How much Credit Card Debt do Americans have?

There’s an interesting article that crossed our desk today from AP (Associated Press) Study: Americans love-hate their credit cards, by Candice Choi. At first we thought “Let’s file this under overstating the obvious”, but then we read it through and we found an interesting paragraph with some very intriguing data:

Last year, Americans held about $850 billion in credit card debt, according to the Consumer Federation of America. That’s about four times the amount of credit card debt held in 1990.In 2005, 35 percent of credit card accounts - or 242 million cards - incurred a late fee, according to the federation.

Of course when the numbers get so big, they stop making sense, since we can’t get a firm grasp on the underlying concept. We love numbers, and we like to take a look at the forest and the trees, and this is a case where the forest doesn’t make much sense to the average person, and we would like to put the data in terms that we can all relate to, taking a look at the trees so to speak.

Let’s put some data on the line, complete with zeros and commas:
Total U.S. credit card debt: $850,000,000,000
Total U.S. households: 100,000,000
Total U.S. population: 300,000,000
So, doing the math we find that:
The average credit card debt per household is $8,500
The average credit card debt per American is: $2,833
That’s astounding, there are households who have no credit card debt, that means that - statistically speaking - for each household that has no credit card debt, there’s a very good chance that there’s another household who has $17,000 in credit card debt.
And $2,833 is a scary figure as well, since it counts every single American, including newborns, and individuals who have no debt whatsoever.

Even more alarming is the fact that during the real estate good years, a lot of family rolled over their credit card debt into mortgage refinancing (refi) or into home equity lines of credit, or home equity loans. If those figures were available (I’m afraid they are not), how much would the average consumer debt be per household and per individual in the U.S.?
Where do you and your family stand when compared to these statistics?

And most people with credit card debt have late payments which only means bad FICO's
on top of that collections and Bankrups!!! We are at the right place at the right time
to help Struggling Americans www.vrtmg.com/framirez Or you can call (212)990-7059 press option 1 for more info!!

Personal Field Trainer
Fernando Ramirez
(818)626-0569