Pay Off Your Debt

I hope(know) I am preaching to the choir. The more I read about the economy right now, I am realizing how much debt people have in the U.S. As of the 3rd quarter of 2025, the average household debt is $105,056. Mortgages dominate the household debt. Average credit card debt is next at $ 6523. Then there are car loans which many people have defaulted on. These cars are being repossessed as fast as they can find them.

People are using their credit cards to buy food and then don’t pay the bill. They just charge and charge and charge. A lot of snap recipients were complaining about not getting their EBT cards refilled but they were going to the hair salon, nail salon and dining out. Does this make any sense to you? It certainly doesn’t to me.

All you have to do is spend 20 minutes on You Tube or Tic Toc and you will see that people are just wasting money, not paying their debts, and saying they don’t care. You can also see that people could not pay their rent and got evicted or didn’t pay their mortgage and lost their homes. They are living in their cars. Sadly, some of them are seniors who didn’t save for retirement and thought they could live on Social Security alone. Social Security was never meant to be 100% of your income in retirement. Then there are those who did save for retirement but squandered their money on things they can’t even remember now. Within a few years, they were relying on SS.

There have always been people who have spent their income faster than they brought it home. They live paycheck to paycheck. They live on borrowed money. They take out home equity loans on their homes to pay off their credit card debt and then charge the cards back up. They keep buying new cars every couple of years and are upside down on the loan of the car they trade in. They just keep digging the hole bigger and bigger. They have no emergency funds. No money in savings. And they wonder why they are always broke.

But I honestly don’t think it has ever been as bad as it is now with the exception of interest rates. Back in the 1970’s in the Carter administration, it got so bad that mortgages had interest rates from 12.5% to 16% by the end of the decade. One of my best friends had a mortgage rate of 16%. UGH! Inflation was so bad that it took a decade for those rates to come down but of course, they never came back down to what they were.

Food was expensive and gasoline prices skyrocketed. There were shortages of gas and I used to drive around with my baby in the car to try to fill up the car for Hubby. He carpooled with another person so on the days the other one drove, I would look to fill up the car for Hubby. When you found a gas station that actually had some gasoline, you could wait in line for hours. Many times I would just get 2-3 cars from the pumps and the station would run out of gas. It was so very frustrating. But we all survived.

That was the first time I purchased TVP ground beef because the price was a lot lower than ground beef. Let me tell you, it tasted terrible and you had to doctor it with a sauce to make it tolerable. It probably was worse than the plant based beef today. I had to cut where I could. In those days we had 2 kids and it was a struggle to feed them healthy food on a tight budget. But we made it work. I washed diapers and hung them to dry so that I didn’t have to waste money on Pampers which were $.99 for a box of 12 if I remember correctly. That freed up money to buy more food.

You can blame what you are going through now on the Clinton Administration. They agreed to a Global Economy. You are seeing now in real time how that has worked out. It was the worst thing that has ever happened. Taking manufacturing out of the hands of America and handing it over to China and other countries was a very bad idea. We are paying for that now.

President Trump can try to get prices down but I don’t know how with a Global Economy. He is trying to bring manufacturers back to our country but that will be a long process. Fed Chairman Powell is bucking him every step of the way also. Perhaps when he leaves next year, things will get better. I know no one wants to hear it but there really isn’t much that Trump can do except give out tariff checks to the people. But then again, if the Supreme Court says he can’t charge other countries tariffs, he will have to pay it all back. It actually looks like they are leaning that way. There will be no money for rebate checks. So don’t count on it. I don’t understand why other countries can charge us tariffs but we can’t charge them. It doesn’t make sense to me and I graduated from college with an accounting degree.

Now President Trump could go after the large grocery stores that I believe are gouging us. Of course that would be hard to prove. The prices just keep going up and up. I know it is supply and demand but I am seeing a lot of people who are refusing to buy anything except necessary food. The demand has to be down the past few months but the prices sure aren’t. I also believe that this Christmas buying season will be a dud. People have no money and their credit cards are maxed out. I know that I have bought less and less. If it isn’t a necessity, it doesn’t get purchased.

There is something really wrong when the top 10% of earners in this country make more money combined than the other 90%.

The biggest thing you can do right now is what I have always said. Pay off your debt if you have any. With your debt paid off you will be in a better position to ride out this storm that is coming. I just know that there are some people who come here who need to hear this.

That said I think things are just going to keep going up in price. It is my belief that the radical leftist elitists don’t want us to have any money. They want the power to control us. Hence, we will see prices continue to rise on food and anything else we need. You have seen your utility bills rise a lot whether it be gas and electric or water. Our garbage prices have gone up. Our car and homeowner’s insurances have taken a steep increase. I know my property taxes have increased immensely over the past 4 years. They are becoming more and more unaffordable. Our telephone, cable TV, and internet package has gone up about $50. just in the past couple of years. Our private health insurance has gone up as a result of Obamacare. Everything is on the rise!

So pay off that debt and start building your savings. You are going to need that money sooner rather than later. Save money every way you can!

What really scares me is that I believe and have for a long time that we will turn into Venezuela. They were one of the richest countries in the world and now they are one of the poorest. First it was inflation then they were on a roller coaster all the way up to hyper inflation. Now people can’t afford to eat. The people are fed up but this is what happens when a country turns Communist. Beware people it is starting here with the latest election of Mamdani as Mayor of NYC and now another communist Mayor in Seattle.

I hope I am wrong but after living almost 80 years, I have seen a lot and learned a lot and I don’t like what I see at all.