Hands up if you’ve ever overspent? I see you. I’ve been there before, and I do not doubt that it will happen again.

Living somewhat beyond your means by using credit cards, loans or Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) products is increasingly normal these days. So normal, in fact, that adults in their twenties and thirties today don’t seem to fear consumer debt the way that older generations did.

Indeed, several people have recently told me that they do not think of their debt, typically totalling thousands of pounds, as “real money”.

Jenny (not her real name) is one of them. Until recently, Jenny, 33, worked in tech, earning around £120,000 a year. She has just taken a 50 per cent pay cut to work in the charity sector because she “wants to do some good in the world”.

Jenny regularly uses BNPL for “expensive but non-serious things like flights or, recently, a sofa” and has “£10,000, OK, more like £11,000 on a credit card.” She now pays around £180 in interest on her credit card each month. “Sometimes I see the interest and I think ‘that’s crazy!’,” she adds. “Like, why do I think that’s OK?”

For Jenny, credit “just felt easy”. She could access it via her mobile banking app, and borrowing money to buy expensive things meant she wasn’t dipping into her savings. She’s far from alone.

In 2024, 61 per cent of Brits used credit cards, according to UK Finance. Amongst younger generations, the use of BNPL has been rising, with 44........

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