Holiday shoppers this year may have less room on their credit cards, and little enthusiasm for making that worse.
In July, 61% of U.S. consumers lived paycheck to paycheck, 2 percentage points more than a year ago, according to research from digital marketplace bank LendingClub. More consumers of all income brackets reported that situation, those researchers also found.
Credit cards have helped U.S. consumers get through a couple of years of rising prices, and buoy retail sales for several months. But that has also helped push their collective balance to a record $1.03 trillion dollars, according to the New York Federal Reverse Bank’s Q2 report on household debt.
