Austin forbearance in July 2021

[Steve R.]

Austin, Texas, ranks No. 1 for having the most people in financial distress. 75% homeowners in austin (https://wallethub.com/edu/cities-financial-distress/79863). does that mean in march-july 2021 Austin will face the most forbearance? (Those relief options allow borrowers to hit pause on their loans for a total of 360 days (two separate 180-day terms) that started in March 2020.)

[Jacob Pereira]

@Steve R., it's actually the 1-year change in number of people in distress that they're talking about, not the total number or per-capita number. One of my big problems with a lot of Wallethub's mass list business model is that they take some seemingly correlated (and often very poor) data and throw it together to publish a list, without really understanding the implications. 

Without knowing the details of this particular data, it seems to me that it's logical that in a town with a large service sector that was faring incredibly well last year and was hit hard by the pandemic that there would be a big increase, although my suspicion is it's from a low base, and mostly of those people who already didn't have a lot of financial assets. I think there's a lot more information needed to pull any kind of actionable conclusions from what was offered here.