The restart of student loan payments may already be straining borrowers. The Census Bureau found that 41.2% of adults reported difficulties paying household expenses in its latest household pulse survey that polled respondents from Sept. 20 to Oct. 2, YahooFinance.com reported. That was up from 37.3% from the previous two-week polling period between Aug. 23 to Sept. 4 and the highest share on record since the survey first began asking that question in August 2020. Specifically, "the difficulties with paying household expenses were concentrated among households with a college degree, making between $50,000 and $150,000, suggesting that restarting student loan payments is the source of increased financial stress for consumers," Torsten Slok, chief economist of Apollo Global Management, wrote this week. That data provides the earliest indications of the kind of impact those repayments — which started this month for nearly 27 million borrowers — could have on both households and the economy as a whole after the 43-month pause helped boost stability and allowed many borrowers to make financial strides.
