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Monday, January 25, 2010

What's the Truth About American's Credit Card Debt

By Layla Vanderbilt

Everyday people hear about how all Americans owe thousands of dollars in credit card debt. These rumors are distributed through the media, government, bank officials, and many other people. They all say the same thing. That a trend is growing of Americans increasing in credit card debt. However if you break down the statistics that everyone talks about you can see the truth about credit card debt.

The most over used and over rated statistic states that each American has more than $8,000 in credit card debt. The statistic is only true if you're taking the average credit card debt among the people that have credit cards. However this is usually a big misconception as the word average is often easily confused. Many people believe that they arrived at this number by dividing the credit card debt among everyone. However this couldn't be further from the truth. They only used the number of Americans that have credit cards which leaves out a huge number of Americans in the averaging factor.

The truth is that most American households don't have debt. In fact only about 1 in 20 American households have $8,000 or more in debt. This means that the majority of American families have paid off their credit cards or don't have credit cards. Out of the remaining households, most of them only owe $2,000 or less. An average can't tell you how much the average American owes as it's a skewed number.

The reason that the truth about credit card debt is hidden is because of how they got the $8,000 number. They got it by taking $750 billion, which is all the outstanding credit card debt, and divided it by 84 million, which is the number of American households that have credit cards. While this may seem reasonable at first glance it's just a myth when you're talking about the average American household.

However this number is very deceiving as they didn't even factor in the number of Americans that don't have credit cards. By doing this they eliminated 23.8% of American households in their calculations. This is a huge factor if you're trying to get the average American credit card debt for all Americans. Another 31.2% of American households pay off their bills as soon as they get them. Thus altogether 55% of all American households owe no credit card debt.

Out of the 45% 29% have $1,000 or more in credit card debt, 21% of households owe $2000 or more, 4% owe $10,000 or more, and 1% owe $21,000 or more. These numbers show that 26% of the American people carry all of the debt that is owed for debt that is $2,000 or more. American households owe very little to credit card companies. Most of the households that due have credit card debt have less than $1,000. The truth is that most of the American people are not in credit card debt and nowhere near the rumored numbers. - 23196

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