Stories like this are why I have no hope for the future, at least here in the US.
My eighty year-old parents are driving for DoorDash (in my car) and that’s all the income they have to live on. If they hadn’t paid off their mortgage years ago they’d be homeless.
The empire is collapsing.
Ever wonder what it was like to live in Rome during the collapse?
I imagine it was hot.
Stories like this are why I have no hope for the future, at least here in the US.
And you think its way better in other places? Name a place that you think is better off that the US. The entire world is addicted to credit and debt.
Not me tho! My houses paid off, cars are paid off, and I have no debt. So fuck that noize.
On this particular topic (credit card debt) it is way better in other places.
The median credit card debt is by far the highest in the US compared to other countries. https://www.cardrates.com/advice/average-credit-card-debt-by-country/
But how much of the US credit card debt is people who can’t control their spending vs economic problems?
I have seen plenty of people who can’t really afford it, have the latest iPhone.
I can afford the latest iPhone, yet I have a $125 android.
Do you think Americans tend to rack up more debt than people from other countries?
If so, do you have an hypthesis as to why that would be the case?
I’m curious since here (France) debt is pretty uncommon and the volumes usually way lower are than in the US (and Canada).
Yes.
But I have no idea why, other than we have a lot of people that try to stay current with trends.
Averages really obfuscate the story here. A ~$6300 average could mean 6 people carrying $6300 balances or five carrying no balance and one dude carrying $30k+. I’d love to see the distribution here because leaning on credit for necessities is what people do when they’re falling out of the middle class.
Ironically a similar thing is marriage. The statistic which is like “1/3 marriages end in divorce” are because of the same person marrying like 3 or 4 times. It’s quite a bit (albeit not massively) lower if you only factor in the first marriage
Credit card debt Georg has over 10 million dollars in credit card debt and is an outlier and should not have been counted.
Agree. Weighted arithmetic mean would help. And/or breaking it up by net worth or income.
The article does link to a longer transunion report with more quarterly detail.
There are some other legitimate reasons to put tons in credit too. I built an ADU on my property. Asked the bank for a loan to build it, a second mortgage. They said no, there’s not enough equity. (I’d just bought the house a year prior). I explained that the value of the property will go up by more than the amount of the loan I’m asking. Of course they told me they can’t give loans based on hypothetical future appraisals. So they advised me to put it all on credit. I had a line of 30k with them after all and that’s the exact amount I’d asked for.
So we did. Maxed out the card to build the ADU, got the property reappraised, then got the second mortgage, then used that to pay off the credit card debt, now renting out the ADU for $200 more per month than the loan payment. It all worked out and made perfect sense, but I carried 30k of cc debt for like 4 months while this all went down.
It took 40-some years but I’m finally above average in something 😎
I thought I was starting to do better on my debts, got a notice from the IRS yesterday saying I missed a 1099c in my 2022 taxes that dictated I owe them 1,600 dollars. Not sure how that could be true, I remember I had paid a few hundred that year, so I’m not sure what went wrong. Not looking forward to figuring it out.
Sir, you paid more than many billionaires in 2022, and I know you can’t afford food right now, but we are going to need you to pay us $1,600 more. Oh and um, add a couple more years before you’ll receive the money you paid towards social security.
Nobody goes to prison for most errors. The IRS is made up of average normal every day people trying to do a job. Thry clearly jnderstand people make mistakes. Explain the error, they’ll work with you.
What gets people in trouble is intent. If you intended or intend to do wrong, okay, that’s an issue. But otherwise, stop spreading fear.
Just an fyi resend and that number usually goes away. They did the same thing to me for the same year and when questioned they said they just never got the paperwork. Resent and everything was fine.
Unfortunately its mail from the IRS
In the US.
That’s quite an important fact.
What’s the median? Average could just be my neighbor Steve.
Average consumer
Average US consumer.
Also feel free to add public debt per capita into this - it will be paid from the future taxes after all
Yeah there’s absolutely a bunch of rich people carrying over 50k credit card debt they don’t even care about that are throwing this off
Thats not how this works…
That is indeed how averages work. For example I commonly have 10k worth of credit card “debt” which is just stuff my company reimburses me for and will be paid in full on the due date. I’m skewing this average because in reality I have no debt.
There’s more than one kind of average.
Is everyone just hoping hyperinflation takes off?
You assume that people have a choice. Wages are so low compared to the cost of living in most of this country that unless you’re making six figures, you aren’t going to have much extra without sacrificing what used to just be normal a couple decades ago.
Johnny Harris recently released a video going through several income levels, starting at a $25k job up to $25 million and how that would breakdown for monthly costs with department of labor data for food and housing.
The linked video is in Spanish for me. Just fyi, not sure if you meant to link the English version.
Ok, so you can go to the settings for the video and change the audio track to English or Spanish. I was watching stuff in Spanish before opening this video. I guess YouTube defaulted to Spanish because of that? It’s the first time I’ve seen that happen on any link 😂
Just a heads up, Remove everything after the ? In the link when sharing , it’s tracking data
Weird it’s in English for me. That’s how I watched it. Lol
I did copy the link from YouTube Mobile so who knows what it’s doing.
Was English for me, is your YouTube set to Spanish?
No, it’s all in English but I do watch a lot of stuff in Spanish and French. I guess YouTube thought I’d like it in Spanish since I was watching something in Spanish right before clicking the link.
Removed by mod
In the spirit of Robin Hood.
How about a little Tyler Durden? Just a little.
The soap I make is plant-based.
You mean get a job with these credit card companies?
They said do crime, not do evil.
This is surprisingly low. If the average family put all their expenses on a card and pays it off every month it won’t be far off this.
What is the average amount that people are actually paying interest on?
