Credit Card Debt Statistics: The Picture Is Far From Satisfactory

Unfortunately, the sad truth is that figures don’t ever lie. It seems that Americans are increasingly becoming burdened by debts, and credit card debt statistics show that this trend has been steadily rising ever since the eighties, because that was the period when credit card usage increased considerably and was fast becoming the normal mode of transacting purchases and sales.

More Hard Sell Tactics

Another reason to be worried by the unflattering picture that such credit card debt statistics were showing is that the credit card companies began to do their best to find more innovative ways to sell credit cards to consumers and if you have checked your mail box, or watched TV or been otherwise bombarded by different marketing tools, you would realize the hard sell tactics that were used to get you to use credit cards.

Thus, the eighties saw a shift from the cash-based society towards using credit cards, which in turn can be attributed to the beginning of the information age. With more computers being used to do various tasks, it led to more people also using credit cards and according to some revealing credit card debt statistics of those times, there were more people using credit cards than were using checks or cash in a single year.

And, when people became accustomed to using credit cards, there was a subsequent rise in credit card debts as well and according to available credit card debt statistics, the average American had run up debts to the tune of approximately nine thousand dollars per year that were directly attributed to use of their credit cards. A common reason for such misuse of credit cards was that often the user mistakenly thought that he or she was using their own money when making credit card purchases.

However, the truth is that the money that you spend when using your credit card actually belongs to the credit card company, who are actually just lending you the money with the condition that you need to pay it back. What’s more, such lending has an average interest rate around fourteen percent, which anyone will tell you are a pretty steep rate of interest.

Thus, though you may mistakenly consider that you are getting easy money because of owning a credit card, the truth as revealed by credit card debt statistics is that you will thus tend to overspend and that too at a faster rate. In fact, the latest data as revealed by various credit card debt statistics show that Americans pay less of their debts than in the past, and it has even been recently revealed that Americans in fact have a negative savings rate which is approximately -0.05 percent. For more credit card information please visit Reduce Credit Card Debt.