What our Reddit debt-planning research taught us while building MyDebtLens
I know this isn’t a technical update, but I thought it might be of personal interest to some here.
We’ve just published some original research behind MyDebtLens looking at when people start seeking help with debt and, more importantly, what they’re actually trying to decide.
We started with a random sample of 2000 r/personalfinance submissions. An estimated 15.3%, roughly 1 in 6 or 7, concerned planning or managing existing debt. That describes the Reddit sample, not Americans or households generally.
We also reviewed separate cohorts from r/personalfinance, r/Debt and r/debtfree.
What I found more interesting than the headline number was the range of decisions people were working through: whether to use savings, consolidate or refinance, which debt to pay first, how to deal with cash-flow pressure, what to do with a windfall, and how to adjust when circumstances change.
It reinforced one of the ideas behind MyDebtLens: debt payoff planning makes more sense when debts are considered alongside the rest of someone’s monthly financial life, rather than as balances and interest rates in isolation.
The full research, methodology and limitations are now published on MyDebtLens, but since external links aren’t available on my SaaS Hive plan, I thought I’d share the main takeaway here.
List of people looking for work
A lot of people are looking for work and LinkedIn is hell. Here's a list of people looking for work
Comments (4)
Thanks for sharing, Ayman. The list of things people can't decide is more useful than the big percentage. And good call saying this is just Reddit rather than making it sound like it's everyone.
Thanks, Olga. That was one of the things that stood out to me too. The 15.3% gave us a useful starting point, but the decisions people were actually trying to make turned out to be much more interesting. I also wanted to be careful not to make the Reddit sample carry more weight than it should.
This is a really interesting way to validate the problem space. I especially like that you’re careful not to overgeneralize the Reddit sample, while still using it to uncover the actual decisions people struggle with. The point about debt planning needing to account for someone’s broader monthly financial situation—not just balances and APRs—makes a lot of sense. I’d be curious to see which decision type showed up most often across the different subreddits.
Thanks, Jinny. Interestingly, there wasn’t one decision type that dominated all three communities.
In r/personalfinance, savings trade-offs were highest at 23.1%, just ahead of consolidation/refinancing at 22.2%. In r/Debt, collections/legal issues dominated at 49.1%. In r/debtfree, the broad “Other” bucket was largest, while consolidation/refinancing was the biggest named category at 14.3%.
That variation between communities was actually one of the more interesting parts of the review. I included the full breakdown and charts in the article on MyDebtLens if you’re curious to see how the three communities compared.
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