In August, Kylie Scarletta filed for bankruptcy as a 22-year-old. She was $27,000 in debt across four credit cards.
Scarletta was 18 when she applied for her first credit card. She had heard you were supposed to treat your credit card like a debit card to build up a strong credit rating, so that was what she did. She regularly spent up to $700 on clothes from Amazon and Abercrombie, placing orders with the intention of returning most items. But she never did.
“I thought I was doing something good,” Scarletta said. “It was a snowball where I was opening another credit card and using it, opening another credit card, using it, and then I just became so neck deep in credit card payments.” It reached the point where 80 per cent of her paycheck from her receptionist job in Wisconsin had to go towards covering the minimum payments. “I couldn’t afford any of my other bills,” she said.
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In June, Scarletta posted a video on TikTok exposing her debt to her followers, who numbered more than 4,000. The video blew up, gaining more than ten million views in a week. At the time of writing, it has more than 14.5 million views — and it has resulted in a four-figure payday.
“After I posted the video, so many people were actually suggesting bankruptcy to me,” Scarletta said of her decision to file for Chapter 7, which allowed her to liquidate her assets and wipe away her debts as long as she agreed to a repayment plan supervised by a court. “It felt more normalised and not that big of a deal, people do it all the time.”
Scarletta is one of thousands of young people opening up about their debt problems on social media. On TikTok, the hashtag #debtfreejourney has more than 430,000 posts and #debtpayoff has 113,000 tagged videos. Debt in the US is a cultural conversation. Americans collectively hold $1.23 trillion in credit card debt, up 33 per cent over the past three years. Soon American debt will be growing faster than the US economy, according to a warning issued last month by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Gen Z carries the highest average personal debt, at $94,101, according to a recent poll by Talker Research for Newsweek. That is close to double that of millennials, at $59,181, and Gen X at $53,255. For a generation saddled with huge debt, being transparent about money woes on social media is trending. After all, as the adage goes, a problem shared is a problem halved.
Scarletta said she was nervous before her bankruptcy court date. “I’d never stood in front of a judge before,” she said. “There were actually about ten other people in the room with me.” According to the American Bankruptcy Institute, individual bankruptcy filings are on the rise. There were more than 533,000 cases in 2025, up 12 per cent on the previous year. The present share of credit card debt in delinquency is approaching levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis. Last month, President Trump called for a one-year, 10 per cent cap on credit card interest rates to protect Americans from being “ripped off”, although his proposal requires Congressional approval.
Scarletta said the other people at court also filing for bankruptcy had been much older than her. “I saw maybe one or two people around my age doing it,” she said. “I was basically the youngest one.” But if social media is to be believed, filing for bankruptcy in your twenties is a growing phenomenon, and TikTok searches under “file for bankruptcy yourself” have increased 600 per cent, according to one report.
Although Angelic Lagor, 28, never filed for bankruptcy, she has also found solace by sharing the story of her debt on social media. Last May, she had more than $102,000 of debt and started posting on TikTok under the account Quitting Debt to hold herself accountable. Now she has cut that amount nearly in half to $53,000 and her TikTok posts are encouragement for others.
Much of her debt is a mix of her husband’s student loans, a mortgage and car payments. “In my very early twenties, I started working extremely hard at debt payoff and saving up for my first home,” said Lagor, who works as a commercial property manager based in Chicago. “Now I’m on track, in the next ten months here, to pay off my first property.”
Kylie Scarletta is among the Gen Z spenders laying out their financial worries on social media
KAT SCHLEICHER
However, as the stigma about debt has started to ebb, experts say it is important not to diminish its seriousness. A bad credit score can make it harder, and in some cases impossible, to rent an apartment, get a car loan, qualify for a mortgage or land jobs that require credit checks. “Debt, especially student loan debt, has become so common that many people just assume it’s part of modern life,” Kaydee Ambas, a consumer finance professional at Earnest, a private student loan lender, said.
At the same time, Ambas acknowledged that debt transparency was rising “because the silence stopped working”, adding: “We haven’t been getting any clarity or relief by keeping it private. It just makes you more anxious. Might as well try something different.”
Debtors on TikTok and other platforms are finding that they can actually monetise their posts, which helps them to chip away at the mountain of bills.
TikTok’s creator rewards programme allows those with 10,000 followers and 100,000 video views over the past 30 days to cash in on viral videos that are more than a minute long. A million views typically earns a creator anywhere between $500 to $1,500, although this can vary wildly.
Amaiya Camillo is one content creator who discovered this modern-day upside to exposing her debt.
In January 2025, Camillo totalled up her debt from two credit cards, five federal student loans and five private Sallie Mae loans she used to pay her rent and bills during nursing school. At 26, she was more than $95,000 in debt. Once she realised that, she turned to TikTok.
“I’m turning 27 this year and I wish I could be thinking about starting a family or getting married or buying a house, but really I can’t think about anything but paying off this debt,” she said in a video shared with more than 400,000 followers.
She said: “I originally decided to post the video because I was feeling extremely overwhelmed. I think there’s a lot of power in social media, and there’s power in talking about the things that you’re going through.”
The reaction to her video was mixed. Those under the age of 40 were generally supportive, Camillo found, “but the older generation were tearing me apart in the comment section”.
Overall, however, the video was a boon. Thanks to TikTok’s reward programme, and the fact that the video got more than six million views, the social media company paid Camillo more than $3,000. That allowed her to pay off her credit card debt based solely on the video’s earnings — an accomplishment that she shared in another post.
A year later, Camillo has paid off both credit cards, bought a home with her partner and is chipping away at her student loans and car payments. She said: “I’m seeing the numbers go down rather than up.”
Scarletta, too, is building her savings from scratch after seeing her credit card balances wiped clean for the first time in years. “Paying upwards of $300 a month to a credit card company was my norm for two years,” she said. “It feels so nice to finally look and see that I am at zero.”
