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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether and to what extent households living in southern Europe, i.e. Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy, experience similar conditions of financial vulnerability, considering that in comparative research these countries are often grouped together because of the substantial instability of their economies and the similarity of social and welfare model.Design/methodology/approach The authors use data from Household Finance and Consumption Survey, a quite novel data set that covers the whole balance sheet of a sample of households. The authors compute four indicators of debt burden and in order to study households’ risk of default the authors apply two-part model, which is a valuable alternative to the application of conventional regression models with zero-inflated data.Findings Analysis reveals that the burden of debts and the risk of default are very different among the four countries, in particular Spain and Portugal have the highest proportion of financially vulnerable households.Originality/value The study is one a few that have directly compared objectives indicators of households’ financial vulnerability in all Southern European countries. Moreover, the authors employ a two-part model, a valuable alternative to the application of conventional logit or linear regression models. In the first part of the model the authors estimate the probability that households suffer financial vulnerability; in the second part, the authors estimate households’ level of vulnerability only for vulnerable families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]