Canadians Are Feeling the Debt Burn
Low rates set off a borrowing boom. But will it all end badly?
Kieran Maxwell flinches when she sees an 800 number light up on her phone. It’s a natural reaction after being hounded for a decade by debt collectors. “You go to bed thinking about it. You wake up thinking about it,” Maxwell says. “I wouldn’t even want to answer the phone because I didn’t want to know who was asking for what.”
The 43-year-old single mother is about C$100,000 ($75,000) in debt, mainly from student loans to fund nursing and kinesiology degrees at Toronto’s York University. The loans might have been manageable if she hadn’t had to turn to credit cards to help cover other expenses: tutoring for her 14-year-old son; assessment tests for him; and private school to help him overcome learning difficulties. The breaking point came in 2017, when she realized she couldn’t make even the minimum payments on her credit cards.