Happy Friday!

Keep that smile on your face; a new Edmunds report tells us almost 30% of trade-ins with outstanding loans in the third quarter of 2026 carried negative equity.

Those drivers weren't so lucky — they owed an average of $7,107 more than their cars were actually worth.

This is the highest third-quarter figure in at least a decade and more than $1,600 above the good ol' pre-pandemic days, when $5,500 of financial pain was considered plenty.

JD Power is forecasting roughly the same misery for October, with nearly 30% of trade-ins underwater again.

Let's look at Epoch Times:

The financial burden grows when drivers roll that unpaid balance into a new car loan.
Consumers who did so in the third quarter financed an average of $57,235, up more than 44 percent from $39,732 in the same period in 2019, Edmunds said. Their average monthly payment climbed to $952 from $646 over that period.
At an average interest rate of 8.1 percent, those borrowers are expected to pay about $16,610 in interest over the life of their loans, nearly 83 percent more than in the third quarter of 2019.

Oh, did I mention that the total auto debt in the U.S. is approaching $2 trillion?

More than 91% of these rollover buyers signed up for 72 months or longer. What's more, these rollover buyers "financed about $12,600 more and paid an additional $165 per month."