Payments for multiple products using Installments

An Apple 2-year installment plan for the iPhone sounds good until you buy another one or two (or more) Apple products on installments and you want to pay one item off early. 

For example, if you purchased a Watch and an iPhone on installments, let’s say you only have $200 to pay on the watch, but $950 to pay on the iphone. Naturally you want to keep the 2-year payment plan for the iPhone because that is easy to maintain financially so you decide to pay the watch off early.

Process 1

You go to your Apple card on your iphone and click on the three dots, next to the credit card icon and then select “Monthly Installments”. This will take you any active (still showing a balance) products, in this case the phone and the watch. 

To see the balance on each product click the appropriate line item. Let’s say we click on the Watch. This Watch page shows what you financed, what you paid and what remains to be paid. Just below the amount you financed there is a “Pay Early” link. Perfect you think and click the link. A message appears, informing you that “...you will need to pay off your total Apple card balance before additional payments can be applied to your installments balance”. For simplicity, let’s assume you have no other charges on your card, just your installments. You click “Continue”. 

The next screen shows an amount equal to the total of the remaining installment amounts to to be paid on your two installments. In this example, that would be $200 + $950 = $1,150.

You only want to pay off the Watch so you ignore the “Pay $1,150 and select “Other amount” at the bottom of the screen.

You enter $200 on on the next screen thinking this will pay off the watch, but no, Goldman Sachs allocates $100 to the watch and $100 to the phone.

There is now a $100 balance on the watch and an $850 balance on the watch. You decide to pay another $200 payment to finish paying for the Watch. This DOES pay off the remaing balance on the watch but it also reduces the balance on your iPhone to $750 which reduces the number of payments to less than 24 which is NOT what you intended to do. Also, your personal cash flow is impacted.

So, in order to pay off the watch you have to pay double what you owed on the watch which results in a reduced payment schedule on your phone.

The Goldman Sachs (GS) help desk confirmed that despite the product screen offer to “pay early” for that product, the payment is actually applied to the total outstanding installments balance, NOT the watch alone.

Process 2.

I did hear another explanation from another GS rep who said that the payment would be taken off the FIRST product that you purchased on installments but when I get my next bill I’ll test to see which of these two processes is actually right. Neither of them are acceptable. I should be able to select which product to pay off without impacting the other product’s balance or installment schedule.

In my ACTUAL situation, my 2-year phone installment plan would be reduced to 8 months under Process 1 above and I would have to spend $566.50 to pay off my watch that has a balance of $283.25 to pay. The user interface is misleading in that the context for the “pay early” is a single product, not both.

In conclusion, I may have to choose not to buy more than one product on installments using the Apple card and buy the other one outright or from another supplier like Amazon or Costco instead. Not a very elegant solution. How do others handle this situation?