My first reaction to this was wah piang! That's a lot of money to owe a bank at 15-30% interest per annum. I did more research and it turns out that Obama doesn't need to panic that much.
The problem with statistics is the use and proliferation of the average. Averages are skewed by extremes. So if nine people make $100 and the tenth made $10,000, they made an average of $1,090. Not quite representative of the situation right? To the rescue is the statistic known as the median.
The US households that did have CC debt, the median amount owed was $1,900. Here's more comforting news:
- Only 29% of households owe $1,000 or more on their cards.
- 21% owe $2,000 or more.
- 6% owe $8,000 or more.
- 4% owe $10,500 or more.
- 1% owe $21,400 or more.
More not-so-bad news:
- 23.8% of American households have no credit cards at all - no bank cards, no retail cards, nothing.
- Another 31.2% of the households the Fed surveyed paid off their most recent credit card bills in full.
- So together, the households that owed nothing on credit cards equaled 55% of the total.
Woof. So remember stats aren't everything they seem to be.
1 comment:
I guess they need to stop sending pre-approved credit cards to uni students.
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