The Debt Trap

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. It happens all the time. The lovely couple with a nice house, beautiful family, and gainful careers unexpectedly find themselves drowning in tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt. Debt grew by $93 billion at the end of 2024, and half of that increase

Came from new credit card debt, now New York Federal Reserve research. Or maybe it's the fresh college graduate who, rather than looking forward to a bright future and a sense of freedom, finds himself trying to pay back a series of compounding loans, only to watch the balance grow year after year after year. For Americans with student loans is delinquent. That's nearly tripled the pre-pandemic delinquency rate seen. And then there's the retiree who thought she had enough saved until one medical emergency wiped out her nest egg.

And so you just start chipping away at your savings, chipping away at everything you have, and and ultimately chipping away at retirement. It's easy to believe This would never happen to me. I would be smarter, savvier, better at saving. And yet, hundreds of millions of people around the world find themselves enmeshed in debt.

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