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A Good Credit Card For You

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.

You may have heard the statistic that the average American has more than $8,000 in credit card debt. While this statistic is true, it only holds true if you’re considering every American in the country. Most statistics don’t include every American, only those that have credit cards. Thus our image of the average American family with a house and kids is skewed as not all of these “average” Americans have credit card debt. The problem is when they mention the word average in their statistics we are lead to believe that it’s this type of family that we often think of when in fact they actually use the mean of the people who have credit card debt.

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.

However this number is very deceiving as they didn’t even factor in the number of Americans that don’t have credit cards. By doing this they eliminated 23.8% of American households in their calculations. This is a huge factor if you’re trying to get the average American credit card debt for all Americans. Another 31.2% of American households pay off their bills as soon as they get them. Thus altogether 55% of all American households owe no credit card debt.

Out of the 45% 29% have $1,000 or more in credit card debt, 21% of households owe $2000 or more, 4% owe $10,000 or more, and 1% owe $21,000 or more. These numbers show that 26% of the American people carry all of the debt that is owed for debt that is $2,000 or more. American households owe very little to credit card companies. Most of the households that due have credit card debt have less than $1,000. The truth is that most of the American people are not in credit card debt and nowhere near the rumored numbers.

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