Saturday, January 17, 2009

Rent to Own - good in a pinch

Living in a depressed area of the country can lead to a few stereotypical things; lots of dollar stores and many food banks and non profit agencies, but the oddest phenomenon is the increasing number of rent-to-own stores.

I don't turn my nose up at these places they are far to useful, especially in a declining economy. We have used one local chain on a few occasions. We've looked at rent to own appliances before. I even had one in my home, our dryer went a month before our tax return came so we rented for a couple months until we were able to find a good deal on a good dryer. We even bought our sons bunk bed from this store. It was the only way to purchase this bunk bed & at the time we thought it would last him a long time, looked well constructed & heavy duty. It has proven to be a sturdy piece of furniture, but I don't see him staying in it in to his teens. I've mentioned my son is a big boy right??? It also wasn't nearly as heavy duty as it seemed (I looked at it in the box at the store, not put together).


If you've ever wondered what is rent to own? It is a way for people who don't have credit, don't want to use credit, or are looking for a temporary solution to have the things they need (ok mostly things they want & should probably be saving money to buy outright. But in our case it saved us from having to borrow money or use a credit card to replace a much needed appliance. We ended up going through the payment cycle on the bed, we made a few extra payments & cut the payments short by doing so, but we would have done better if we had made more payments on the principal.

There are so many rent to own companies locally that I am not sure I can list them all. We just added Aaron's to the mix, Rent-to-Own & Rent Way are just a couple of the others. If you have cash on hand and are looking for a potentially good deal, check them out. They get returns or repos all the time & since they can't (at least in NY) sell them as new they offer good deals on them to clear them out of storage & store space.

1 comments:

Lissaloo said...

We got a dryer from a rent to own place, it was a great experience & they were really nice to deal with :)