SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the I-owe,-I-owe,-it's-off-to-work-I-go dept.
Another day, another record broken.
The debt held by US households has surpassed its pre-2008 record, several financial outlets note. A peculiar spotlight in the associated numbers falls on student loans, where delinquencies are multiple times higher than for other debt types: 10 percent is the norm.
That's some pretty troubling news for the economy [and wider society], notes Rana Foroohar at sister outlet the Financial Times. First off, there's the association between the rise in student debt, and a decrease in home ownership for young people. This connection is exacerbated by them millennials increasingly turning towards income-based repayment programmes, which spread out the debt over more years.
Secondly, the level of student debt delinquencies ain't changing: the 10 percent figure is a near-constant over the past 4-5 years. People who've ever had a delinquency -- even if they recover -- have a much lower rate of home ownership at age 30 as compared to their non-defaulted compatriots. Not having a home means not filling it with stuff, and filling with stuff is kinda what the economy is based on.
Then, thirdly, it's not only students that are hit by student debt: increasingly, their parents are taking on debt too, to help out. Fuel for that debt sandwich is something peculiar: the rate of inflation in college admission costs is three times higher than the consumer price index. Must be that college professors wages have increased a lot, then.
Given that boomers and their millennial offspring are the two largest voting blocks in the US, a snappy future president-elect might consider raising the issue a bit.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday May 19 2017, @01:31PM
There's really nothing complicated about it.
I have two cards. Whenever I (we actually) get fuel or groceries, we grab a certain card to pay it. Utilities (mobile phone, electricity, gas, water, etc) are on auto-pay on the other card.
People spend enormous amounts of time "couponing". We don't. We consider our time more valuable than that. It's a simple reflex to use a certain card for fuel or any store that happens to sell food items that would qualify as grocery.
Then there is the minor hoops to jump through to claim your rewards. On one card its easy to use airline points when you book tickets. On the other one, you have to visit a kiosk at Disney World to get your Disney dollars. For us this usually works out to somewhere between about $250 - $350 depending on what we spent that year on the cars, and whether it was the "short" gap between vacations or the "long" gap.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.