Cassie Bennett and her best friend had been planning the Antarctica trip for over a year. They booked a balcony cabin, and Bennett put down the deposit with the understanding that each of them would pay her own balance when it came due.
Then the deadline arrived, and her friend’s card wouldn’t go through.
Facing the loss of the cabin, Bennett put the roughly $8,000 balance on her own credit card. “I got paid back, but slowly,” she said. The last of it cleared earlier this year — months after they’d come home.
For a growing number of American travelers, the hardest part of a group trip is not the planning or taking the time off work; it’s what happens after everyone gets home and someone has to bring up the money.
New national research from Zelle finds that among Gen Z consumers who have fronted money for a shared expense, 76% say they were not fully repaid. Nearly half of Gen Z respondents say they have gone into debt covering group costs for other people. Fifty-five percent say a repayment issue created tension in a friendship or hurt a relationship.
Zelle has a name for it: the avoidance economy. One in five Gen Z respondents said they had canceled plans, or muted or ignored a group chat, specifically to avoid a conversation about paying someone back.
When the money outlasts the friendship
Dr. Traci Williams, a board-certified clinical psychologist and certified financial therapist who serves as a spokesperson for Zelle, has a term for what Bennett spent those months feeling: “Repayment anxiety is the stress, discomfort or emotional hesitation people experience when it’s time to settle shared expenses,” Williams said. The trigger is rarely the spending itself, but rather when people are waiting to be repaid or trying to figure out how to ask for their money back.
Williams doesn’t think the phenomenon is new, but rather newly visible, as more people split the cost of vacations, high-end meals, concerts and sporting events, and talk about it openly.
“Money is rarely just about money,” Williams said. “It’s tied to relationships, trust, expectations, and emotions. That’s why even relatively small amounts can feel surprisingly uncomfortable to discuss.”
Left alone, the balance rarely stays neutral. “When repayment is delayed, it can lead to feelings like resentment or frustration that ultimately affect the relationship,” she said.
The survey data bears that out. In the Zelle research, 27% of Americans said repayment issues have caused arguments, and a quarter of Gen Z respondents said such a dispute had done long-term damage to a relationship. Some have even said it ended one: 19% of millennials and 14% of Gen Z consumers reported ending a friendship or relationship over a repayment dispute.
Syon Bhanot, an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College who studies behavioral economics, said the friction is structural, as money and friendship run on incompatible logic. Consider when a friend asks for help moving; most people would give up a Saturday without a second thought and volunteer hours without thinking about being paid. Now imagine the same friend offers $10 an hour.
“You’d probably be weirded out, and more likely to say no,” Bhanot said. “In theory, the financial incentive should increase your eagerness to help, but it actually eats into your motivation.” The same crowding-out effect, he said, is why asking a friend to settle up feels like it costs something.
What the debt actually looks like
The amounts at stake have grown. Gen Z is now the biggest average spender on group travel and events, according to the Zelle research. While nearly half of Americans surveyed spent less than $2,500 per person on major events like the World Cup, Coachella and the Super Bowl, 37% of Gen Z consumers spent at least that amount.
Those trips almost always require someone to go first. Blocks of tickets, house rentals, advance dinner reservations and group bookings are bought by one person on one card, weeks or months before anyone settles up.
Jacob Bayer, a certified financial planner and founder of the firm JBayerWealth, estimates the organizer is now extending $6,000 to $10,000 in credit to the group and paying the financing cost on it. Run $4,000 of someone else’s vacation through a card at 22% to 24% and pay the minimum, Bayer said, and “you may pay for the vacation twice.”
Credit card holders ages 18 to 29 have had the highest rate of accounts moving into delinquency of any age group, according to New York Fed data, with more than 10% transitioning into delinquency in a recent quarter.
Buy now, pay later has become a parallel track: 49% of Gen Z consumers planned to use BNPL for large purchases and 36% for daily essentials, like groceries and gas. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has found that 63% of BNPL users hold multiple loans at once. Because those loans are not always reported to credit bureaus, borrowers routinely underestimate their total exposure.
Across all Zelle respondents who sometimes borrow for shared expenses, only 28% said they pay someone back immediately or the same day. Among Gen Z respondents, 18% said it can take up to a month, 10% said two to six months, and 11% said longer than six months.
Why nobody sends the text
The obvious solution– just ask for your money back– is the thing almost nobody does.
Part of the reason is a strange inversion of who feels bad. “Many people worry that asking to be repaid will make them seem petty or will create unnecessary conflict, even when they’re simply asking for money they’re already owed,” Williams said.
“Context often matters more than the dollar amount,” she said. “The relationship between the people involved, whether repayment expectations were discussed upfront, and each person’s financial situation can all influence how comfortable someone feels asking for their money back.”
Repayment anxiety often doesn’t end with the transaction; people stop replying to messages, put off asking, put off paying, and eventually stop making plans. “In the short term, avoidance can feel easier than having an uncomfortable conversation, but over time it can create additional stress, resentment, and strain on relationships,” Williams said.
Payment apps absorb some of the discomfort. Bhanot thinks removing the face-to-face element is much of why they caught on: “That way you don’t have to talk about money in person with a friend.”
For the conversation people are already dreading, lead with the relationship, then the request. Williams recommends something like, “I had such a great time on our trip,” before transitioning into, “I noticed I haven’t received your portion yet.” Explaining the stakes can help too, like that your own card payment is coming due.
She also suggests a step most people skip: thinking honestly about what a friend can afford before agreeing to front anything. “Sometimes people genuinely intend to repay but may have overcommitted financially to participate in the experience.”
Bennett is trying a version of that. She and her friend are going to Australia next, and this time she told her friend to book her own flights.
It didn’t hold. Her friend asked her to book the ticket and send a Venmo request instead. The round-trip fare was about $3,800, and only roughly $2,000 of it has come back so far. Bennett has also put down the deposit on a three-day liveaboard on the Great Barrier Reef, and there are still three domestic flights to book.
“I just keep thinking about all those points,” she said, “to mentally get around how much I do not want to be fronting all this.”
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