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There’s lots of news today. Let’s start with the exploding business of buy-now-pay-later loans.

Working capital

It was tempting, during the pandemic, to “buy now, pay later,” as a new class of apps was offering. Because: What a treat. Here was a company in Alaska offering to ship wild-caught salmon to New York — and no need to pay for it right away? Sure! We got deliciousness on the installment plan and paid no interest along the way.

Six years later, folks are using what’s known as B.N.P.L. for a lot more than fancy seafood. Lending apps can now cover your electricity bill, your health insurance, your water bill, your visit to the dentist, even your mortgage or rent. Use one to pay a $200 bill today, and it might subtract $25 from your bank account every week for two months, plus a few bucks for fees.

My colleague Stacy Cowley, who covers consumer finance, has a smart story about the loans. They’re becoming the “working capital for the modern middle class,” a market expert told her. “Consumers are using it more for essential, everyday things.”

Credit card spending is still by far the larger business. But pay-later loans practically doubled in just a couple of years, with no signs that the growth is stalling. Is that a change in consumer preference — or are folks just desperate to meet their monthly nut? Stacy’s reporting suggests it may be a combination of both:

Ashley Reed, 40, initially used pay-later loans for small indulgences. Then a family emergency upended her finances: Her mother had a brain aneurysm, hours away from their home in Baltimore. Ms. Reed maxed out her credit cards paying for emergency care, including an ambulance trip not covered by insurance and a hotel room near her mother’s hospital.

Loans from Afterpay, Klarna and other merchants became the only way she could keep up with her electric bill, auto insurance and repairs, and other essentials. Now, she spends about $700 a month paying down the debts and then borrowing more on her pay-later loans to stay afloat.

“It’s a roller-coaster ride, up and down — I can’t afford to have an emergency,” she said. “Sometimes I’m like, OK, am I going to have enough for groceries?

Pay-later loans are an attractive way to answer that question in the affirmative. Miss a rent check and you face late fees, or eviction. Put your daily living expenses on a credit card and you could end up in a debt hole that grows every month.

But taking out a pay-later loan? The stakes aren’t as high, Stacy told me. “The appeal of B.N.P.L.,” she said, “is very concrete payment terms (fixed versus interest, which most people — including me! 🙃 — are bad at calculating). And if you can’t pay it off, the consequences are less dire than they would be on credit cards. Most lenders charge minimal or zero late fees; the main consequence of being late is you can’t borrow more until you’re paid down. But on a credit card the debt will just keep compounding until you find a way to get it paid off.”

A pay-later loan, she told me, is a relatively painless way to give people some flexibility if their incomes or circumstances fluctuate. As one executive at a pay-later company told her, “What we can help people solve is a timing issue.” He described the business as “harm reduction.”

So should you download one of these B.N.P.L. apps? I put the question to Stacy.

“That’s one of the prime questions,” she responded. (I’m blushing.) There may be upsides to using the loans as a kind of bridge, she said, particularly for those on the lower end of the income ladder, whose cash flow is more constricted.

But “it’s every bit as easy for people to get in over their heads with B.N.P.L. as it is with credit cards.” Stacy pointed to TikTok, where she found creators posting about “how they have like 10 different pay-later loans, and the money just gets sucked out of their accounts daily to pay for them. Or sets off overdraft fees if they don’t have the money in there to keep up with the payments.”

I watched an adjacent TikTok yesterday — a woman clowning her friend who overuses pay-later loans to purchase everything from Chipotle to a fancy car. For the BMW, she shrugs, “I’d only have to pay $25 a month for 1,600 months.” Another shrug: “It’s not bad!”

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THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Read Edwidge Danticat’s new novel, “Dèy,” about a Haitian American mother in Miami experiencing the numbing aftershocks of a mass shooting. Our critic calls it heartfelt and tender, “a love song and an elegy for the Haitian diaspora.”

Focus on helpful thoughts, not just positive ones, to improve your mental toughness.

Drink Natalie’s orange juice on the recommendation of the citriculturists at Wirecutter, who’ve been looking for the freshest-tasting store-bought brand. Can confirm (I’ve been looking, too): They found it.