The Truth About the Average American’s Credit Card Debt

Filed in Credit Cards on Jul.29, 2009

Many sources, including the government, the media, and even bank officials, have claimed that the American people have a lot of credit card debt. There are many rumors going around saying that Americans owe thousands of dollars each in credit card debt. They usually will give statistics with their claims to help back the claims up. However the truth about Americans credit card debt is often skewed and hidden. The only way to see the truth is to break down the numbers.

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.

You may be curious why this is. In reality it’s very simple. It’s due to how they came up with their number for the average American’s debt. They took the outstanding credit card debt that is owed which is $750 billion and divided it by the number of American households that have a minimum of 1 credit card. This is approximately 84 million households. Thus they arrived at $8,000 per household.

An astounding 23.8% of American households don’t even have credit cards! These households weren’t included in the calculation since they don’t have credit cards. Another 31.2% of Americans pay off their cards as soon as they get the bill. This totals to an astounding 55% of American households that have no credit card debt.

For the $1,000+ range there are only 29% that are in that range and only 21% of households that owe $2,000 or more. Finally we can see that only 4% of households owe $10,000+ and 1% of American households have credit card debt in excess of $21,000. We can see that very little to nothing is owed by most of the American households. There are only 21% of American households that actually owe more than $2,000 in credit card debt. This is only 1/5 American households that owe a decent amount of money to credit card companies and we can see that the $8,000 is nowhere near what the average American household owes in credit card debt.

by Layla Vanderbilt

About the Author:

Layla Vanderbilt is the webmaster for a leading website that offers for instant bad debt consolidation advice and guidance.

Tags: Bad Debt, business;finance, Credit Cards, debt, debt consolidation, finance, investing, loans, money, Money Management, Personal Finance

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