Debt meets middle-class life

that stubborn monthly balance on the credit-card bill. For the average American family, it’s been growing steadily over the past few decades, lurking like a visitor who’s overstayed his welcome – and no one knows quite how to get rid of him. Somehow, people have drifted away from the thriftiness that emerged from the Great Depression and embraced life on borrowed time.

‘Americans really appear to have accepted debt almost as a way of life – they assume that’s just the way it goes,’ says John Putnam of the Million Dollar Round Table, an association of financial planners in Park Ridge, Ill. The group found in a recent survey that 30 percent of Americans believe they probably will always have debt.

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