CardHub.com‘s new quarterly credit card debt study shows a worrying return to pre-recession carelessness about debt, says Odysseas Papadimitriou, the site’s CEO. “Unfortunately, we’re a little bit worse than we were last year and significantly worse than we were in 2009 and 2010,” he says.

Americans historically pay off the most debt in the first quarter of each year, as we pay down our holiday spending and take advantage of early tax refunds to chip away at those debts — an average of $6,628 per household, according to CardHub. But in the years following the recession, we’ve been paying down less and less. This year, we paid down 28% less debt than we did in the first quarter of 2009.