Both Confortini and Lamarre post about personal finance topics on TikTok (surveys show the majority of Gen Z consumers resort to social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram for financial advice) and both have discussed paying rent with their credit card on the platform. None of them work with Bilt, although they can earn points for successful referrals. Confortini estimates that he has made some 35 references in the last year.
Daniel Heppner, a 25-year-old software developer in Seattle, also puts his $1,700 monthly rent on his Bilt card and met the minimum transaction requirement by purchasing several $1 Amazon gift cards (those purchases began to be denied, so now you use the card in restaurants and cafeterias). “Honestly, overall, I feel like credit card rewards are just one big scam,” he said. “We are all paying for it with credit card fees. But I’m going to take advantage to get as many as I can as long as this is the system we live in.” Heppner said he has about 10 credit cards and pays them off in full. “I don’t even know how much it’s worth trying to maximize everything. What are you getting, $10, $20, $30 extra dollars a month? The fact that the rewards are founded partly in the interest of people who can’t pay their bills is “really unfair,” he said, but the way commerce works today, credit cards “are not something I can boycott.”
For consumers who aren’t trying to earn rewards or can’t pay off their balances in full, charging these expenses to a credit card can signal a financial shortfall, “and that’s certainly happening with Gen Z as well,” Matt Schulz said. , credit manager. Analyst at LendingTree. “It’s scary, especially when you consider how quickly interest rates have risen over the last year or so.” He average credit card interest rate is now 23.55%, the highest since Schulz’s company began tracking monthly rates in 2019. In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a sharp increase in renters who were charging the rent to their credit cards while they awaited emergency relief funds, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. In a separate LendingTree survey, about 45% of Gen Z adults live paycheck to paycheck, and 62% of people who didn’t have money to pay their bills used their credit cards to cover them.
