Americans Step Up Revolving Debt Just to Meet Payments

“Just as the president reminded us yesterday we are not a deadbeat nation, merely borrowing money today to pay the bills of yesterday, so, as theNY Times reports in this all-too-real article, many of the citizens of the US are also living not just paycheck-to-paycheck but short-term-loan-to-short-term-loan. As one debt-consolidation service noted “They’ve been borrowing just to meet payments on previous loans; it builds on itself.” Rings an awfully loud bell eh? (and yes, we know the government’s finances are not run like a households – though at some point the check book needs to balance). People in tough ‘economic’ situations fall into the ‘poverty trap’, borrowing money at ever higher interest rates in a shell game to keep previous borrowers at bay. The average debt for households earning $20,000 a year or less more than doubled to $26,000 between 2001 and 2010 – as people dig deeper, precisely because they long to escape. As the focus of the article notes, “the belt-tightening was the easy part… the larger problem was cash-flow.” Critically, experiments show that ‘economic’ scarcity by itself – independent of personality or any other factors – fuels a drive to borrow recklessly.

Via NY Times:

The belt-tightening was the easy part. Cancel the cable. Skip the air conditioners. Ration the cellphone, unplug the wireless Internet, cook rice and beans — done, and done. The larger problem for LaKeisha Tuggle, 33, who had lost her public relations job, was cash flow: After her unemployment insurance and savings ran dry, there was none.

 

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