Financial Expectations and Household Debt - ARCHIVED

This Economic Insights article quantifies the degree to which families who expect their financial situation to get better in the next two years have, all else equal, more debt than comparable families. The data are drawn from the Survey of Financial Security for 1999, 2005 and 2016. The term “family” is used to refer to family units and includes economic families and unattached individuals. Debt and income estimates are shown in 2016 dollars. The study shows that even after a large set of socioeconomic characteristics is controlled for, families who expect their financial situation to improve in the near future have significantly more debt and generally higher debt-to-income ratios than other families.