fwiw, vpro is right.
Well, if there is no interest I think it is always wiser to have financing.
Surely parents will be willing to pay for $110 or so a month for the computer until I can get another job at least.
Dang! This is the way you think after you just posted this kind of message?
$200? Do you have to pay all at once? I don't have the cash. I would have if I haven't gave some to my parents and they don't have the cash ready unless they take out of credit card.
It's really none of my business how you want to spend your money, but this kind of thinking is clearly dangerous, imho.
My advice here will probably fall on deaf ears, but here it goes:
Mathematically, it seems better to have no interest financing. But due to psychological twisting effects of how much money you really have (in fact, it's a sales machination on their part to make you buy something you can't afford), I feel you should never use financing unless you have the cash to pay it outright - the one exception is for real estate, but even then, you must be extremely careful due to bubble cycles that exist on the scale of decades.
For your reference, when I bought my first computer, the original 128k Mac in 1984 for $2,499 + tax with my own savings in high school, I made sure I had at least $5,000 in the bank before I even considered buying a computer - having nothing in the bank is dangerous.
Today, I will not spend more than 5% of my liquid assets on a vehicle (a declining asset) or 0.5% on a computer (also a declining asset), even though I can technically afford to spend more. These are not even hard percentages - as I save more money over time, I want to push these percentages lower.
IMHO, it's a waste of money to spend any more on expendables whose values approach zero over time - I don't even want to refer to these things as assets. Overspending on computers is an especially bad idea as they are virtually guaranteed to get cheaper and faster over time. They also become obsolete faster than most vehicles.
I also keep all my machines (with minor upgrades) for at least 5 years before buying a new one... ...and this is coming from someone who actually uses computers to make money (Software development is my career, so computers are the tools of my trade).
Warranties are extremely tricky things - quite often, the people who can afford them shouldn't buy them, as statistically, it's cheaper to pay out-of-pocket.
OTOH, the people who have trouble paying for warrantees really should buy them, if they really need running machines for their trade.
As you may have guessed already, I have personally never paid for warrantees for computers and just buy replacement parts myself when things break. It has worked out in my favor so far - knock on wood.
