I was watching a financial news program last night when I heard an interesting observation from a business professor:

“There has never been a better time to reduce your debts”

Now when you think about this in a bit more detail you realise that this rather educated person is in fact most probably incorrect. How can it be the best time?

The real facts are eveident for each and everyone to see; the rate of unemployment is rising quickly, pay rises are thing of the past and money is scarce. For this reason I can not understand as to how he feels that this is the best time to reduce our debts; the reality is that this is a time when the majority of people have a real lack of money!

At this stage I would like to make it clear that I am not involved in debt management and that what I write in this article is purely an opinion of the current financial situation that we find ourselves in. Please therefore do not take the information as “financial advice”. I am merely an average man from England who is involved in various industries including offering one way links, I run an SEO company and I also provide an SEO copywriting service.

In another way I can actually see where he is coming from; unlike in past years when people could seemingly borrow as much money as they wanted to, the times have now changed and credit is much harder to come by. The companies that we owe money to are also deep in the mire. This may well be a great time to contact the company to arrange an affordable repayment plan.

What kind of deal are you talking about? Well quite simply these companies are also in need of cash and many people are not keeping up their debt repayments. By contacting the company, in writing, and stating that you are eager to pay off the debt but that the interest rates are crippling you in these problematic financial times. Offer them an amount that you could afford to pay on a weekly or a monthly basis and ask them to confirm if this is suitable to them. There are certain ways to write these types of letter and it may well be prudent to ask a debt specialist to contact these companies on your behalf.

I guess that this business professor may well have been correct after all. What do you think?

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.

Only 1 in 20 American households actually carry $8,000 or more in credit card debt. The truth about credit card debt is that most American families actually owe nothing to credit card companies. This is because most of them don’t have credit cards or pay off the bill in full. Out of the households that do owe credit card companies money, most of them only owe $2,000 or less. It’s clear that an average can’t give you the real answer to how much credit card debt the American people have.

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.