[chrissam]

It seems like a bad decision to pay $500-1000 for a smartphone if you can't pay upfront.

My sense is that people push their financial situation to the limit in order to get more stuff faster. You might say "if they had more money it wouldn't be an issue" but my feeling is that, for most of these people, if they had 20% more money, they'd just find the new limit. I don't necessarily fault this behavior, if the things you're buying make you happy then maybe it's perfectly rational.

But if that's true, it seems nonsensical to define poverty as "precariousness of one's finacial situation". The only definition of poverty that makes sense to me is the material one.