The number of Americans who hold holiday debt has nearly doubled since last year, according to a new report from WalletHub.
In the new survey, 46 percent of Americans said they still had holiday debt from last year. Last year at around the same time, only roughly one in four Americans were still paying off their holiday debts.
“Inflation has taken a toll on basically every expense in Americans’ lives, and costs around the holidays are no different,” Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor for the University of Tennessee at Martin, told Newsweek. “There’s normally a feeling, though, around holiday spending that it’s an obligation, even if the consumer has to go into debt to meet that obligation.”
The uptick in debt could reflect that the economy’s larger inflation cooling isn’t making as much of a difference in many Americans’ personal finances.