Rental stores

[Marseeya]

Have any of you rented anything from a rental store (rentway, rent-a-center)? What was your experience doing so?

My laptop is dying and I urgently need another one ASAP, but I was turned downfor credit at Dell online. I won't be buying to own it, but I'll just be renting it until I can save up the money to buy one outright.

 

[Barb D]

Best Buy has a Compaq (I think) for <$600. It might not be exactly what you want, but when you're done with it you can pass it on to one of your kids. If you can swing that, it would probably be better in the long run than renting.

 

[Marseeya]

Best Buy has a Compaq (I think) for <$600. It might not be exactly what you want, but when you're done with it you can pass it on to one of your kids. If you can swing that, it would probably be better in the long run than renting.

No, there's no way I can come up with that until at least next month or so. Between buying all my books for school and buying the kids all their clothes and school supplies, I'm tapped out for the time being.

I hate spending the $30 a week on the rental, but it's doable for a short amount of time. I just wondered if there was any hidden costs or tricks.

 

[jfulcer]

Beg, borrow, scrimp and scrounge, but DON'T rent from one of those places. The interest you will pay will far outweigh the cost you could pay for something brand new. Plus it's too easy to go down the route of 'I'll just do this for 3 or 4 months' and 2 years you're still paying for it.

Save and scrounge $600 and get a BRAND NEW laptop:

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?product_id=4025846

Look for computer exchange shops in your area - they may have a trade-in laptop used for a decent price.

I'd just stay away from the rental places if at ALL possible.

 

[WatchinCaptKangaroo]

Talk to your schools financial aid department as they may have emergency loans with low or no interest for school related expenses.

Also don't fret about being turned down by Dell. They're requirements are insane and I don't know anyone whose ever qualified for their promo rate. If you want to finance it check with Best Buy and CompUSA to see if they have a no interest/no payments for x time and just get it paid off by the deadline.

 

[EthansMom]

I agree that there has to be a better option than doing the "rent-to-buy" thing -- the interest rates they charge are highway robbery.

Do you have any savings that you could borrow from yourself? (That's what I had to do this fall to pay for pre-purchasing heating oil. Will take the money out of my savings account and then pay myself back a little bit each month.)

Is there a credit card that you could get?

Also, how is your laptop dying? Is it possible that you could just clean the hard drive and reinstall to get it working better? Or is the problem something that you might be able to have repaired for $100? I can't believe the number of times my DH has managed to bring one of our computers back from the dead -- at one point, we had spyware so bad that one computer would not work at all and after DH spent a weekend with it, it worked great.