1 in 7 Gen Z credit card users are ‘maxed out’

Ariel Barnes plunged into a credit card debt spiral in college and a decade later she’s yet to escape.

Ariel Barnes plunged into a credit card debt spiral in college, and a decade later she’s yet to escape. Barnes has maxed out seven credit cards and is struggling to make minimum payments on $30,000 of credit card debt. “The interest is so high that it’s hard to get out of it,” Barnes, who is 28 years old and lives in Jackson, Mississippi, told CNN in a phone interview on Thursday. Barnes is hardly alone. Roughly one in seven (15.3%) Gen Z credit card borrowers have maxed out their credit cards, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (The NY Fed defined Gen Z as borrowers born between 1995 and 2011, though others mark the cut off as 1996 or 1997). By comparison, just 4.8% of Baby Boomer borrowers and 9.6% of Gen Xers have maxed out their credit cards, which can be a sign of a severely tight cash-flow problem.