For more than half a million Britons, January provides the mother of financial hangovers. The darkness of the days is compounded by the need to trawl the internet to find a new home for credit card debts swollen by the Christmas spending orgy.

For some it is an annual ritual that keeps their share of a £192bn unsecured consumer credit mountain ticking over and out of sight. But last week, alarm bells started ringing as official figures showed consumers racking up debt at a rate not seen since the spending frenzy that preceded the 2008 financial crisis.

“Every month is stressful to be honest but January, being a new year and time of reflection, was tough and you’d beat yourself up,” says Alexis Hall, a 48-year-old PR executive and recovering shopaholic who wrote a book about getting in – and out of – £32,000 of debt during the years of lax lending before the credit crunch hit. “There was no limit to the amount of credit I was getting: I had six or seven cards at the time as well as a loan on top. No one was turning me away and I was constantly getting offers through the post and by email.”

The Bank of England figures made it look like UK consumers were partying like it was 2007 as credit card borrowing reached a record £66.7bn in the year to November. The Bank said that consumer credit, which means all credit cards and car loans, had risen at its fastest rate in 11 years, up 10.8% over the last 12 months period to reach £192bn. To put that in context, when Lehman Brothers imploded in September 2008 and the banking crash triggered a worldwide recession, the figure peaked at £208bn. The average household in the UK now owes a record £12,887, before mortgages are taken into account, according to the TUC.

So what does this mean for consumers and where is the country heading?

“The fact credit is growing may not mean armageddon is coming,” says Peter Tutton, head of policy at debt charity StepChange, who expects borrowing to revisit the 2008 peak within a “matter of months”. “But past experience shows that when credit grows quickly, the result can be people standing on a financial cliff edge. A lot of households using credit are ‘just about managing’ (the Jams), then something happens that turns them into ‘no longer managing’.”

So far, so 2008. But are we really falling back into old ways? Loading spending on to the never-never thanks to the welter of 0% credit card deals. Some of the controversial lending that took place before the banking crisis has disappeared. You can’t take out a 125% mortgage any more or constantly remortgage to go on holiday or buy a new car. But new forms of lending have taken hold. PCP – personal contract purchase – hire purchase deals, for example, now make up more than three-quarters of the finance deals provided on new car purchases, according to the Finance and Leasing Association.

Last year more than 588,000 Britons shuffled their credit card balances in January, with a collective debt of £1.4bn finding a new home during the month, according to the British Bankers’ Association (BBA). A similar number are expected to go through the process this year.

After the lean years of 2008 and 2009, choice is once again a feature of the market, with 122 balance transfer deals for consumers to scrutinise, according to Moneyfacts.co.uk. That compares with 133 in January 2007, before the financial storm hit. The key battleground is now the length of deal, which can be measured in years rather than months: today the average balance-transfer deal lasts 659 days versus just 295 days in January 2009, when the country was mired in recession. Many Britons rely on being able to shuffle debt from one company to another, with industry data showing 43% of credit card balances are being managed on an interest-free basis, the highest level ever.

While on the surface it looks like great news for consumers that they can borrow for free for so long, the industry cynically relies on a portion of its customers failing to keep up with minimum repayments. One missed repayment on a balance-transfer deal can force a borrower on to the standard interest rate, which is typically 18-20%.

“Zero per cent offers are extremely popular,” says Andrew Hagger, of financial website MoneyComms. “The problem is nobody knows how many of the people on 0% are using them because they are savvy with their money or because they are struggling financially and just treading water.”

The Bank indicated that it was not at present concerned about the scale of consumer debt. “Interest rates are still very low, and are expected to remain so for the foreseeable future, so there are fewer concerns on debt servicing than there were in the past,” said Andy Haldane, the Bank’s chief economist, last week.

The last recession provided a rude awakening for a generation that had become reliant on cheap credit to fund their lifestyles. As the financial markets seized up, banks and credit card companies pulled the rug out from under millions of their customers, in some cases knocking a zero off their card limit overnight. In 2007,Barclaycard reduced the credit limits of 1 million of its 12 million customers while the following year Egg infamously withdrew credit cards from 161,000 customers suddenly deemed “high risk”.

There are now 31.3m cards in circulation in the UK. Photograph: Martin Meissner/AP

While the current credit boom may be sustainable, the extra borrowing could prove harder to manage this year if the economy stumbles. The vote for Brexit did not make consumers worse off in 2016 as robust high-street spending in the runup to Christmas proves, but there is a storm brewing. The pound’s weakness since the Brexit vote makes imports more expensive, which will feed into higher prices at the shops, while prices at the pumps started the year at their highest since 2014.

The TUC research calculated that unsecured debt in 2016 is up £1,117 on the year before, the highest annual increase since at least 1997.

“These increases in household debt are a warning that families are struggling to get by on their pay alone,” said the TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady. “Employment may have risen, but wages are still worth less today than nine years ago. The government is relying on debt-fuelled consumer spending to support the economy, with investment and trade in the doldrums since the financial crisis.”

If you look under the surface of the credit card market, debt built up in the freewheeling days before the last recession never really went away. Last year, the UK’s financial watchdog attacked credit card providers for squeezing profits out of consumers who were stuck in the trap of making monthly minimum repayments for years rather than actually paying off their debts. The Financial Conduct Authority report found that one in nine card holders had balances that would take them more than a decade to repay, with 1.6m customers repeatedly making minimum repayments.

Hall, who eventually wrote a book, In the Red, about her now vanquished shopping addiction, is surprised that history could be about to repeat itself. “It’s a time I look back on with regret as it takes up so much of your time worrying about debt,” she says. “I feel the situation is different today. It’s more about people surviving than using their credit card to buy fripperies.” Things are looking up for the recently promoted Scot, who has cleared her debts and recently started a new job and life in Berkshire.

There is already a gulf between the groups that can get their hands on a credit card in the first place. In 2015, there were nearly 31.3m credit cards in circulation, but while 75% of households with annual incomes of more than £50,000 had one, that figure fell to less 25% when the income was less than £10,000, according to the more recent market study by the UK Card Association (UKCA). The number of credit cards per customer is 1.94 with only 10% of cardholders carrying around more than four in their wallets.

The transition to a digital economy sees cards playing an increasingly central role in everyday life, a trend that makes it harder to keep track of your spending. Commuters are corralled into tapping instead of buying tickets and cash has now disappeared from many lunchtime transactions as contactless cards let you wave a seemingly magic wand to pay for your sandwiches and coffee. Finance gurus used to tell you to carry around cash to know the value of money, but a recent industry survey found that the average Briton now carries less than a fiver on them while one in 10 carries just a credit or debit card in their pocket.

StepChange reports a recent stream of clients coming for help after falling behind on essential household bills, which it believes is indicative of the general squeeze on household incomes. “There are millions of people in persistent credit card debt, with the market structured to allow this to happen because it is profitable [for the industry] for people to be stuck making minimum repayments,” says Tutton. “Lenders, regulators and the government need to ensure that the mistakes made in the lead-up to the financial crisis are not repeated and that there are better policies in place to protect those who fall into financial difficulty. Yes, the credit market is opening up again but have we learned the lessons of the last financial crisis?”