Millions of people are behind on their credit-card and auto-loan payments, the latest sign of the coronavirus pandemic’s financial devastation, the Wall Street Journal reported. Lenders in April had nearly 15 million credit cards in “financial hardship” programs, such as deferral programs that let borrowers temporarily stop making payments, according to estimates by credit-reporting firm TransUnion. That accounts for about 3 percent of the credit-card accounts the company tracks, TransUnion said yesterday. Nearly three million auto loans were in these hardship programs, accounting for about 3.5 percent of those tracked. The numbers have surged from a year ago, when 0.03 percent of credit cards and about 0.5 percent of auto loans were in financial-hardship programs. The spike in unemployment caused by the coronavirus has strained people’s ability to make their monthly debt payments. To make matters worse, Americans were tapping credit cards and auto loans at record levels even before the pandemic to deal with rising costs and stagnant incomes.
