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Young people form the primary target demographic of new 'buy now pay later' (BNPL) and digital credit services. Despite consistent data showing young people as a cohort are particularly vulnerable to unsustainable levels of indebtedness, little is known about how young people define and make sense of the experience of being in debt through consumer credit services. This paper explores how indebtedness is experienced and understood in relation to wellbeing through a qualitative study using interviews alongside arts-based participatory methods of bodymapping and sandboxing with 24 young people in the Hunter region of NSW, Australia. These methods enabled particular attention to the embodied and affective elements related to the experience of indebtedness to understand debt's significance for wellbeing for young people. The embodied and affective registers of indebtedness are integral for understanding the conditions informing how wellbeing is negotiated and felt in this context. This study considers the role of BNPL services in young people's economic lives as part of broader processes of financialisation, and the significance of extended and ubiquitous forms of credit for young people's wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the findings of an interview and digital methods-based study of young Australian hospitality workers who lost work in the wake of the pandemic. In so doing it focuses on the relationship between one's present-day material conditions and their capacity to form plans for the future, and the role of planning in young people's future thinking. The article argues that the impact of the pandemic on the participants' plans can be best understood not through analysis of their orientations to planning, but through consideration of the degree to which their present-day circumstances brought them further away from the desired futures that they had been planning. Indeed, some of the participants who found themselves in states of deprivation identified that their plans remained unchanged, while others who were little affected in an immediate, material sense experienced it as a crisis or as a catalyst for re-evaluation. By identifying the relationship between present-day conditions and future plans for our participants, we ultimately contend that understanding planning as a form of practice through which one's present is connected to their desired future allows for insight into how young people prioritise and address goals in various spheres of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]