joining us live now is cnet senior editor nick walney. he's got key findings, advice on how to get out of credit card debt. thank you for joining us. first off, i don't even know how many zeros are in a trillion because these numbers that were released by the federal reserve bank of new york, they are pretty alarming. >> yeah, it's really gone up quite a bit. people actually were really good about paying down their credit cards during the pandemic. part of that was attributed to the stimulus payments that people received. but since then, inflation really came roaring back and caught a lot of people off guard. and so between the cost of living uh- and just generally trying to keep up with limited savings, people are spending a lot more on credit cards and as a result, things are going up quite a bit. the reason that it's really alarming as well is that credit card apr's have gone up a lot in the last 18 months. in 2021, we saw an average of about 14.6, and then already a little earlier this year, we were up to an average of over 21% for a