My close friend maxed out five credit cards," Noh said. Noh Eun-woo, 25, a sales executive at a beauty store in the Edae shopping district in central Seoul, told Insider that she owes just over $12,000 on her credit card bills, which she considers a "low amount." Middle-class salaried workers are also falling victim to South Korea's debt crisis Sometimes, I still find myself relying on credit cards to pay for food and transportation costs," Kim told Insider. "When your paycheck doesn't cover your basic necessities, you don't have an option but to pay for things in advance using a credit card. One man told South Korean daily newspaper Kyunghyang Shinmun he was able to secure around $3,000 in credit within five minutes, with the promise of 0.01% interest rates for a limited time. It's possible for people to secure "jobless loans" now through app-based lenders. In 2019, it was estimated that the average South Korean had around four credit cards, with credit card use accounting for around 70% of private spending that year.Īdd to that the development of quick credit schemes, and you have a heady recipe for disaster. This snowballed over time, making it easy for today's millennials to get trigger-happy with their credit purchases. The country saw a credit boom in the wake of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis when the Korean government gave tax breaks for credit card payments to boost spending. It is easy, even for lower-income individuals, to get credit in South Korea. However, he relied even more on the credit cards during a long, eight-month stretch of unemployment last year and saw the little progress he made with repayments get wiped out. His payments vary based on how much he can squeeze out of his paycheck from his convenience store job, but he tries to make a payment of around $280 to $350 per month on each card. Kim, who managed to get approved for four credit cards when he was still employed and working two jobs in 2019, is now struggling to pay off the minimum sum on each card every month. Kim now tries to make ends meet by working part-time at a convenience store after being laid off from his restaurant and nightclub jobs during the pandemic.
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Having made little money from being a tattoo artist, Kim cycled through a series of odd jobs over the last five years, taking up employment as a bouncer at a nightclub in the college town of Hongdae, later working extra shifts as a waiter in a barbecue joint in Sinchon. "Though if I'm being brutally honest, the game masters might think my life probably isn't even worth that much." "If someone told me that right now, you could gamble your life to have your debt cleared and become a billionaire, I'd do it without hesitation," Kim said. Netflix 's hit drama series "Squid Game" as a grim reflection of their own experiences.
Stuck in dead-end jobs, with piling debt and no real means of buying a home, it's no wonder that these South Korean millennials think of Kim's experiences reflect the unforgiving realities of life for some young South Koreans. That's quite a lot, considering the Korean gross national income (GNI) per capita was just US$33,790 in 2019, according to the World Bank. In 2021, the total amount of debt that South Koreans ran up - more than $1.5 trillion - rivaled the country's GDP of $1.63 trillion.Ī 2018 survey from the Korean think tank Seoul Institute found that Koreans owe around $44,000 of debt per household. "I'm very aware of how much financial trouble I'm in right now, but there's very little I can do to change my situation." "I consider myself lucky that I managed to keep my debt under $50,000," Kim said, showing Insider his latest bank statements.