You're stranded in a foreign place and have no cash in the local currency. There's no ATM around, but there are businesses that take credit and you can pay the

You're stranded in a foreign place and have no cash in the local currency. There's no ATM around, but there are businesses that take credit and you can pay the bill for it at the end of the month. Something unexpected pops up like a family member dies and you need to arrange a funeral, but don't have the cash on hand because some other emergency last month used up your liquid savings. You know that you can pay it off over the long run, but don't have any other way to deal with it right now. So you go into a small amount of debt that you can likely pay off without paying too much over the original cost. There are a million ways that they can be good. There are probably more ways they can be bad, but this question is very simplistic.