Credit card debt rising across U.S.

Many Americans are lacking plan to pay it off

As 2024 dawns, Americans’ credit card debt and late payments are rising, and card interest rates remain high, but many people lack a plan to pay down their debt. If your balances are ballooning, a New Year’s resolution to tackle them would be timely.

After clearing the $1 trillion mark last spring, credit card debt has continued to mount, rising 4.7% in the third quarter to $1.08 trillion, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported.

Card debt fell during the pandemic period of 2020-21 but rose as Americans turned to credit to cover expenses amid rising prices. Card debt is growing even as inflation cools and the job market remains resilient.

Delinquencies are also on the rise: 2% of card users went from being current on payments in the second quarter of 2023 to being 30 or more days late in the third quarter, up from 1.7% in the first half of the year. Borrowers who also had car loans and student loans, in particular, were more likely to fall behind on their credit card payments, Fed researchers reported.

Despite rising debt, fewer than half of cardholders who carry a balance say they have a plan for paying it off, according to a survey published this week by the financial site Bankrate. Nearly half those surveyed said they carried a balance, up from 39% in 2021. That’s worrying, analysts say, because the Fed reported the average interest rate was above 22% for cards that assessed interest.

“I think it’s a big concern,” said Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at Bankrate.

At 22%, it would take almost nine years to pay off a $2,000 card balance by making minimum monthly payments, and total interest would exceed $2,100, Rossman said.

Making larger monthly payments will pay off debt faster, but getting people to do that in a way that makes a meaningful difference is a challenge, according to a recently published paper about an experiment in Britain.

In the test, thousands of people opening card accounts were encouraged to sign up to automatically pay more than the minimum amount each month — and most did so. But the change made no difference in their debt in the longer term, researchers found, in part because people kept spending on their cards, so their payments were still too low to chip away at the growing balances.

Paying down card debt is “a really hard thing to do,” said Benedict Guttman-Kenney, a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of Chicago and the lead author of the paper. “There’s no simple fix.”

Isabel Patterson, 36, an account manager at a sports and entertainment marketing agency in Richmond, Va., said she had spent roughly the last three years paying off about $20,000 in credit card debt.

Patterson began accumulating debt after opening her first credit card account in her early 20s, she said. “I didn’t understand how interest works,” she said. “I was making minimum payments but was still using the card, so it didn’t make a dent.”

One of Patterson’s splurges was a $2,500 bicycle. But during a spell of unemployment, she also had to pay for living expenses with credit. “It added up after a while,” she said.

Her parents suggested she contact Money Management International, a nonprofit agency that negotiates payment plans for eligible borrowers at a reduced interest rate.

Participants make a single monthly payment to the agency, which pays the lenders. (The initial consultation is free, and clients pay a monthly fee of $24, on average, for the debt management plan, said Thomas Nitzsche, a spokesperson for the agency; the average negotiated interest rate is 7%.)

Patterson said she cut back on travel and new clothes, shopped at cheaper stores like the Aldi supermarket and ignored ubiquitous social media promotions for beauty products. She expects to make a final debt payment of $717 next month and plans to use some of the newly available cash to build savings for unexpected expenses.

Money Management International continued to see an influx of new clients during November and December last year, normally a slower period, Nitzsche said. Inflation has eased, he said, but card rates remain high, and student loan repayment is “putting a pinch on a lot of people.”

The average unsecured debt held by the agency’s clients has increased to about $30,000 from roughly $20,000 two years ago, Nitzsche said; the average balance placed in debt management plans is $18,000.