One Third of Americans Have More Credit Debt Than Savings

According to a new survey by financial services company Bankrate, almost one third of Americans carry more credit card debt than they have stashed away in their emergency fund. Only 44 percent said that their savings were currently exceeding their credit card debt. 18 percent said that they had neither credit card debt nor savings.

The amount of people whose credit card debt exceeds their savings has never been so high in the past nine years in which the study was conducted. At the same time, the amount of people having more savings than debt has never been so low. Around a fifth of Americans were living paycheck-to-paycheck, not making any debt or saving up money, a slight increase.

Bankrate commented that the findings were an indicator that an increasing number of U.S. households were not financially healthy. The study also found that Millennials were even more likely to have more credit debt than emergency savings, with 35 percent saying that they were in that category.