I blew a tire yesterday and need to replace all four, but I don't have $800 cash right now. The tire shop offers a lease-to-own option that claims I can pay it off in 100 days for "cash price + small fee." Has anyone actually managed to do this successfully? I’m terrified of missing the deadline by one day and getting hit with huge interest fees. Is the process straightforward, or do they hide the payoff button?

It is doable, but you have to be aggressive. The default weekly payments they set up will not pay it off in 100 days; they are calculated to drag it out for 12 months. You have to manually log in and make extra principal payments every single week to beat the clock.

I used one of these services for a laptop when my freelance work dried up temporarily. The biggest hurdle was actually finding the manual payoff option in their app, it was buried three menus deep. I got paranoid about the deadline and started searching for the snapfinance phone number so I could talk to a human and confirm my zero balance. The automated system is okay, but getting a live person to email you a "paid in full" confirmation letter is the only way I felt truly secure that they wouldn't hit me with a surprise charge later.