America's Riskiest Borrowers Are Nursing a Financial Hangover

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  Here's your money briefing from Monday, January 6th.

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  I'm JR Whalen for the Wall Street Journal.

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  Stimulus checks along with suspended mortgage and student loan payments during the pandemic allowed many Americans to build up their savings accounts and their credit scores.

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  But since then, reality has set back in.

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  As those pandemic aids went away,

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  a lot of people started feeling

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  like they weren't able to save as much and they also weren't able to keep up with their debts.

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  So, especially for people who took on extra loans in 2021, when they were doing better financially,

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  that really came back to bite them in the butt

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  because they were not able to keep up with those new debts that they had taken on.

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  We'll talk to Wall Street Journal reporter Catherine Hamilton after the break.

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  American's credit scores that skyrocketed during the pandemic are coming back to Earth.

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  Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Catherine Hamilton joins me.

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  Catherine, how have average credit scores trended over the past couple of years?

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  There was a really big jump that we saw during the first three years of the pandemic and more recently that jump in credit score has leveled off.

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  So, the average FICO score, which is a traditional credit score, measure jumped from 708 in 2020 to 718 in 2023.

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  So, that was a record high 10 point increase.

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  And then this year, it actually ticked down one point, which is the first time it's done that in more than a decade.

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  But that was a big jump in 2021.

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  Why did it go up so much?

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