First time using pay in 4 for Target. My PayPal says it’s waiting for “authorization.” It’s been 4 days already, the first time payment has been taken out of my bank account. The items I “paid” for is still in my cart with no emails about a confirmation… do I still wait?

https://www.paypal.com/us/campaign/5-bnpl-offer-terms

PayPal limited the recent Pay in 4 promo to one eligible purchase per customer, moving away from the previous dollar limit. They will be honoring purchases made before this point under the old terms, according to the email.

I hope you all got your MS in! 😁

Full email below:

Hello Stanley

Thank you for being a part of our limited-time Buy Now Pay Later holiday promotion. We’re so happy you’ve been able to take advantage of it. You’ve reached the limit on this offer given our new terms, which can be found here.

Any eligible PayPal Pay Later transactions you made before today will receive the benefit of the original offer terms. You can check the status of any pending points in the rewards hub of the PayPal app.

During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, shop with PayPal Pay in 4 interest-free and with no fees. And you can check out other cash back offers in the PayPal app.

Thank you for being part of this promotion.

The PayPal Team

Hey folks,

I just discovered this, but Paypal Pay-in-4 actually supports putting a credit card as your method of purchase, and it'll actually give you cashback! I bought an iPad for my brother for Christmas, and although I could theoretically pay it off instantly it by pulling a little bit from my reserves, I paid with it with Paypal Pay-in-4 through Best Buy, splitting up the ~600 dollar purchase for 4 equal payments over about 6 weeks.

The second transaction just posted to my credit card, which I used an American Express Blue Cash Everyday, and it correctly coded as online retail, giving me 3% cashback. We're in a high-interest rate environment, so you're committing a bit of arbitrage by letting it sit in an HYSA, having your cake and eating it, along with getting cash back. In addition, the Pay-in-4 Loan does not go on your credit report, so you can "hide" some legitimate debt and tack it on via putting it on your credit cards later.

For the math: you're getting a 3-4 month 0 APR loan (the time it takes for Pay-in-4 to end + the time to pay the balance) + ~3% cashback, so around a 4-5% in total that scales linearly (assuming you have the equivalent funds in a HYSA).

Word of note: the Credit Cards you can use as your payment method seems arbitrary. I couldn't actually use my Paypal Mastercard as the Pay-in-4 method for whatever reason, it just gave me a list of a few of the cards I had linked in my account. YMMV

Thought it might be useful for any min-maxxers out here!