Household Debt Service by Vintage since 1999

"Looks like they do some significant revising of the debt service data. Maybe I'll do a post on that. Maybe I will." -- me

It was easy. Went to FRED TDSP and took the link to ALFRED. They have "vintages" of the debt service data beginning in 1999, with a new one every three months or so, up to the present. I put the first 10 of em into a graph, then figured I'd better save it. So I clicked DOWNLOAD. The first option ALFRED offers is "All Vintages (data)". Whoa, exactly what I wanted. Got it as an Excel file. Didn't need to do em 10 at a time.

I didn't know how many lines I could plot in one graph in Excel. Tried columns A to Z, and it worked. So then I tried em all, column A to column CD. And it worked.

I wrote a little VBA routine to make all the lines thin and black; the heart of it is here:

Dim s As Object: For Each s In ActiveChart.SeriesCollection
    s.Select
    With Selection.Border
      On Error Resume Next
        .ColorIndex = BLACKLIN
      On Error GoTo 0
        .Weight = xlThin
        .LineStyle = xlContinuous
    End With
  Next s

Your basic For/Next loop.

I didn't identify which line is which on the graph, but you can more or less tell by where each one ends. Anyway, the point of the graph is just to show there is substantial revision in the Household Debt Service data. The first line, high on the graph, is the November 9, 1999 vintage. I made that one red. Also red, low on the graph, is the most recent vintage: September 25, 2019. Getting late in the year, isn't it. November already.

Also red: The last vintage before the big change: June 19, 2003; and the first vintage after that change: October 22, 2003. Notes related to that revision appear in the PDF "Recent Changes to a Measure of U.S. Household Debt Service" by Karen Dynan, Kathleen Johnson, and Karen Pence.

Here's the graph as FRED shows it:

Graph #1

Here's what the ALFRED data gave me:

Graph #2

You can click the second graph for an enlarged view.