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When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, Kelley Robinson was running the political shop at Planned Parenthood. Like so many abortion advocates and activists, she had seen the moment looming insidiously for so long. Even still, its arrival felt like both a personal and professional thwacking. It was a moment meriting despondency, but even taking the time for that seemed like an indulgence.

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“Up until Roe was overturned—even after the leak that they planned to overturn Roe came out—we polled folks across the country and they still did not believe it was true,” Robinson tells me. “They just would not believe that the Supreme Court in our lifetime would actually overturn such a fundamental right that had been the law of the land for over 40 years.”

Robinson is now president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ civil rights organization, and fears she’s watching the same slow-moving car crash all over again. The most glaring sign of many came about on the day Roe fell.

“In Clarence Thomas’ dissent, he says the quiet part out loud: next they are coming for Windsor and Obergefell and Lawrence,” she says, citing three rulings that unlocked a national right to same-sex marriage.

Put another way: the foundational underpinning of LGBTQ rights is up there on conservatives’ list of targets, and they’re not exactly announcing it in a whisper.

Before 2015, whether a same-sex couple could marry varied by state. With its 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court extended the federal right to marry to same-sex couples. It was a reflection of how much the country’s views of same-sex relationships had already shifted, and would continue to do so in the years that followed. But while the polls have moved one way, the composition of the Court has shifted in the other direction. If Roe could fall after 49 years in a 6-3 ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson case, there’s no reason to think Obergefell is any safer after less than a decade in action.

It’s the legal earthquake that people like the lawyers at the Human Rights Campaign’s headquarters in Dupont Circle argue could come as soon as next year. Yet even some of those who worked for years to help secure a right now enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of couples refuse to believe it could be taken away. Same-sex marriage, they argue, is too popular, too engrained and accepted in American society. The Court wouldn’t dare.

Or would they? A clear-eyed examination of the political and legal landscape makes it impossible to dismiss out of hand. The threats are as real now to Obergefell as they were to Roe, whose durability was largely taken as an article of faith until it was too late. The legal breadcrumbs are not difficult to find for those looking hard enough. Justice Samuel Alito in particular has been sprinkling swipes at Obergefell in concurrences and dissents since 2020. And then there are the smattering of cases—mostly to do with trans rights—working their way through courts in red states. Any one of those reaching the nation’s highest court could give the 6-3 conservative majority a chance to undermine Obergefell, or wipe it out entirely, and with it, the other rulings that cite it as precedent. And it must be noted: only two Justices who voted in favor of Obergefell remain on the bench—Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Here, you may be hitting a bump. Didn’t Congress fix this? They’d like to think so. But there are enormous shortcomings in the 2022 Respect For Marriage Act that ordered states to respect marriage licenses, adoption orders, and divorce decrees issued in other states. It also gave a buffer to earlier rulings that allowed interracial couples to wed.

But it did not codify Obergefell. Instead, it scrapped the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which would have snapped back into effect if the Court were to spike Obergefell. The law has so many loopholes that even the conservative Mormon church endorsed it, as its leaders understood that it might someday empower states like Utah, which roughly 133,000 LGBT residents call home, to tell gay couples to go elsewhere to get a marriage license.

“People think that marriage equality is a fait accompli,” says Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, a former spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee and Yale Law graduate who is on the board of LPAC, which raises money to help lesbians and their allies win elections. “They think that not just because of Obergefell but because of the Respect for Marriage Act. They’re wrong—dangerously wrong.”

If the red-blue divide in this country that emerged for abortion rights is any guide, we would likely to see a similar geographical split on access to same-sex marriage in a post-Obergefell legal environment. But that would just be the start. Many Republican-controlled states would likely take steps to not just ditch marriage licenses for same-sex couples, but also ignore scores of anti-discrimination rules and regulations that federal agencies promulgated based on rights some say are justified through Obergefell. The ripple effects would be massive and, for potentially millions of members of the LGBTQ community, heart-wrenching.

It’s why Robinson is among those pushing Democrats to make the case more forcefully that same-sex marriage, and LGBTQ rights more broadly, are on the ballot just as much as abortion. 

“What we are seeing is similar to what we saw in the abortion fight, right?” says Robinson. “They didn’t go after Roe first. They came at us with death by a thousand cuts, but always with the same goal of undermining abortion access. That’s what’s happening here.” 

Here, it’s worth another pause and a reminder. Public opinion—and law—has changed so rapidly during the last decade on LGBTQ rights that it can be easy to forget that the legal scaffolding upholding much of it is disturbingly fragile. The big breakthrough came in a 2013 ruling about inheritance laws, United States v. Windsor. Later that year came Hollingsworth v. Perry and Prop 8, which restored same-sex marriage in California, yielding a neck-breaking Obergefell in 2015. It was a joyous march for LGBTQ community and their allies, but activists were warning me only months later to not be fooled into thinking a Golden Age of Gay had arrived.

They were right. Onward came the Bathroom Bills. And bans on transgender athletes. And potential child-separation laws in places like Texas that allow the state to take trans children away from their parents. For those who may think trans rights are a separate issue from broadly accepted gay rights like same-sex marriage, you are missing how nearly all of these rights are anchored on an LBGTQ-inclusive reading of the 14th Amendment’s provision that says all Americans have the same protections. For most of the current era, race and sex were considered parts of an American’s identity, while their sexuality and gender identity were not. 

To be sure, it’s not clear if the votes are there at the moment to end the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. But at least two Justices, Alito and Thomas, appear to be itching to overturn Obergefell. And it’s immensely clear that they are fairly immune to public opinion, political pressure, or demographics.

In 2020, when presented an appeal from a Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after Obergefell, the duo said that the case record wasn’t the best version of a precedent-reversing action and indicated that they’d wait for a better one. “Until then, Obergefell will continue to have ruinous consequences for religious liberty,” Alito and Thomas wrote.

A year later, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that Philadelphia’s Catholic Social Services could refuse to work with same-sex couples on foster care in defiance of the city’s non-discrimination laws. But Alito issued a concurring opinion arguing for a deeper review of precedent that does not require states to set aside laws to accommodate religious beliefs. Alito has long argued that religious beliefs can trump civil laws. “As long as it remains on the books, it threatens a fundamental freedom,” Alito wrote in the Philadelphia case.

All of which has LGBTQ court-watchers nervous on any number of cases that are winding—albeit some more slowly than others—toward Washington.

“The distillation of the crisis we face to whether Obergefell falls is apt and, in a way, an inversion of a familiar problem: the conflation of marriage equality with what it takes to protect LGBTQ+ people in day-to-day life,” says Buckwalter-Poza. “We didn’t win civil rights for queer and trans folks across the board just by winning Obergefell, but we absolutely do stand to lose everything if we lose Obergefell.”

No massive, sweeping anti-LGBTQ case is in the offing this term, which ends this summer, according to those who are tracking every utterance from the Court. But narrower ones are inching forward and could be consequential.

The most proximate seems to be a case coming out of Tennessee, where the state passed a ban on doctors providing gender-affirming surgeries, administrating puberty blocking drugs or prescribing hormone therapies on minors. A Memphis doctor and three families are trying to keep the minors enrolled in treatment that could be ordered to be ended by March 31. An appeals court upheld the state’s case against the trans teens; the Supreme Court hasn’t decided if it would join this state-by-state anti-transcare bingo landscape.

Other cases potentially coming from Florida and Utah stem from public-accommodation needs, including school bathrooms and locker rooms. (Such laws require visitors of certain public buildings use facilities that match the gender on birth certificates that were issued before the families left the hospitals.)

But federal judges in Richmond, Va. seemed sympathetic last year to a transgender girl from West Virginia looking to compete on the girls’ track team in her middle school, but blocked by state law. (The court has yet to rule on the case.) 

And much of Washington is awaiting a potential Title IX case that more than a dozen Republican attorneys general are bringing against the Education Department’s proposal that simultaneously goes too far and not far enough in protecting transgender student athletes. Those AGs say the proposal—which would allow schools and colleges to define sport-by-sport rules for athletes—guts the very core of Title IX, which is best known for boosting opportunities for women to participate in college sports. LGBTQ lawyers, meanwhile, maintain that the framework creates an unequal system, where some team buses will be inclusive and others will be allowed to be harbors of anti-trans rhetoric.

Not everyone is convinced that this legal environment means Obergefell is at risk.

“It’s very easy to see where one or two votes would come from on the Court for this based on Thomas’ opinions and Alito’s,” says Sasha Issenberg, a journalist whose study of same-sex marriage politics and law, The Engagement, is a must-read volume about the era. “Showing me where the third, fourth, or fifth vote is becomes very difficult with this Court.”

Yet even a skeptic like Issenberg agrees that the concern isn’t completely unfounded. 

“The fact is there are a lot of other terrible things that Republicans are doing to members of the LGBTQ community now, and you don’t have to reach that far for speculative stuff,” he says.

For Robinson, this is all feeling awfully familiar. She spent a good part of her career fighting liberal complacency about the sturdiness of a popular constitutional right, only to see the Dobbs decision burn it to the ground.

She and many of her colleagues watched as the groundwork was being laid decades earlier with President George W. Bush’s addition of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Those were no accidental nominees, but the building blocks to eventually overturning Roe. And Bush was hardly alone in his Republican Party. Even someone seen as a moderate maverick like Sen. John McCain, the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2008, made no secret of his desire to nominate Justices who had already ruled favorably toward abortion limits.

Yet so comfortable were Democrats with Roe’s resiliency that they did not panic when, just five months into his presidency, Barack Obama went to Notre Dame to deliver a commencement address that spoke of working to reduce the number of abortions in the nation. Throughout his eight years in office, Obama’s faith-based advisers spent considerable time looking for areas of mutual agreement, only to find zero-sum partisanship motivated voters more than compromise.

In 2016, Donald Trump did little to conceal his overt pandering to the anti-abortion rights crowd. His defeat over Hillary Clinton came about in part because the majority of Americans who supported access to abortion didn’t believe Roe could ever be overturned.

Nonetheless, there were still plenty of abortion rights supporters concerned about restrictions being pushed in statehouses and in Congress to fuel a massive expansion of Planned Parenthood footprint in the political space. Robinson witnessed the group’s supporter roster grow from 6.5 million to 18 million during her on-and-off, decade-long tenure at the group’s political arm. 

Like 2016, the 2020 presidential campaign never hinged on abortion. The economy drew the most important billing for 35% of Americans and 20% cited racial inequality. Still, Robinson helmed a $45 million electoral machine for Planned Parenthood Action Fund that year.

Then came Dobbs, and what had been an afterthought in 2008—abortion access—rocketed in 2022 to being second only to inflation as a deciding factor in people’s vote. A full 27% of all voters pointed to abortion as their top deciding factor, and Democrats were about three-times as motivated on the issue than Republicans. 

For decades, presidential candidates often spoke about the Supreme Court in the context of Roe. Now Obergefell might be a better barometer. Even if a majority of justices aren’t ready to rule that same-sex marriage is no longer protected under the 14th amendment, whoever is sitting in the Oval Office over the next four years could find themselves replacing enough members to shift that dynamic fairly quickly. 

Yet strategists in both parties have advised campaigns against elevating LGBTQ rights too highly on their agenda, saying abortion is the more animating tool, both for activists and donors.

That kind of thinking ignores how many voters have a vested interest in preserving Obergefell and other LGBTQ gains. New data released Wednesday from Gallup shows 7.6% of Americans identify as LGBTQ—twice the level as when Gallup first asked the question in 2012. Among GenZ—folks who were ages 18 to 26 when reached by Gallup—that number is 22.3%. And Millennials in the next grouping above them and up to age 42, the figure stands at 9.8%.

Put another way, one-third of LGBTQ Americans are under the age of 43 and stand to be voting for many, many elections to come.

On top of this, an average of 2,200 LGBTQ individuals turn 18 every single day.

President Joe Biden clearly gets it. As he addressed a packed lawn of Washington’s LGBTQ insiders gathered in December of 2022 to watch him sign the Respect For Marriage Act, he drew a direct line from Roe to Obergefell.

“An extreme Supreme Court has stripped away the right important to millions of Americans that existed for half a century. [With] the Dobbs decision, the Court’s extreme conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade and the right to choose,” Biden said, specifically noting Thomas’ opinion that cited precedent on contraception, sexual conduct, and marriage. Biden’s re-election campaign has made the Court’s move on abortion central to his pitch to on-the-fence voters, and he often adds in an occasional reference to LGBTQ rights for good measure. He specifically made a nod to transgender rights in his State of the Union last week: “I have your back.”

For his part, Trump has been more vague when it comes to LGBTQ rights. At his 2016 nominating convention, billionaire Peter Thiel became the first openly gay speaker at a GOP convention to acknowledge their sexual orientation. But as President, Trump also put in place three Supreme Court Justices—among the 234 federal judges confirmed on his watch—who have been transparently hostile to LGBTQ rights. A Trump campaign spokesman did not return a query about the former President’s position these days.

While the fall of Roe is reality, and Obergefell’s remains theoretical, both issues warrant better attention by the candidates and voters. “This isn’t just some sort of fantasy. This could actually be our reality unless we do something,” says Robinson. “It’s why 2024 matters so much.”

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The good news about inflation in recent months is that it’s slowing, but that probably doesn’t matter much to the American consumer; slowing inflation still means that prices are rising. The cost of groceries ticked up just 0.3% from the previous month in January, but has grown 28% since January 2019. No wonder Americans still get sticker shock when they look at their grocery bills.

It may seem contrary that prices are still rising when so many of the events that kicked off the high inflation of recent years—the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting supply chain headaches, the war in Ukraine—started years ago. But there are dozens of different factors that go into food inflation.

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To explain these factors, TIME picked a meal that might be typically consumed by an American household—a cheeseburger and fries—and looked at what’s driving prices higher for different ingredients. We found that the cost of ingredients for a cheeseburger and fries—$4.69—is roughly a dollar more than in 2019, though just pennies from a year ago. 

Wells Fargo chief agricultural economist Michael Swanson explains the factors driving up prices bite by bite:

White bread: Up 59% since 2019

Bread is one of the items that jumped the most in price since the beginning of the pandemic. The dollar figure isn’t much—a pound of white bread costs $2.03 now, up from $1.27 in January 2019, according to government data. What happened? Bread was really cheap for a long time, Swanson says. The price was so low that it essentially fell from 2014 to 2019, as cheap wheat and robust bakery competition forced bread makers to lower prices. The bread business was so tough that many bakeries went out of business or consolidated.

Prices started rising at the beginning of the pandemic, but really jumped in early 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine and the price of wheat spiked. The price of wheat has since cratered, but the Russian war gave producers an excuse to increase prices. For years, bakeries really needed the price of bread to go up to cover their labor, energy, and transportation costs, and finally, they had the opportunity. “Once the dam broke, it was going to be quite awhile for the inflation to go back down,” Swanson says. 

Processed cheese: Up 25% since 2019.

In 2022, the price of milk was too low for farmers to make money, so they started culling their herds; cheese buyers, anticipating that there would be a shortage of cheese, started “leapfrogging each other to get supplies purchased,” Swanson says. That drove cheese prices up to their peak in April 2022. The same thing may be happening now, he says; a recent milk production report showed heavy signs of culling. 

Even if the price of cheese drops on commodities markets, it can take awhile for consumers to feel the difference. When cheese prices skyrocketed in 2022, retailers couldn’t raise prices that much, Swanson says. So when cheese prices fell back down, retailers tried to recover what they had lost. The price of processed cheese is still 25% above what it was in January 2019. 

Ground beef: Up 32% since 2019

In the beginning of 2024, there were only 87.2 million cattle and calves in the United States. That may seem like a lot of cows—roughly one for every four people in the U.S., but that number actually represents the lowest inventory since 1951. Fewer cows means higher prices for the ones that are getting sold and turned into meat.

U.S. herds are at such low levels primarily because of drought and high supply costs. In the last four years, as drought plagued Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and other cattle-raising regions, farmers found that it was costing a lot of money to feed their cows. They started selling them—and, unusually, they also sold female cows, who would typically have been held back for breeding, according to economists from the American Farm Bureau Federation. 

Now, El Nino has brought moisture to much of the U.S., and farmers are trying to rebuild their herds. But doing so will be expensive, keeping the cost of beef high. While the U.S. had a record corn crop in 2023 and prices of feed are falling, some farmers are holding back cows they otherwise would have sold in order to rebuild their herds. With higher interest rates for borrowing and more expensive cows, beef prices aren’t likely going anywhere soon. In February, economists from the American Farm Bureau Federation predicted that 2024 would be characterized by record-high beef prices in the grocery store.

Tomatoes: Down 1% from 2019

One of the only foods that have not experienced major price increases over the past four years. That’s in part because they were already expensive compared to other fruits and vegetables. But tomato prices are also affected by trade rules; ever since 2013, U.S. and Mexican producers have essentially agreed to set the price of tomatoes so one country’s farmers don’t have an advantage over another. 

Potatoes: Up 30% from 2019

Potato crops in 2021 and 2022 were severely affected by drought and wildfire smoke, reducing yields. With fewer potatoes in the U.S. and abroad, prices jumped. In 2023, though, U.S. potato production increased for the first time in seven years, which should temper prices.

Romaine Lettuce: Up 19% from 2019

An insect-born virus destroyed huge swaths of lettuce crops in California in 2022, causing costs to spike. The price has fallen since then, but labor and transportation costs are still higher than in 2019, which means suppliers aren’t rushing to bring down prices further.

You Won’t Save Money Dining Out

Your restaurant burger is probably going to get more expensive, too, as wages continue to rise in a competitive job market. “Across the board, everything is just up,” says Brian Arnoff, the co-owner of Meyer’s Old Dutch, a hamburger restaurant in Beacon, N.Y., his restaurant has done two pricing increases since the pandemic, its burger now costs $16, up from $13 in 2019.

For restaurants, though, labor accounts for much of the increased cost of food. Meyer’s Old Dutch can’t even get applicants to come to interviews unless he offers $18 an hour, significantly higher than the state minimum wage of $15 an hour. Wages across his business have climbed as he tries to retain talent; cooks who made $18 an hour in 2019 are now starting at $20. Until the pandemic, Arnoff says, the cost of food and other supplies surpassed the cost of labor. Now, he spends more on labor than on ingredients. 

My credit card is a mangled thing. Its blue plastic backing is peeling so much that it doesn’t work in swipe machines; it looks like a dog chewed it up and spat it out. It seldom leaves my wallet anymore. But that doesn’t matter. In the two weeks before I wrote this story, I spent more than $4,000 on my card without laying eyes on it. 

Each of these transactions was made online, where my card number is stored by Uber or Walmart or Google Chrome. That’s probably why I didn’t flinch when I spent $333 on groceries for a weekend with friends, or $48.34 on a pizza through Uber Eats, or even $1,533 for an Airbnb when my extended family comes to visit. Without having to type in my card number, the pain of the purchase was dampened. 

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Frictionless transactions are common in today’s economy—you can wave your cell near a cash register, press “buy” on Amazon without really knowing which credit card you’re charging, and send money to a stranger via your phone without having met them in person. There’s even a company, McLear, marketing a ring that you can use to pay for things. 

These technologies, often referred to as “fintech,” for financial technology, make spending easier than ever before— and there’s growing evidence that they’re making us shell out more than we realize. With so many different accounts to keep track of and so many merchants smoothly debiting what we owe every month, we just keep on spending, whether we can afford it or not. 

U.S. consumers spent a record $19 trillion in December 2023, up 6% from a year prior and 29% from February 2020. Spending has soared despite high inflation, high interest rates, and repeated commentary from economists that this ebullience can’t continue. And yet it has.

Read More: Is It Finally Time to Buy a House?

There are, of course, a few reasons why people are spending a lot of money right now. Consumers saved a lot of money when they were stuck at home during the pandemic, and now they’re making up for lost time by traveling, eating out, and doing all the things they couldn’t’ during quarantine. The government helped consumers feel flush by sending out stimulus checks and pausing student loan payments. After years of slow wage increases, workers’ payments are finally growing more quickly than prices, giving them extra pocket money.

But there’s one additional factor that has changed since the beginning of the pandemic: people are more accustomed to using financial technology to pay for things, which eliminates barriers that might have once slowed their spending. “Convenience makes it much easier to enjoy the process of shopping, removing the additional difficulties of buying things,”  says Yuqian Xu, a professor at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School who has studied frictionless payment methods. Research shows that the more frictionless the payment method, the more money people spend. 

By 2023, 73% of consumers had paid for something through a website or browser on a phone or computer, according to a McKinsey survey, up from 46% in 2019. People are also more comfortable using mobile payment apps like Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and Venmo; more than 53% of Americans surveyed by Forbes Advisor in 2023 said they used digital wallets more often than traditional payment methods. 

Paying with a mobile phone is faster than using a credit card—it takes an average of 29 seconds versus 40, according to Xu, the UNC professor. That speed and convenience accelerates spending, Xu and her colleagues found in a July 2023 study that tracked spending after the launch of Alipay, a mobile payment service. It indicated that credit card transaction amounts increased by 9.4% once people could use a mobile device, while the frequency of transactions increased by 10.7%. 

The result is a cycle of tech adoption that has loosened customers’ wallets. Once consumers started using mobile payments, they became more comfortable with making credit-card payments on their computers, and started moving more money digitally. And once they were comfortable spending money digitally, they started spending more money overall. 

Elizabeth Mendoza, a 33-year-old who lives in Washington state, says she was getting her debt under control before the pandemic by setting aside cash twice a month for various budget categories like groceries, gas, or her cat. She found that she spent less using cash, because she would think twice about parting with a large bill. 

But once COVID-19 hit, Mendoza got into the habit of buying things online and saving her credit card information in different apps. Soon, she found herself back in about $20,000 worth of debt. “Once I stopped using my cash,” she says, “I stopped paying attention to what I was doing.”

In October 2023, Mendoza vowed to get out of debt and removed her credit card from any app that would save it, including Apple Pay. She creates colorful envelopes every month to put her cash in to make the process more fun. It’s more of a hassle to buy things online now since she has to go find her wallet and type in her information. But she says it’s made a huge difference in her spending. “It’s just so easy to fall into using your credit card and not keep track of what’s going on,” she says. 

Economists refer to the way people organize and spend their money as mental accounting. Humans are often irrational with the way they choose to spend and save money—splurging with a $100 bill found on the sidewalk while fastidiously saving every penny of their salary, for instance, or spending more money on the same item if they’re paying via credit card than if using cash.

Read More: The Solar Power Industry Is in Trouble.

Mental accounting is a big reason people spend more with frictionless payments. Consumers think of new apps like Buy Now Pay Later or Apple Pay as a separate budget category that enables new spending, says Michael Gelman, a finance professor at the University of Delaware. In an experiment, Gelman tracked the behavior of consumers who had received a random credit card in the mail. While those consumers’ spending behavior on their old credit cards remained the same, they started to splurge on their new one, dropping 26% more than people who had not received a new card. “Once you open a new budget category, you manage it separately,” he says. “It can have an effect on total consumption: you consume more because you have the opportunity.” 

Yanibel Colon, a 35-year old account manager who lives in the Bronx, was once the type of person who would buy things with cash and use her credit cards for emergencies. But cooped up at home during the pandemic, she started putting more things on her credit card, and using Buy Now Pay Later services. She mentally categorized Buy Now Pay Later spending as cash, which got her into trouble. “I was like, ‘Well, it’s not a credit card, I don’t have payments,” she says. Now, she sets a budget every month for certain categories like food, and makes sure she doesn’t exceed them, no matter how she is paying. 

Strong consumer spending has helped stimulate the economy and provided healthy profits for companies that depend on the American consumer. Walmart, for instance, saw online sales grow 17% in the last quarter, and made about $1.2 million a minute in 2023. Amazon reported its highest operating profit in history in its February earnings report. 

But many American consumers are spending beyond their means. Household debt reached a record $17.5 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2023, and has increased by $3.4 trillion since the end of 2019, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Credit card debt has “passed a milestone,” says Michele Raneri, VP and head of U.S. research and consulting at TransUnion. Credit card balances now stand at $1.05 trillion, 13% higher than a year ago. The percent of credit card balances that are 90 days or more delinquent ticked up in the last quarter of 2023, according to the New York Fed, reaching nearly 10%. 

That’s partly because  people have a hard time keeping track of all the places they’re spending money, credit counselors say. The rise of digital payment systems like Apple Pay and Buy Now Pay Later  “creates this scattered universe of different payment options that can lead to overspending and financial instability.”  says Bruce McClary, senior vice president at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC), the largest nonprofit financial counseling organization in the U.S. 

“People ask me, ‘How could you let this happen,’” says Britt Reynolds, 28, who uses TikTok to chronicle her journey getting out of $36,000 of debt. “I want to say, ‘Credit card companies gave me a $43,000 credit line, and spending money is the easiest thing in the world.’”  

Tanya Menendez, the co-founder and CEO of Snowball Wealth, a financial tracking and education app, says she frequently sees clients who have lost track of their spending because of the many ways they can pay for things. She recently held a workshop for clients and asked them to estimate how much they spent every month on ride-share apps like Uber. They’d estimate they spent $400, she says, only to find that they spent double that on average. 

Many of the apps that helped people track their spending have disappeared in recent years. Mint, the personal finance app, will be shutting down on March 23, according to Intuit, the company that owns it. There aren’t many good free options left. “Tracking your spending is really difficult,” Menendez says. “It’s like a vitamin that people aren’t taking.”

Credit counselors have a variety of tips to help combat overspending on frictionless transactions. Jessica Spangler, a money educator whose book, Invest Like a Girl, comes out March 26, recommends not storing payment information in apps. She also tells people to set up their phones so that they get a notification every time they make a purchase, no matter what payment method they use. “That way you’re not just swiping into the void,” Spangler says.

Read More: 11 Ways to Get Free Financial Advice

McClary, of NFCC, recommends having only a few accounts where you spend money so you can more easily track them. It’s easy, he says, to set up new accounts through Google Pay, for example, and then forget which credit card it’s linked to, which makes it harder to calculate whether you’re overspending. And those mobile accounts aren’t doing you any favors—the more time you have to think before you make a purchase, he says, the more likely you’ll evaluate whether you can afford it.

As for me, I’ve started putting reminders on my calendar to check my credit card balances so that I can track how my spending on apps is piling up. Not that it’s easy. Digital payments are swift but the process of logging into my account to track them is a headache that involves remembering bank passwords and logins and then waiting for the bank to send me a code to verify my identity. If spending money was as hard as tracking it, we might not do so much of it.

I’m generally not ashamed to talk about personal matters. In fact, I’m known for oversharing. At parties, I’m always good for a few cringey anecdotes plucked from my lackluster dating life. As a writer, I’ve never shied away from sharing the vulnerable, sometimes ugly, side of my evolving relationship with  self-worth. Even my earliest report cards mention my garrulous nature: “Jamie Feldman: Talks too much.”

But there’s one topic that I’ve kept quiet for as long as I could remember: money—or in recent years, the lack of it.

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I’ve maintained a fluctuating level of credit card debt for over a decade. At its highest, it hovered around $18,000. From that first moment in my hopeful early 20s when I felt the shiny piece of plastic in my hands, I was hooked. Now this, I thought, was freedom. I recklessly opened card after card, blatantly ignoring interest rates, skating by on minimum payments, and maintaining a hefty balance at all times.

Growing up, there wasn’t a whole lot of talk about money in my house. There was just a general sense there was never really enough of it. As a result, I have, for the majority of my adult life, maintained a pretty precarious balancing act of both living in a scarcity mindset and way beyond my means. I’ve gone through periods of unflinchingly forking my credit card over at a $100-per-person group dinner, then spent the following weeks living off of ramen and tinned fish. I’ve thrown caution to the wind and booked trips because “I deserve it!” then spent hours spiraling at the sight of my bank account, if I wasn’t too afraid to even check my bank account, that is. Add to that a pretty deep seated propensity to people please and an inability to say no, and you have a person who is pretty much guaranteed to spend money they don’t have.

I never revealed the extent of my troubling money habits to anyone, and frankly, I didn’t actively fret over them. The consequences of my behavior felt so removed from my day-to-day life that I treated them as if they weren’t there. I didn’t have judgments about other people’s debt, either—because I naively assumed I was the only one with this kind of debt. But considering the fact that American household debt hit a record $16.9 trillion in 2022, the only explanation I can fathom for this mindset was deep, internalized shame.

The facade started to show its cracks in 2021, when smack in the middle of the pandemic, I lost my job—a job that I had held for over seven years and was the only thing keeping me afloat in the sea of my spending habits. Suddenly, the debt wasn’t something I’d get around to paying off eventually. It was something I needed to face. Now.

Read More: Overwhelmed By Debt? Here’s Where to Start

First, I confided in a close friend, which admittedly was terrifying. I was convinced that she’d see me differently, or feel as though I’d tricked her into thinking I was a good person all of these years when, actually, I had this deep, dark secret the whole time. 

What actually happened was this: She simply said, “OK,”  marched me straight into her office, pulled up a chair and her favorite budgeting software, Tiller, and sat there with me at her desk for hours, teaching me how to use it and exactly how to make a budget. Most importantly, she taught me how to stop avoiding the problem. She showed me that my trouble with finances was not—and is not—indicative of who I am as a person. It was invaluable. 

Once I opened that door to the secret, I realized it was up to me to make sure it stayed open. Telling one person provided me with a huge sense of relief. I wasn’t alone. But then came the hard part: holding myself accountable. I needed to do something so brash, loud, and dramatic that nothing would remain in the shadows of my denial. I needed to conjure the Jamie Feldman that “talks too much.”

Telling the entire internet might sound extreme, but I knew I’d be less inclined to give up if there were some stakes involved.” So I opened a TikTok account and started talking. In one breathless post, I shared the full story of my debt. As a 30-something millennial with only a vague understanding of how TikTok worked at the time, the “entire internet” felt more like screaming into the void. I didn’t know anyone using it, so there was a sense of anonymity that gave me confidence that this was just a mental exercise.

Of course, as I’d soon realize, it was not anonymous at all. Suddenly people started liking my videos. I went from a couple hundred followers to 20 thousand followers within a few weeks. I realized I hadn’t really thought this out. What would all these people think of me? 

But what came next was far scarier. Friends, acquaintances and family members started to follow me. What was I thinking? Not only was I worried about embarrassing myself, I was worrying about embarrassing them. What would my mom think? My aunt, my nana, what would all our family friends think? What would my mom’s ex-coworker who I met exactly one time think? I braced for judgment. 

Turns out, I was bracing for nothing. Not only did the thousands of strangers reach out with kind words, so did my friends and family. My mom sent supportive, emoji-filled cheers. My friends encouraged me to keep going, invited me over for dinner, and indulged my new budget-friendly suggestions when we made plans. But what was perhaps more surprising was that everyone had their own money story to share. People wanted me to know that they had debt and how they got out of it. These were stories I’d never heard, from some of the people in my life that I am closest to.  

The first time one of my videos hit 1 million views, I realized this was much bigger than me. My story is not unique. It’s just that most of us are suffering in silence. My DMs were flooded with people telling me their debt stories and my comments were full of cheers of recognition and solidarity. In some cases, I was the first person they’d ever spoken to about it. Most people said they’d never told anyone about their credit card debt. Breaking my silence helped them break theirs, and together we realized that talking about it was the only way to escape the deep shame that underlies that silence—and the only way to pave a different path forward. 

I’m not a personal finance expert, and I don’t pretend to be. In fact, I find most experts get it wrong. Most of them tell you to change your behavior but don’t acknowledge the deep seated reasons why that behavior started in the first place. Popular methods for personal finance also rely on their own shame tactics to change your behavior: you don’t work hard enough; you’re stupid for getting yourself into this situation in the first place; you should feel like you’re suffering while you pay debt down so you don’t get yourself into it again. This is only doubling down on the root cause. Instead, my goal is this: to continue telling my story, and to help people get comfortable with the fact that getting out of debt is a group sport, not a solo mission.

We cannot feel empowered to shift our situation—financial or otherwise—if we don’t feel empowered to share our truths first. I was never going to squeeze myself out of debt without pushing through the shame first and talking about it honestly. 

My life looks a lot different now than it did three years ago. My social calendar and circles are smaller. I move slowly and with intention. I track my spending and, for the first time in my life, I have a budget. And I have a community of people to share that with, who see me, debt and all, and refuse to believe my financial issues have anything to do with my goodness or humanity. 

I have rejected all of my prior judgments of being in debt—both toward myself and others. Shame is not an effective tool for creating change, but connection certainly is.

Money is one of the most significant stressors for Americans, according to a 2023 American Psychological Association report. 

The number of Americans who reported money as a stressor, has only increased since before the COVID-19 pandemic. Of parents who said they have multiple stressors causing significant strain on their lives, nearly 80% said that money is one of those factors. Single adults pointed it as the most significant source of stress, over housing costs and personal safety. 

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The report comes despite a resilient U.S. economy. Job growth seems to be at a steady pace—although numbers fell short of the gains seen in 2021 and 2022—and the unemployment rate has remained below 4% for the past two years. However, inflation has remained persistently high, with rising energy, food and housing costs putting a strain on households.

Still, even Americans who appear to be doing well financially struggle. More than 50% of Americans who make more than $100,000 a year are living paycheck to paycheck as of September 2023, according to a Lending Club report. “A lot of Americans don’t necessarily realize that there’s a difference between your wants and your needs,” says Dr. Traci Williams, a financial therapist and board certified clinical psychologist. “When things are tight, we have to focus on our needs and maybe let go of our wants temporarily.”

According to the American Psychological Association report, 61% of adults say that people around them expect them to just “get over their stress,” without providing any actionable guidance on how to do so. 

TIME spoke to experts about how to better manage your relationship with money. Here are their tips.

Understand your ‘money story’

Before trying to budget and figure out a financial plan, experts advise people to assess their personal relationship with money. That involves thinking about their parents’ relationship with money, how adults around them modeled spending, and whether they personally overspend or underspend. 

“The hard part is it’s not something that’s really tied to your personality,” says Jack Heintzelman, a certified financial planner. “It’s just really how you grew up and how you were educated on money…If you’re able to think back on [it], It gives you a different perspective.” 

In order to best assess areas to improve, Williams advises folks to recognize their triggers and note their reaction. “What are the things that money is providing that speak to you as a person that can help you to get some indicators,” says Williams. “For some people that might look like: ‘I am looking for security’ or ‘I am bored,’ or ‘I do not feel a sense of high self esteem. And so money helps to provide that for me.’”

Read More: 7 Ways to Manage Financial Stress

Williams notes that spending money releases endorphins and dopamine, triggering feelings of pleasure. “There are other things that you can do to feel good in your life, that can create those feel good hormones,” she says. “Whether it’s spending time with loved ones, or baking with your kid, or going for a walk, listening to music, things can be affordable.” 

Meanwhile, so-called underspenders, who worry about money despite being financially stable, might have to work on neutralizing what it means to spend money. “​​There is no such thing as the right or wrong way to do things. They’re just the choices that we make,” Williams says. 

Come up with personal goals

Experts say that everyone’s financial plan should accommodate their own desires, needs, and lifestyle. For some, it can be as simple as checking their credit card’s app and looking at the amount they spend on categories like food, bills, or subscriptions. For others, it might be better to physically highlight a bank statement or write out purchases to adequately visualize their spending. 

Heintzelman says he’s personally a fan of the 50-30-20 method, which has individuals spend 50% of their income on their needs, such as rent or food, 30% towards less essential “wants,” and 20% towards savings. But he stresses that everyone should work around what best suits their future goals. “Try your best to not worry about what other people are doing and just think about the path that you’re on and be comfortable with that,” he says.

Read More: Why a 60/30/10 Budget Could Be the New 50/30/20

The goal is to eventually be able to instinctively set aside a certain amount of money and know that it cannot be touched. “If you can be more natural with it and let it automate, then that can help with being more under control,” Heintzelman says. 

Recognize when you need support

While finances are one of the leading causes of stress, only 52% of U.S. adults say they feel comfortable discussing it with others. But experts say it’s better to discuss financial goals, plans, and stress with a spouse, friend, family member, or others to get different perspectives and share anxieties.

Around 35% of U.S. adults have a financial advisor. Heintzelman says they can be helpful for clients who are looking for someone to make them accountable for their financial decisions. 

Financial therapists, meanwhile, work at the intersection between a client’s finances and their mental health.

Read More: 11 Ways to Get Free Financial Advice

“If your worries are affecting your ability to work or your relationships with your family members or your friends, or your ability to take care of yourself, those are usually indicators that you need extra help,” says Williams. “That help can look different for different people depending on what your situation is and what your need is.”

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