What if you PURCHASED Afterpay Shares during Covid, rather than PURCHASED WITH Afterpay during Covid?

Did you start shopping online for the first time during Covid? Did you use Afterpay or another buy now pay later platform for the first time?

If you answered yes, you’re not alone.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, online sales in Australia increased by 55% rise in December 2020 when compared to the previous year. While Australia Posts Online Shopping Report, revealed that more than 5.6 million Australian households shopped online in December 2020, up 21.3% from the 2109 average. This was a 238 percent increase over the same quarter in 2019.

Afterpay reported an average of 17,300 new customers were added to their platform from July 2019 to June 2020. Afterpay’s daily new customers increased to 20,500 new when we were all reeling from Covid’s impact between April and June 2020.

Here’s the thing.

If you shopped online with Afterpay or credit cards during Covid, like millions of Australians did – chances are you spent more than you would if you used your own money and shopped instore. It’s from using digitised payments and our brains not feeling ‘pain’ as well as something called the framing effect. Framing is a psychology of pricing tool where instead of you thinking you’ve spent $100, your brain only registers the $25 payment so you spend more.

As buy now pay later sites such as Afterpay’s own data on spending behaviour shows.

But what if instead of you purchasing using Afterpay during Covid, you purchased Afterpay shares?

Often share investing is something people are scared of, yet if we look around and realise the trends that are happening, we can potentially take advantage of them. Certainly, that’s something those within my 8 week My Financial Adulting Plan were doing.

Financal Adulters like Yiota had heard me say again and again that the market is cyclical and not to follow the herd. To consider a falling market with caution, but perhaps to think of it as shares that were expensive, now being on sale.

And who doesn’t love a sale.

That’s why Yiota and other women like her within my program were purchasing shares during Covid, instead of panicking. They had learned about share investing during one of the modules, they’d potentially taken it further still and played the ASX share game, they’d increased their confidence and when the sharemarket fell, they didn’t run but dipped their toe in and bought on sale.

Certainly, when I caught up with Yiota in June, she had bought a handful of shares for the first time which had already started to increase in value. However, she wasn’t celebrating wildly because she knew they were a long term investment but she was glad she had the confidence to act.

Which takes me back to Afterpay.

If you’re one of the many young women particularly who Afterpay targets and who uses Afterpay regularly, my question to you is – what if instead of purchasing with Afterpay during Covid and having nothing to show for it, you’d purchased Afterpay shares instead?

Let’s take a look. At it’s lowest Afterpay was at around $15 but let’s presume you purchased shares during lockdown at $25. Let’s also presume you spent the average spend on the platform of $150 four times which totals $600 and would have bought you 24 shares. Today, Afterpay is worth $122 which means your 24 shares would be worth $2,928.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have the almost $3,000 rather than nothing because I’d overspent on their platform.

That’s the power of financial literacy. Of not being sucked in by financial products that make spending easier and instead, to consider them curiously as an investment instead.

Intrigued? Why not check out my 8 week My Financial Adulting Plan and join the waitlist for when we open the doors in May 2023.