When Americans have fewer dollars, creditors need to position themselves at the top of the pile to get paid each month. This is called payment hierarchy, and traditionally mortgage creditors have been at the top and unsecured creditors, and perhaps ubiquitous credit card creditors, near the bottom. At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau conference on the anniversary of the CARD Act, I learned that the payment hierarchy has been upended. In 2010, consumers are paying their credit cards ahead of their mortgages. (Click on CFPB conference link above, then click on "Credit Card Profitability" by Credit Suisse and go to slide 7 to see the full data). Two key explanations for this change: 1) people may be more willing to risk losing their home when its value is plummeting and they are not certain they can hang onto it, and 2) credit card companies reduced the amount of credit lines and closed old accounts, making people more concerned about "preserving" their good standing with their credit card company. Another way to think about this is that homes used to be families' piggy banks, tapped when it is time to send a child off to college or do a home renovation. With no equity, Americans need to rely more on the credit card as their safety net. Unemployment rates are high, the economy remains fragile, medical costs are uncertain. In this economy, it seems entirely rational and reasonable to me for families to highly prize access to unsecured credit from cards.
When there are too many unsecured creditors to go around, however, how do consumers chose who gets their scarce dollars? A new research paper, Winning the Battle but Losing the War: The Psychology of Debt Management, uses a series of experiments to explore this question. The authors find that consumers focus on making payments that reduce the number of open accounts, which the researchers call "debt account aversion," rather than solely on paying off the debt with the highest cost interest rate. The latter would ultimately reduce the total cost of credit, an approach that the researchers term "perfectly rational." In a series of stylized debt games played by students, not even one student consistently repaid in multiple rounds of the game all of their available cash to the open debt account with the highest interest rate. The pattern of debt account aversion–using some cash to pay off small accounts–held across a variety of conditions, although the researchers find some interventions that reduce the practice, such as prominently highlighting the amount of interest accumulated on each debt between rounds. But is debt account aversion really a "mistake"? Should policymakers be discouraging this behavioral trait?