?Unsatisfactory Statistics Regarding Credit Card Debt
Although it’s not always good news, numbers can’t lie. Throughout the United States, Americans are racking up some very unpleasant statistics regarding credit card debt. This trend seems to have begun in the 1980’s, because it was during that decade that credit card use started to become more popular and eventually came to be a very normal way to make everyday purchases.
Additional 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.
Once credit cards had made themselves such a normal part of life, debts incurred from credit cards also became normal. Statistics on levels of credit card debt from that time show that most Americans were getting themselves into nine thousand dollars worth of debt annually, most of which credit cards were directly responsible for.
Many consumers who found themselves deep in debt because of credit card use did so because of a misunderstanding of the process. They thought that the credit cards were connected to their own money that they already had.
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.
In addition to purchases made, interest also builds up in your credit card account, bringing debt to staggeringly high levels. The average interest rate on most credit cards is roughly fourteen percent, a rate that can quickly change a small credit card balance into overwhelming debt.