driven by an increase in auto loans, credit card balances and most of all, mortgage borrowing for your home. dave ramsay is a personal financial expert, author of the book baby steps millionaires. good to see you again. welcome here. this is your deal. you hate debt! you ve been waging war against personal debt for decades! dave, they re not listening to you. well, it s tight out there. folks are really, really scared and what this is a sign of is they re reacting poorly to the situation because here s the thing. if you don t lower your lifestyle to be within your income, even given all the inflation, even all the pressures, i mean, i fill my truck up and about passed out yesterday. it s real out there. but if you don t lower your income, below your out go, it s not sustainable. you can t just add credit card debt every year and not address this situation as an individual person, you can t do that. i mean, you can t keep borrowing like you re in congress. bill: yeah.
hasn t stopped them yet, though! dave, as you mentioned, there s credit card balances has increased by $46 billion. that s the largest seen by the fed since 1999. americans open 233 million new credit card accounts, most since 2008. that means they re looking for money. with higher gas price, you mention gas filling up your own car, that people are putting these gas prices on their credit card which contributes to further debt. you agree with that? sure, that s a scary stat, if we think about it, bill. i mean, that s the largest credit card debt increase in 23 years! so that tells us that even in the crash of 2008 when real estate prices went down, stock market went down. it was a wilder time than now, even then people didn t turn to their credit cards like they are now. and so that it s a scary stat. and banks, you got folks to remember out there, these banks are not your friends.
and so yeah, it s pretty scary that even with good wage increases of 5%, that doesn t keep up with a 9.6% inflation rate. biden administration has some real issues. bill: one last thing here, dave. you take calls from viewers all over the country every day. what are they telling you about the inflation crunch hitting them? i think they re most concerned about the gas prices, honestly, we re hearing that pretty regularly. and the house prices. the good news is house prices are levelling off. we had a 29% increase in house prices in 2020 and then 2021 we had 28%. so some of these prices are associateed with mortgage debt going way up because house prices have gone way up. people are worried about the real estate stat on this. bill: good to get your
when someone says hey, i m here to help you at 28% or 18%, that is not your friend! bill: this stuns me. 61% of americans, talking about 157 million american adults, are living paycheck to paycheck. have you seen a number that high before? and dave, in all the advice that you give and people you talk to, how do we change that? year in and year out, we run into the number 75%, 78%, 76% of americans are living with too much month at the end of the money. dump a 9.6% inflation rate on top of that, that is a lot of it is your gas tank. but a lot of it is also the milk and the bread and the things that the gas prices and labor prices have driven up in the stores. and now, you ve got regular families that were probably doing ok. they maybe were not it s pushing them up over that.