer unveiled the Klarna Card, a physical debit card powered by Visa. And earlier this month, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange with a $19 billion valuation. In its I.P.O. prospectus, Klarna outlined an ambition to become “consumers’ everyday spending and saving partner, available everywhere and for everything.”

For Berman, the wake-up call was a puffer jacket.

In the late winter of 2023, she found herself in a luxury department store cradling a $700 garment — a gauzy, tufted black coat from the upmarket designer Khaite — to the register. The retail price was three times that amount. A holiday sale had marked it down into total-steal territory. Berman had to have it.

But her credit cards, all of them, were maxed out.

She stood in a corner of the store, sweating under the halogen lights, and started moving money helter-skelter from one account to another — trying to cobble together enough to pay for the jacket while tamping down the hysteria bubbling up in her throat. Berman opened Klarna and Affirm, only to see she had exceeded her allowable amounts. When did that happen?

Eventually she was able to transfer a bit of money from a credit card to one of her B.N.P.L.s, paying off enough of an outstanding loan for the lender to issue her a one-time virtual card to cover the coat.

It was “insane,” Berman, who is now 36, told me over lunch this summer, shuddering visibly as she relived the memory. “I remember sitting in the store trying to finagle and do mental math and use all these different levers, and it was in that moment that I realized: If everything was tapped out, maxed out, then I’d have to declare bankruptcy if I didn’t fix this.”

She left the store in a daze. At home, she made a New Year’s resolution to not buy anything new until she was no longer in the red.

She started tallying her debt. The next step was coming clean to others in her life.

Up first: her husband. “I was so nervous,” she told me. “I was afraid he’d leave me. I knocked back a martini and came out with it. He said, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of money!’ But he was compassionate and understanding.”

Telling her parents was just as daunting. Berman’s parents had fought so hard to put her into worlds of affluence. But her childhood among the wealthy had left her feeling ashamed for her family to be looked at as the “have-nots of the neighborhood,” and this nagging inferiority had plagued her throughout her adult life.

To Berman’s surprise, though, her father showed sympathy, and her mother revealed that she had, herself, grappled with shopping addiction and overspending. Arguments over money had even strained their relationship to the brink of divorce. Her mother told her about a debt-repayment strategy she’d used herself. “It was very, very painful,” Berman told me.

Researching madly, Berman put together a plan to tackle the maelstrom she had created. One option was to wipe out some of her debt through a 401(k) loan, which by law she would have to pay back with interest. Though this meant dipping significantly into her hard-won retirement savings, it also meant she could start scratching her way back into solvency. She went for it.

B.N.P.L., for so long, seemed like a golden ticket to the life she grew up admiring through the big picture windows of others’ houses. Since people “lease their fancy cars and lease their phones” all the time, she didn’t see why “leasing a lifestyle” through apps like Klarna was any different, she told me. She knew that she had been reckless in thinking that she could “cheat code” her way into some sort of American dream — but at the same time, each bout of scrolling on the internet seemed to show that everyone else was doing the same thing. Confronting her debt meant confronting the extent of those illusions.

In April 2024, Berman finally zeroed out her B.N.P.L. debt. This year, after many months of swiping her cards only for bare necessities, she also paid off the 401(k) loan. Today, for the first time in almost a decade, she no longer owes any money to anyone.

Berman started making TikTok videos herself, hoping to use her own journey as a cautionary tale for younger people bingeing on consumption through B.N.P.L. Occasionally on her feed she’ll see a video of someone bragging about Klarna subsidizing their expensive trinkets or adventures and pop into their comments, imploring them to understand how badly things could end up.

Rarely has anyone ever listened. “I’ll get backlash for just telling them the truth,” she told me.

There are important purchases — a car, a house, maybe more — that Berman knows she might have been able to afford by now if she hadn’t spent a decade free-falling into B.N.P.L. debt. But she has tried to make up for it by being extra conservative with her spending, double- and triple-guessing herself anytime she needs to make a purchase. “I can’t stomach owing money,” she told me. “And I don’t want to be defined by the choices I made.”

Berman deleted the B.N.P.L. apps from her phone after nuking her debt on them. She pays off every monthly credit-card balance in full. And she has also been able to resell many of the items she bought while on her yearslong spree, including the Proenza purse, recouping a bit of money.

But she did keep the Khaite puffer. Some deals are just too good to give up.

Source photographs for photo illustrations: Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times, Getty Images, Reuters, Adobe Stock