[poundwise]

The first part of your post illustrates my previous point. While I agree that rent-to-own is a bad way to go, the idea of paying three times over for a product, such as a computer, is actually commonly accepted. It happens whenever someone pulls out a store credit card and then makes minimum payments or follows a credit payment plan, such as issued through Dell Financial Services.

Both are equally bad. Actually the latter may be worse than rent-to-own. A person may wish they had paid only three times as much once they've had that Best Buy credit card for 5 years and the computer is far from state-of-the-art but they still owe $500 on it.

By the way, nothing against Dell or Best Buy specifically; I just used them to illustrate my point.

I think the bottom-line is that you get into trouble whenever you are trying to buy something you can't actually reasonably pay for. It is all a product of the 'buy now, pay later' mentality.