Does debt consolidation work, or does it just trade one debt for a slower-motion version of the same problem? That question got fresh national attention this week, when a wave of local news coverage warned that rolling credit card debt into a personal loan can backfire if the spending habits underneath it never change. Americans … Read more
Buy now pay later statistics tell a more complicated story than the “debt trap” headlines suggest. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond’s own 2026 research brief, BNPL loans actually charged off at a lower rate than credit cards in the most recent year measured — 1.83% versus 4.19%. And yet the same research … Read more
How much debt do Americans have right now? The New York Fed’s Q2 2026 Household Debt and Credit Report puts the number at $18.8 trillion total — a small 0.1% dip from the previous quarter, the first decrease in a while. Spread evenly across the roughly 134.8 million households in the U.S., that works out … Read more
Is credit card delinquency rising, or is a scary-sounding headline number telling only part of the story? According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 12.8% of credit card balances were 90 or more days past due as of the first quarter of 2026, up sharply from 7.6% back in late 2022 — a … Read more
Is credit card debt normal, or does it just feel that way because everyone around you seems to be carrying some? The numbers say it’s the second one, and they came out just this week: total U.S. credit card balances climbed to $1.26 trillion in the second quarter of 2026, according to the New York … Read more