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The CFPB released results from its Making Ends Meet Survey – conducted in May 2019 – which revealed that more than 40 percent of U.S. consumers had a difficult time paying a bill or expense in the last year. The bureau is currently conducting a follow-up survey to determine how the coronavirus pandemic has impacted respondents' financial stability.

When asked what they did when they had difficulty paying a bill or expense, half of respondents said they borrowed, including formal borrowing such as with a credit card or home equity loan, informal borrowing from friends and family, and borrowing from an alternative financial service provider using an auto-title loan, through a pawn shop, or a payday loan.

The CFPB last week issued its final rule related to payday lending, which included the rescission of mandatory underwriting requirements – including ability-to-repay (ATR) provisions – from the 2017 payday lending rule. NAFCU supported removing these requirements, but its call for an expansion of the safe harbor for credit unions' payday alternative loans (PALs) was not included in the final rule.

NAFCU will continue to tout the benefits of credit unions' PALs loans to help consumers in need of safe, affordable short-term, small-dollar loans and urge the bureau to expand its payday lending safe harbor.

Other key findings from the survey included:

• people with lower incomes and lower credit scores were much more likely to report having difficulties, but 18 percent of respondents with incomes over $100,000 reported having difficulty paying a bill or expense in the previous year;
• households that suffered a period of unemployment, reduced work hours, or an inability to work because of illness were nearly twice as likely to report having difficulty paying a bill or expense than households that had not experienced these events; and
• if respondents could point to an event that caused them difficulty, 48 percent listed medical expenses and 33 percent listed job loss or other loss of income.

Read the full survey results here. The bureau in 2017 released results from a similar survey, which found 43 percent of adults struggled to pay bills and one-third experienced a financial hardship in the past year.