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WEKU
WEKU
Alina Selyukh

Welcome to America! Now learn to be in debt

United States America NPR CFPB Economy Goodwill
Yazmin Lopez, here at home in Madison, Wis., first learned about credit scores from a personal finance book she picked up at Goodwill a few years after coming to the U.S. as a teenager. (Lianne Milton for NPR)

Every time you swipe your credit card for a coffee or a carton of eggs, you take out a tiny loan from your bank.

In many ways, the U.S. runs on borrowed money: a mortgage for a home, financial aid for college, a loan for a car, credit cards for nearly everything else. Over just two years, Americans went from pandemic-fueled, near-record savings to today's highest-ever levels of personal debt.

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