I perceived the Easter flex promo as a reminder that if I’m spending more than usual over Easter that I can flex it to take the sting out of it. I personally didn’t read it as encouraging more spending than what I was already planning. I went on a road trip last weekend, so these promo messages just reminded me that I could flex some of that past expenditure to free up some funds until payday.
I’ve avoided setting up a flex card as I think that feels slightly more prone to encourage spending I wouldn’t normally do.
I think this is a great summary of all these “pay it off in three products” to be fair. For some folk they’ll stay in their limits and pay it off as they should just fine.
But for many others it’s a gateway into continuous debt all while trying to keep up with the latest insta trends.
I hope Monzo will be the groundbreaker here with more options for those customers who get into financial difficulties as a result. That would be a strong differentiator to other similar products.
And I don’t mean the stuff they have to, but the additional stuff they want to do to help
I recently started building on my thin credit history, so I’m keeping an eye on this too.
I’ve had Flex since November and the last report to TransUnion was on 1 Feb, even though I’ve Flexed multiple purchases since then and had two automatic payments go out in late February and March (another one coming in a few days).
Nothing at all is showing up with Equifax either, but my Monzo overdraft increase was quickly updated on both.
I absolutely love Flex, but would really appreciate some info on how and when it reports to CRAs
We’ve been reporting to TransUnion and Experian since October but it has taken a while for testing to be completed.
TransUnion set everything to live about a month ago so should be visible to you in Credit Karma - although I think they haven’t loaded the latest month of data yet so may be a month behind.
Experian should be about to move everything to be live in the next week or two.
We haven’t started reporting to Equifax yet - but probably will soon.
Here’s an edge case question, does anyone know what would happen if you flexed a transaction, then immediately paid it off, then tried to flex that same transaction again? I’m assuming there’s a check/flag that gets activated that prevents you from flexing the same transaction more than once.
Yep, it’s this, with a button to view installment plan, seems odd to still refer to it is that when you’ve paid it off. Nonetheless click on it and it just shows your first installment that was taken when you flexed it, and a second payment below that shows you paid the rest. And that you have £0.00 left to pay.
So after using flex for a while, on the whole its great and really suits my needs. However as is it so per transaction/ purchase based that can be a little frustrating at times. Id love the ability to group a few transactions together and flex as one group. For example I recently bought a suit for a mates wedding and got different parts from different shops, it would have been great to group those purchases together as ’ suit’ rather than having 3 separate flex’s. I know this might be logistically a nightmare or perhaps its niche but I would really love the ability to do this!
I love this such a great idea. I recently flexed a hotel break and paid separately for room service and other amenities as part of the trip. It would have been handy if I could group all transactions from this trip and flex the total.
If youre replying to me, It doesn’t solve my issue/ niggle. I used the virtual card, I still have three separate flex items.Combining them into one grouping as a single flex item would be great.
I can see how this would logistically be a bit of a task considering flex seeks to be build around single transactions/ items but hey a boy can dream ha
But I don’t understand the use case - if you purchase them at the same time - which you seem to say you do, and flex them the same period, then they’re just one payment on subsequent instalments?
I guess different things suit different people, for me, it would be easier to see a total for that event flexed as one item so I can see that I’ve spent 150 on it and split it over 6 months concisely rather than looking at 3 £50 flex items separately. Maybe it’s niche and just the way I like to categorise things, I know it doesn’t change the instalments but it’s just cleaner to look at in the flex feed and better for my head budgeting wise
They are - but it would be nice to have one transaction on Flex rather than 3 different transactions.
We’ve thought about this use case - where it’d be fantastic is for holidays - eg. you go on holiday for 7 days, pay for some activities, pay for some restaurants, etc. - when you get back you can then combine all those transactions together into one Flex instalment plan and pay off your holiday over 3/ 6/ 12 months.
As much as we want to do it - as mentioned above it doesn’t actually change anything under the hood - it’s just a lot nicer visually and mentally. As such it’s kinda low on the list - I hope we do this by the end of the year but tbh it’s unlikely.
