Live Now, Pay Later

Faced with an uncertain future, young Canadians are doom spending like never before, propped up by an ecosystem of finfluencers, financing apps and investment schemes. Portrait of a generation on the instalment plan.

- COURTNEY SHEA

Hilary entered adulthood with a leg up. The 28-year-old from Hamilton, Ontario, was fortunate to have her parents cover her undergrad at the University of Guelph. When she graduated, she hoped to get a job in public policy, and she did—only she had to move to Thunder Bay. Pretty soon she realized that career advancement would require another degree, so she saved up more than $12,000 and did her master’s at Queen's. The program was supposed to involve travel to Ottawa and Washington, but then the pandemic hit. She spent the year staring at a screen, isolated and anxious about the future that was once promising and now in freefall. She was also broke.

By 2022, Hilary was working in her field and living in her own apartment in Toronto. It was small, nothing fancy, but clean and close to transit. It was also, from a budgetary perspective, a bridge to nowhere. Her monthly income was $3,500, and her monthly rent was $2,200. And so she started using a precarious if increasingly common life hack: “I put my paycheque toward rent and everything else on credit card.”

“Everything else” was nothing too extravagant—the modern necessities, really. She bought groceries and a gym membership, Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions, a couch and bedding for her new apartment. She had dinners out with friends once or twice a week, ordered takeout and bought “the good makeup” from Sephora (and if that strains your definition of necessary, you haven’t spent much time on teenage GirlTok). She noticed her credit card balance was creeping up and vowed to skip expensive bar nights. “I thought, Okay, I'll switch to weed. But then I would get stoned and order shit I didn’t even remember ordering.” Amazon deliveries became a game of guess-what’sin-the-box. She can still pinpoint the purchase that ran afoul of her credit card’s $10,000 monthly limit: a US$60 subscription fee for Fabletics, Kate Hudson’s company hawking cute workout sets to fitness girlies.