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I generally get four types of emails from readers:
- Fan mail (more compliments, please!);
- Hate mail (I guess noticing that President Trump did a thing and then sometimes writing down what that thing was makes me a libtard);
- Genuinely thoughtful comments (thank you, adults); and
- Inquiries from content strategists wanting me to write something about their company.

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With the fourth category, I typically write back and politely decline. Often what’s being pitched is a fine idea for an article, but I’ve just got too many other topics in mind for the foreseeable future.
But this time, the pitch worked. And the reason it worked is because it came with a titillating offer: the chance to interview a researcher who actually had a hand in putting together a detailed financial study.
The study comes from online loan marketplace LendingTree. LendingTree has a massive amount of data at its fingertips, and it regularly conducts research into various aspects of the consumer lending marketplace. This particular study is about the crushing debt load that Baby Boomers seem determined to carry with them into the grave.
I won’t elaborate too much on the nuanced findings of the study. LendingTree has an article on its website that goes into far more detail than I have space for in this column. Suffice it to say that those born between 1946 and 1964 owe a median total of $25,187 on non-mortgage debts. This is the average of median debt balances for individuals in this age group in the 100 largest U.S. cities. The biggest single source of debt for Baby Boomers is auto loans, followed closely by credit card balances, which each respectively account for just over a third of Boomers’ total non-mortgage debt. Most importantly, here’s my favorite line from LendingTree’s official summary: “This study reveals that baby boomers are carrying significant debt — more debt than millennials are carrying, by comparison.” I guess it’s not a contest.

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But the real treat for me about this study is that I got to talk to Kali McFadden, a Senior Research Analyst at LendingTree with a background in law and econ research. She took the lead in putting the report together.
McFadden and her team at LendingTree have access to anonymized credit reports, and they looked at about 100,000 of them from January 2019 to form a representative sample of the population in America’s major metro areas. After compiling information from thousands of individual reports, they compared their proprietary data against data available from credit reporting agencies Experian and TransUnion. This ensured the trends they identified were in line with credit reporting data from other sources and guarded against selection bias. At the end of the day, McFadden gained some useful insights into the spending habits of the Baby Boomer generation.
“People are spending too much money on their cars,” said McFadden when asked about the key takeaway of her study. “People are spending the equivalent of a college education repeatedly throughout their lives. But a car is a depreciating asset; education is typically an appreciating asset.”
According to Kelley Blue Book, the estimated average transaction price for light vehicles in the United States was $37,577 as of December 2018.
As someone who spends 40-plus hours per week looking at consumer debt, McFadden believes that although a lot of attention is devoted to student debt, more of the focus should be on people older than Millennials. She didn’t have all the answers on why student debt steals so much of the spotlight from the expansive levels of debt taken out to buy things much less valuable than an education. But she was willing to speculate about why car loan debt doesn’t have the same emotional resonance as a source of panic compared to student loan debt: you get daily pleasure out of driving your car, so you feel like you’re getting something out of it.
For what it’s worth, McFadden herself is 44 years old, solidly within Generation X.
Thanks to Kali McFadden for sitting down with me for an interview, and thanks to LendingTree for setting it up and allowing one of their talented researchers to go on the record. And if you feel the open road calling this summer, maybe think twice before selling your firstborn to buy a shiny new set of wheels.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].