NYC Is The Most Financially Distressed City In The Nation
- January 29, 2019
Featuring Kelly Figueroa, Financial Wellness Expert
New York City is officially the most financially distressed metropolis in America, according to local debt counselors and financial analysts.
The city’s credit card delinquency rates and level of bad personal debt are the highest in the nation, which saw household debt and credit soar by $219 billion, or 1.6 percent, to $13.51 trillion, in the third quarter of 2018 — a record $837 billion more than its previous peak in 2008.
Facing an environment of mounting personal bankruptcies and financial meltdowns, unprecedented numbers of local residents are just one paycheck away from total monetary disaster.
The latest surge in toxic debt is blowing a huge hole in New Yorkers’ personal finances, these experts say. Forty percent of Americans recently said they could not cover a $400 emergency — and that proportion may be even higher in New York City, analysts say.
“It’s really bad right now,” Kelly Figueroa, a Financial Wellness Expert, in New York at GreenPath, a national nonprofit, told The Post.
“Like the rest of the nation, most New Yorkers are living paycheck to paycheck,” she added. “But in New York, the situation is even worse because of the city’s higher — and rising — cost of living.”
From low-income to highly paid consumers, Kelly says, local clients’ unsecured distressed household debt ranges from an average of $20,000 per individual to as high as $100,000.
Credit card debt troubles, in particular, have jumped in New York City, from 30 percent of client caseloads at GreenPath to 40 percent in the past few years, even as housing and mortgage stress cases stemming from the financial crisis have ebbed.
Continue here to read the entire New York Post article.
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