Goodbye American Dream: The Average U.S. Household Is $137,063 In Debt, And 38.4% Of Millennials Live With Their Parents
By Michael Snyder
TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com
November 21st, 2017
Once upon a time the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world, but now the middle class is steadily being eroded. The middle class became a minority of the population for the first time ever in 2015, and just recently I wrote about a new survey that showed that 78 percent of all full-time workers in the United States live paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time. But most people still want to live the American Dream, and so they are going into tremendous amounts of debt in a desperate attempt to live that kind of a lifestyle.
According to the Federal Reserve, the average U.S. household is now $137,063 in debt, and that figure is more than double the median household income…
The average American household carries $137,063 in debt, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest numbers.
Yet the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the median household income was just $59,039 last year, suggesting that many Americans are living beyond their means.
As a nation, we are completely and utterly drowning in debt. U.S. consumers are now nearly 13 trillion dollars in debt overall, and many will literally spend the rest of their lives making debt payments.
Over the past couple of decades, the cost of living has grown much faster than paychecks have, and this has put a tremendous amount of financial stress on hard working families. We are told that we are in a “low inflation environment”, but that is simply not true at all…
Medical expenses have grown 57% since 2003, while food and housing costs climbed 36% and 32%, respectively. Those surging basic expenses could widen the inequality gap in America, as a quarter of Americans make less than $10 per hour.
Getting our healthcare costs under control is one of the biggest things that we need to do. As I talked about the other day, some families have seen their health insurance premiums more than triple since Obamacare became law.
As the cost of living continues to rise, an increasing number of young people are discovering that the only way that they can make ends meet is to live with their parents. As a result, the percentage of adults age 26 to age 34 that live at home continued to rise even after the last recession ended…
The share of older Millennials living with relatives is still rising, underscoring the lingering obstacles faced by Americans who entered the workforce during and after the Great Recession.
About 20% of adults age 26 to 34 are living with parents or other family members, a figure that has climbed steadily the past decade and is up from 17% in 2012, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Trulia, a real estate research firm.
A staggering 59.8 percent of younger Millennials (18 to 25) are now living with relatives, and overall an all-time record 38.4 percent of all Millennials are currently living with family.
If so many of our young people are unable to live the American Dream, what is the future of this nation going to look like?
The Rest…HERE
