Personal Debt Map

5-16-2026

As of 2025, the average American carries $63,500 in debt. I created this project in order to apply data analysis techniques to visualize personal debt by year and state.

Project Overview

My goal by the end of this project was to create a web-based interactive map that would allow users to explore debt trends over the past 10 years of data. I wanted to demonstrate both frontend software competency, and learn visualization techniques for geographic and time series data.

About the Dataset

I used the Household Debt and Credit Report as reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which tracks debt on a quarterly basis across the following categories: Auto, Credit Card, Mortgage, Student Loan, and Total Debt.

Data Preparation

In order to easily serve the data to the web without the need for a database or backend, I converted the data spreadsheets to JSON format and included them as static files in the frontend.

Visualization

I used Leaflet for the basic map capabilities, with custom React controls built on top to filter for year and debt type. The charts were created using ChartJS.

Challenges

The majority of my time on this project was spent learning Leaflet. It's an easy enough library to understand once you've gotten the hang of it, but it has many configuration options that give it a somewhat steep learning curve. I was grateful for the excellent documentation and tutorials created by the Leaflet community.

I also found it a challenge to build a mobile-friendly version due to screen size limitations. Fortunately I had some patient beta testers who helped me adjust the user interface along the way.

Conclusion

For my first time creating a project in Leaflet, I'm pleased with the results. I look forward to creating more geographic analyses in the future!