And not all debt behaves the same way

Debt gets talked about as one moral substance, and it is not one thing.

A mortgage on a house you live in, a student loan repaid as a share of income, a car on finance, a credit card at a high rate, an overdraft that never clears, a payday loan, money owed to a family member, and money owed to somebody who is not a regulated lender at all. Those behave completely differently, and they sit on a person differently.

The research points the same way. Short term, high cost, unsecured borrowing carries the heaviest psychological load, and it does so out of proportion to the amounts involved.

Nothing in this course will tell you what to do about any of them. But knowing that they are different things is the beginning of stopping the internal sentence that says I am in debt, full stop, as though it were one condition you have.