The middle class is staying afloat on a sea of debt. Four trillion dollars’ worth of debt, to be precise—and that’s all consumer debt, without counting mortgages. What used to be staples for the middle class—car loans, college educations, being able to afford health care—are increasingly turning into anchors attached to that float, and it’s only a matter of time before they drag everyone on it down.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, student debt all by itself totals some $1.5 trillion dollars.

That’s more than any other type of consumer debt except mortgages. Auto debt — up nearly 40 percent, considering inflation, from where it was a decade ago — is hovering at $1.3 trillion, not surprising if you consider that the average new car loan has risen 11 percent over the last 10 years to $32,187.

Although mortgage debt is lower than where it was after the financial crisis hit, that too is on its way back up.

And all you have to do to see health care debt’s place in this very un-pretty picture is scan the headlines just about any day of the week.

Income has pretty much stagnated for the last 20 years, despite posting anemic increases just lately in a tightening (although still disappointing) employment market. So there’s a big gap between what people are earning and what they’re having to spend just to run in place economically—and that gap is steadily widening.

What’s filling it? Loans. And even if people are optimistic enough to think they’ll be able to pay it all back at some point, should the economy take a nosedive, the jobs they’re counting on to pay for everything will follow—and then where will they be? Then the markets will see missed payments, writeoffs, foreclosures, repossessions… and the recent Fed rate cut might not be enough to counteract that, although according to the report it’s aimed at heading off a slowdown that could kill jobs.

Household income is just above the 1999 level, although if you go back 30 years instead of 20 it’s gained 14 percent, accounting for inflation.

But that’s not enough—not when housing prices are up 290 percent in 30 years, college tuition is up 311 percent and average per capita health expenses are up 51 percent over just the last 17 years.

Lots of things are going by the wayside as people struggle to stay in the middle class.

Going out to dinner once in a while, for instance, and other small expenditures that used to be commonplace now seem more like little luxuries when stacked up against an average of $8,390 in credit card debt (in addition to those other things like mortgages and student loans) in the first quarter of 2019. WalletHub.com analysis of Federal Reserve data indicates that that’s up 9 percent from 2015, when adjusted for inflation.

A third of all the gains in income and/or assets went to the top one percent, which helps to explain why the middle class is having such a tough time.

Says the report, “The median net worth of households in the middle 20 percent of income rose 4 percent in inflation-adjusted terms to $81,900 between 1989 and 2016, the latest available data. For households in the top 20 percent, median net worth more than doubled to $811,860. And for the top 1 percent, the increase was 178 percent to $11,206,000.”

Another way this is affecting the middle class is via 401(k) loans to keep up with bills or extraordinary expenses.

A wider slice of the population may not be tuned in to that, but those who are probably do not realize the potential negative consequences if they fail to pay such loans back.

Although they’re probably far more focused on the high points of a 401(k) loan (no credit check, not a whole lot of paperwork, a lower interest rate than on a conventional loan, according to a MarketWatch report), they’re almost undoubtedly less cognizant of its low points: a limited time—usually around five years—to pay back the money, less time to pay it back if the job goes away, and the cost to one’s eventual retirement because of lost opportunity for funds to grow uninterrupted—they might not even have considered what happens if they don’t pay it back.

Tax penalties for early withdrawal and taxes on the distribution—at ordinary tax rates instead of what could be lower rates during retirement—and considerably less money at retirement than they’d planned to have available are just some of the nasty surprises waiting for borrowers from a retirement plan if the “float” catches up with them and they sink.

Tough times for the middle class lurk under the surface, and consumers need to beware of those economic anchors lest they be sucked down to the bottom.

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