Last fall, Brittney Reynolds was in a rough spot. The 28-year-old had broken up with her partner, left their shared apartment in San Francisco, and moved back in with her parents in Temecula, California, to regroup. More specifically, she needed to pay off her three maxed-out credit cards, which totaled more than $36,000. At first, Reynolds felt like an extreme outlier — she didn’t know of anyone with that much credit-card debt.
And while her balance was significantly higher than most people’s (the national average among cardholders with unpaid balances at the end of 2023 was $6,864, according to), her situation is more common than she thought — nearly half of those with credit-card debt said it would take them at least a year to pay off. After about eight months of drastically reducing her expenses, Reynolds has paid off all but $2,000 of her debt, which she plans to get rid of by Apri