ACS Data Users Group

Hello,

I recently got a question about data that shows income to debt ratio. More specifically, for the bottom 25%. Ideally at the city level. The Census Bureau provides some interesting estimates on debt, type of debt by some selected household characteristics but for the whole country (https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2019/demo/wealth/wealth-asset-ownership.html).

Has anyone come across a reliable source that provides a similar breakdown by income levels for smaller geos?

Thanks in advance!

Gustavo.

You won't find official data at levels smaller than country. These tables are based on SIPP (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/sipp.html), which has been going on and off. You can probably find something related in the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) conducted by the Federal Reserve (https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm). But it would also cover the country as a whole.

This is not to say that the data like that does not exist. This is exactly the data that credit bureaus have and operate with. I doubt you can buy it from them as an individual (and if you could, it would be fairly costly, on the scale of 10c per person -- totaling a few million research dollars for the country).

Stas summed it up really well. The only local (county level) source I know of is a recent analysis done by the Urban Institute using credit bureau data: https://apps.urban.org/features/debt-interactive-map/ It looks at medical, auto, and student debt and provides county level estimates overall and, where possible, for White communities and communities of color. It's not quite what you are looking for, but the data are downloadable and well-documented.

Urban's work is impressive.

Thank you both!

Stas Kolenikov, this reminds me how expensive it was (and probably still is) to purchase sales and foreclosure data with credit history back during the housing bust in 2008. I also noticed the SIPP tables were not consistently produced.

Rebecca Tippett, this is a great resource, thanks for sharing it. Perhaps can be used as a proxy measure to my initial request and help frame/contextualize how debt can play out differently between population groups.

Thank you again!