Rent-to-own . . . tires

I finally got new tires on the car yesterday, something that was on the to-do list to take care of before winter, or, specifically before travelling at Thanksgiving. I hate car expenses, not so much for the cost of it, as for the feeling that I’m being taken advantage of by the guy trying to upsell or get me to buy a service I don’t need. (Like the time I had the mechanic tell me I needed a new alternator, when I was a grad student and chose to drive the car until it died for completely unrelated reasons later instead.) But in any case, I’m always grateful that we don’t live paycheck-to-paycheck and such expenses don’t cause problems for our family finances. And I was reminded of the article I read a while back on rent-to-own tire stores (this article is in the Los Angeles Times, but, re-reading it, it seemed very familiar and I suspect that it was this very article that appeared in the Trib). Here’s the thing: tires are now so expensive, and yet such a necessity for poor families with aging cars, that they’re willing to pay what amounts to more than 100% annual interest for the opportunity to buy tires on installment. And since these are rent-to-own contracts, rather than loans, the contract is iron-clad, even in bankruptcy, and the company can literally reposess the tires and leave the car on cinderblocks if the consumer defaults. So, yes, even someone living paycheck-to-paycheck should stay ahead of the game in whatever way they can, knowing the cost of an unexpected expense, whether it’s a new tires or brakes, or replacing a furnace, or a hospital bill, will cost far more if it’s paid with a high-interest loan than if the money was in the bank in the first place. But at the same time, for someone whose income is truly as low as to be desperate, a large part of the answer is to not be at risk of such expenses. Most obviously, if you can’t afford sudden home repair expenses, you shouldn’t be a homeowner, but have the predictable cost of renting. (And the government shouldn’t be in the business of pushing people with marginal income into homeownership.) And the big expense of car ownership? Well, in a perfect world (or, say, in Europe), public transportation would be sufficiently well-developed that car ownership isn’t a dire necessity; failing that, I suppose, an alternate answer would be used-car a leasing arrangement, with maintenance and repairs included in the price, and low-deductible insurance. Which leaves the third big expense of medical bills — for which there historically really hadn’t been an answer (given that even non-profit hospitals, rather than intentionally providing charity care, deem writing off bad debt as a form of charity), and it’s unclear whether the Obamacare subsidies will have solved the issue or not. In any case, remember how periodically people will say that, just as the Catholic Church used to consider money-lending a sin and have now changed their minds, they could do the same with contraception, for instance, just reclassifying it? Up until the High Middle Ages, moneylending generally took the form of lending to the poor, who had no hope of repaying the loan, but would be trapped in debt — so that the morally correct choice was charity rather than enslaving loans. Only in the High Middle Ages did the economy develop to a degree that moneylending became a way of financing business transactions and trade, and, ultimately, the prohibition of moneylending was ended because the very nature of moneylending was different. Here’s the thing: I believe in free markets. But when people resort to these sort of extremely-high-interest loans, it’s a symptom of a much bigger problem.