Put on your financing face!

I handle several retail clients for CurrentMarketing, which means that even slight changes in the world of financing can rock my world from a creative perspective. Lately, we’ve seen serious changes take hold.
Gone are the days of promoting “interest FREE” or “0% financing” – welcome to the world of “No Interest if paid in full within 12 months, minimum monthly payments apply.”  That poses a big enough real estate problem, right? Follow that with two paragraphs of disclaimer copy at 8-point type (minimum) and you can see the conundrum with creative for our retail clients.
In spite of the challenges newspapers are facing these days, the cost of a print ad in the local newspaper is still very expensive (that’s another blog topic all together). Now we also have to consider the amount of costly real estate that must be left for financing and disclaimers, not to mention shrinking widths and heights to accommodate for increased hard goods costs.
So, the dilemma becomes how to explain to my client that the extra retail price point they want to include in an ad has to be cut to leave space for the disclaimer? Or how do I justify to my client that the space we’ve secured has to increase to allow for the additional copy requirements on financing?
We can’t leave financing out of the equation, especially in a competitive division of retail, and the associated fees for espousing inaccurate financing offers can be steep.  We’ve considered moving budgets to other forms of advertising, but banks are also savvy and have imposed special requirements to all forms of promotion, even digital arenas.
What is the best way to handle the changing face of financing?  Any ideas?