How does Whybuy stack up against buying outright and rent to buy?

It would take as much as around 4 years with no faults for you to have been better off buying, and up to 12 years longer with a rent to buy contract.  You really think your rent to buy appliance is going to last 12 years?  It’s not hard to make rent to buy deals look bad, because they are bad, we’ve never seen one where the customer wasn’t getting stooged.  So to make it a bit more challenging, we’ll show you that not only is Whybuy a better deal than rent to buy, its a better deal than buying outright new.  Let’s do the maths on one of our most common scenarios, a three appliance package including:

The total new value of the appliances (according to choice.com.au) is $3927.  To account for the initial $250 upfront fee of the gold membership we’ll reduce the $3297-$250 = $3677.  The weekly rental cost is $18.80 per week.  So $3677 ÷ (52 weeks in a  year × $18.80) = 3.76, which is 3 years and 9 months.  Almost 4 years.  That’s 4 years with no faults, with three appliances for you to have been better off buying.  Compared against a rent to buy contract where you paid three times as much as the appliance is worth – It would take 12 years for you to have been better off.  And – dont forget our value gets better and better the more appliances you have with us, thanks to our membership fee and low weekly appliance rental fees, only increasing the amount of years for you to have been better off buying.

Whybuy?  It makes far more sense to have fully serviced appliances with us.  What are you getting at the end of your rent to buy contract anyway – a second hand fridge worth a few hundred dollars?  Our way is better, we charge you less from day 1, you’re looked after as a long term customer and you never have to worry about an appliance breakdown again.  You’re paying for working appliances – so if they break, we get out there quick and repair or replace – at absolutely no cost to you.

Why not rent to buy?

We don’t offer rent to buy for three main reasons, and it’s all about being able to provide our customers with the best possible value.

A bad deal for customers

Rent to buy is not a good deal for our customers and we find it morally unjustifiable.  Most rent to buy deals we have seen end with the customer locked into paying for the appliance three times over in a period of only three of four years.   With us this would take as much as 20 years.  We don’t want to be in a business that makes its money taking advantage of people. We prefer to reward our long term customers with reduced long term prices through gold membership, that customers can walk away from whenever suits them.  We provide a lifetime warranty on our appliances meaning there is no stress for you if an appliance breaks down – Often in a rent to buy scenario, if the appliance breaks down outside of the manufacturers warranty, of one, maybe two years, while you’re still locked into your rent to buy contract – you’re not covered.  With us, if the appliance breaks down, it’s our responsibility to have it fixed or replaced and get you up and running again.  As it should be.

Credit licenses

Lets say we didn’t have any moral dilemma to offering rent to buy, and we thought we could do it more ethically (which is totally possible, just don’t charge obscene interest). Credit licenses are the worrrrrssst.  If we wanted to offer rent to buy – we’d need a credit license, and they’re just not cheap to have.  On top of the initial expense, the government (ASIC) would want to run a whole bunch of audits and other nonsense every year, undertake a credit assessment for each customer and keep it for 7 years and so on.  It’s a mountain of paperwork and regulation.  It gets real expensive, real quick.  We just want to rent out quality appliances for a great price, we’re not red tape regulation wizards.  If we had a credit license, all that cost would ultimately be passed onto our customers, as all our competitors out there with credit licenses must.

We want the parts!

We repair and maintain our appliances in house. All appliances will eventually break down and be uneconomical to repair, but when they do, we strip them down for valuable parts.  Parts are expensive, and sometimes new parts are no longer available.  Shelves, handles, doors, switches, fans – there’s many valuable parts we can salvage, and use to maintain other appliances, keeping them running when manufacturers no longer have parts available.  Some manufacturers only have parts available for a couple of years, and an appliance that is otherwise in excellent condition is unable to be repaired simply because the part isn’t available!  Imagine taking your two year old car to the mechanic and being told it cannot be repaired because parts are no longer available!   This is the reality in the appliance industry, but we’ve found a sustainable way around the issue.   There’s no way to know when a manufacturer might withdraw parts availability, so we need to make sure we are able to provide our own.  If we offered rent to buy, it would make parts less accessible for us and increase our prices.