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WEKU
WEKU
Alina Selyukh

REVEALED: Welcome to america now learn to be in debt | Vintage Vibes

Yazmin Lopez, here at home in Madison, Wis., first learned about credit scores from a personal finance book she picked up at Goodwill a few years after coming to the U.S. as a teenager. (Lianne Milton for NPR)

Every time you swipe your credit card for a coffee or a carton of eggs, you take out a tiny loan from your bank.

In many ways, the U.S. runs on borrowed money: a mortgage for a home, financial aid for college, a loan for a car, credit cards for nearly everything else. Over just two years, Americans went from pandemic-fueled, near-record savings to today's highest-ever levels of personal debt.

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