“If your wealth is captured by financial assets, you were back up and running in no time,” said Amanda Fischer, policy director at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “It’s the lowest income folks who don’t even have to file taxes that have the highest barrier to climb.”

As their investment accounts ballooned, well-off Americans got another gift.

Mortgage rates, driven largely by the same forces that sent stocks soaring to dizzying heights, plunged to the lowest on record.

Homeowners, especially those with pristine credit scores, have been taking advantage. Refinancings have accelerated to the fastest in nearly two decades, according to data from Fannie Mae, allowing millions of borrowers to cut their monthly payments.

Falling Behind
For those at the other end of the spectrum, things are very different.

Employment for the bottom quartile of American earners -- those making less than $27,000 a year -- remains more than 20% below January 2020 levels. Last month, nearly 30 million adults lived in households where there wasn’t enough to eat, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, up 28% since before the pandemic. In Louisiana, the worst affected state, one out of every five people now faces food scarcity, the survey shows, with the numbers being even more dire among Black Americans.

Millions are busy figuring out how to keep their homes rather than borrowing against them. Over a third of U.S. adults who live in households that have fallen behind on rent or mortgage payments are likely to face eviction or foreclosure over the next two months, according to the December Census Bureau survey.

As the roll out of the first Covid-19 vaccines instills more optimism in financial markets, many borrowers struggling with debt are finding it harder than ever to see a path to recovery, even after the additional relief measures approved by Congress in December.

“People simply feel that they are nearing or at rock bottom,” said Bradford Botes, a principal at bankruptcy law firm Bond & Botes in Birmingham, Alabama. “We are hearing a lot more hopelessness.”

Botes said that for many of the people his firm has advised across Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi, government unemployment benefits and stimulus checks simply haven’t cut it.