Bradford Stroh

BREAKING: 1 in 5 American families are behind on loan payments, the highest since 2010, per the Federal Reserve. That’s up from about 12% in the Fed’s previous survey. Families more than two months behind rose to over 8%, from 5% in 2022. 8.6% of families now spend more than 40% of their income on debt payments, the highest since 2013.

🦔The poorest American families are giving up their cars. Among the bottom fifth by income, 59.4% owned a vehicle in 2025, down from 66.4% just three years earlier, according to the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances. The Fed says that’s the lowest share for that group in 20 years. Across all families, 19.6% fell behind on some kind of loan last year (a car note, credit card, mortgage or student loan), up from 12.2% in 2022. My Take Car debt overall shows only a slow rise in bad loans, so most of the pain falls on people at the bottom. Experian puts the average used-car loan at about $27,850, and a subprime borrower paying 19.1% instead of a prime borrower’s 8.8% pays more than double the interest for the same car. At that end, plenty of families lose the car to repossession or never replace one that dies. The new federal tax deduction for car loan interest skips these borrowers completely. It only covers new, US-assembled vehicles, so someone paying 19% on a used sedan gets nothing while a new-truck buyer can deduct up to $10,000 a year in interest. Losing a car hurts more than a bad credit score, because for most of the country it’s how you get to work. Families who stop driving don’t show up in lender data at all, and for a lot of lower-wage workers it means a harder commute or fewer jobs they can get to. Hedgie🤗