76
Average American Debt: Household Debt Statistics, Average household debt hits $101,915
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
76 points (81.7% liked)
News
23274 readers
2841 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Bullshit.
The ultra wealthy alone basically live in debt. They use debt for everything. That’s one reason they pay virtually no taxes. That would skew an “average”.
Also, mortgages and auto loans would make this way higher for average people.
OP gets the number for the post from here I suspect
https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-household-debt/
Debt doesn't reduce taxes. Not having income reduces taxes.
You can claim debt repayment on taxes and it reduces your income
General debt payments aren't deductible, certain interest payments are allowed, like mortgages, but there's a cap.
My old boss kept refinancing his house to keep all the debt tax free. Need a new Mercedes? Time to refinance.
Debt never gets taxed, it's not income. Debt forgiveness can be taxed as income though.
That's not a thing. Unless he was somehow laundering money through like cash mortgage payments and then refinancing cash out to spend.
The methodology here is suspect at best.
Simply dividing the amount of debt by the number of people does things like decrease the debt per person if there are children in the house.
There are other weird scenarios like non married people who own a house together. When you purchase a house with someone both parties are responsible for the debt, so 100% of the balance shows up on both their credit reports.
There may be some broad trends that can be gathered from this? If anybody has any idea what they are I'd be interested in hearing. Right now I can't think of any
Article says specifically ‘$59,580’ as the average amount.
Am confused where the remaining amount is coming in from OP for the remainder of folks.
Including mortgages? That’s not bad at all.
There is no way this figure includes mortgages....
I'm curious if it includes the house as an asset. Does a $300,000 house with a $200,000 mortgage count as $100,000 or $200,000 of debt?
It's per year. My parents were like "50 grand in debt? That's nothing!" which shows you the true state of the American economy.
Seems low, honestly. If you have a mortgage, chances are your debt is much higher.