Averages really obfuscate the story here. A ~$6300 average could mean 6 people carrying $6300 balances or five carrying no balance and one dude carrying $30k+. I’d love to see the distribution here because leaning on credit for necessities is what people do when they’re falling out of the middle class.
Ironically a similar thing is marriage. The statistic which is like “1/3 marriages end in divorce” are because of the same person marrying like 3 or 4 times. It’s quite a bit (albeit not massively) lower if you only factor in the first marriage
Stories like this are why I have no hope for the future, at least here in the US.
My eighty year-old parents are driving for DoorDash (in my car) and that’s all the income they have to live on. If they hadn’t paid off their mortgage years ago they’d be homeless.
You assume that people have a choice. Wages are so low compared to the cost of living in most of this country that unless you’re making six figures, you aren’t going to have much extra without sacrificing what used to just be normal a couple decades ago.
Johnny Harris recently released a video going through several income levels, starting at a $25k job up to $25 million and how that would breakdown for monthly costs with department of labor data for food and housing.
That is indeed how averages work. For example I commonly have 10k worth of credit card “debt” which is just stuff my company reimburses me for and will be paid in full on the due date. I’m skewing this average because in reality I have no debt.