SmartAsset or Dumb Luck

A Study Telling Us What We Already Knew

The financial wizards at SmartAsset—a name that sounds suspiciously like a choice insult—have put their considerable brainpower to work and discovered, to everyone’s great astonishment, that people in America owe money. Their latest report, Debt Disparities in the U.S.: Regional and Generational Trends, unveils such groundbreaking revelations as “homeownership is expensive” and “student loans exist.”

According to this study, Nevada is among the top ten states where households are so deep in debt they’ve tunneled straight past broke and into negative net worth. Also on this prestigious list of financial despair are Wyoming, West Virginia, Alabama, Oklahoma, Georgia, New York, Virginia, Michigan, and Tennessee. In other words, if you’ve ever thought, Gee, I’d like to live somewhere that guarantees an empty wallet, these states are prime real estate.

The Western U.S. allegedly leads the way in total debt, with the average household owing $104,200. According to SmartAsset, it is driven primarily by home debt, which averages a staggering $263,723. Whether that debt is due to overpriced real estate, a national addiction to quartz countertops, or simply folks borrowing against their homes to buy jet skis, remains unspecified.

The study also informs us that Generation X carries the most overall debt at an average of nearly $107,000, while Millennials are drowning in student loans, averaging $27,648. Wyoming, meanwhile, wins the grand prize for the highest percentage of households with zero or negative net worth at a cheerful 20 percent.

One can only assume that with all that wide-open land, they’re running out of places to bury their unpaid bills.

And for those feeling smug in states not mentioned, don’t get too comfortable—SmartAsset reports that, nationally, 11.1 percent of U.S. households have a net worth of zilch or less. In other words, more than one in ten Americans is financially upside-down, but thanks to this well-funded research, we now have official confirmation of what everyone’s bank account has been screaming for years.