This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

It happens all the time.

The lovely couple with a nice house, beautiful family and gainful careers

unexpectedly find themselves drowning in tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt.

Debt grew by $93 billion at the end of 2024, and half of that increase came from new credit card debt. Debt grew by $93 billion at the end of 2024, and half of that increase came from new

credit card debt.

Now, New York Federal Reserve Reserve.

Or maybe it's the fresh college graduate, who rather than looking forward to a bright

future and a sense of freedom, finds himself trying to pay back a series of compounding loans,

only to watch the balance grow year after year, after year.

One out of every four Americans with student loans is delinquent.

That's nearly triple the pre-pandemic delinquency rate scene.

And then there's the retiree who thought she had enough saved until one medical emergency wiped out her nest egg.

And so you just start chipping away at your savings, chipping away at everything you have, and ultimately chipping away at retirement.

It's easy to believe this would never happen to me.

I would be smarter,

savier, better at saving.

And yet, hundreds of millions of people around the world

find themselves enmeshed in debt.

Some of this has to do with reckless spending, of course. But even when you do

everything right, budget, plan, and make reasonable choices, debt has a way of surprising you.

Today on the show, the unseen traps that influence our behavior when it comes to money, the entities that

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