Sixty-eight percent of U.S. adults with debt are not confident they’ll ever be able to pay it off, according to a new creditcards.com report.
This includes 30 percent who say they’ll never be debt-free -- and another 38 percent who don’t know when (or if) they’ll achieve the milestone.
However, there some's hope: 32 percent give an estimated time frame to get there, indicating an average of roughly nine years. Click here for more information:
"Generally, the older someone is with debt, the less confident they are about their ability to pay it off," according to creditcards.com.
Specifically, 83 percent of the Silent Generation (72 and older), 70 percent of Baby Boomers (53-71), 68 percent of Gen X (37-52) and 65 percent of Millennials (18-36) with existing debt either don’t know when they’ll be able to pay it off or think they never will.
The biggest culprit is credit card debt.
Fully 35 percent of adults with credit card debt think they have dug themselves too deep a hole to ever climb out of. Another 33 percent with credit card debt don’t know when they’ll be debt-free.
“With credit card debt currently at near record levels, it’s frightening that so many Americans do not have a plan to get out of the red,” said creditcards.com senior industry analyst, Matt Schulz. “Credit cards should only be used to pay for things that you can already afford or, at worst, for things that you have a strategy in place to finance.”
The news isn’t entirely ominous, however. For example, 27 percent of Americans indicate they have no personal debt, whatsoever.