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About quarter of B.C. respondents expressed regret over the amount of debt they’ve taken just this year alone and up to one-third said they regretted the debt they’ve built up over their lives.

“We are seeing more and more people accumulate more debt than they used to,” said Judy Scott, an insolvency trustee and senior vice-president at MNP. “Part of it is low interest rates, part of it just credit being very available to them.”

People are getting used to carrying higher levels of debt, Scott said, although they are also losing track of how much keeping up with payments on rising levels of debt can stretch expenses and put them at risk of going broke if interest rates rise.

The MNP survey, conducted by the research firm Ipsos, used an online panel of 1,500 respondents from across Canada, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points 19 times out of 20.

In the results, four in ten B.C. respondents said they are $200 or less per month away from not being able to pay all of their bills, though that finding is contradicted by declining rates of insolvency in the province.

Sweet-Speiss wound up paying up to $1,600 per month just to pay minimum balances on 13 credit cards, which stretched her ability to pay other bills and once forced her to use her bank’s grace option to skip a mortgage payment.

“It was very disheartening,” she said of that experience, because she knew that she had dug herself into the debt problem that she is now a year away from completely pulling herself out of thanks to a debt repayment plan arranged by the Credit Counselling Society.