this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Averages really obfuscate the story here. A ~$6300 average could mean 6 people carrying $6300 balances or five carrying no balance and one dude carrying $30k+. I'd love to see the distribution here because leaning on credit for necessities is what people do when they're falling out of the middle class.
Ironically a similar thing is marriage. The statistic which is like "1/3 marriages end in divorce" are because of the same person marrying like 3 or 4 times. It's quite a bit (albeit not massively) lower if you only factor in the first marriage
Credit card debt Georg has over 10 million dollars in credit card debt and is an outlier and should not have been counted.
Agree. Weighted arithmetic mean would help. And/or breaking it up by net worth or income.
The article does link to a longer transunion report with more quarterly detail.
There are some other legitimate reasons to put tons in credit too. I built an ADU on my property. Asked the bank for a loan to build it, a second mortgage. They said no, there's not enough equity. (I'd just bought the house a year prior). I explained that the value of the property will go up by more than the amount of the loan I'm asking. Of course they told me they can't give loans based on hypothetical future appraisals. So they advised me to put it all on credit. I had a line of 30k with them after all and that's the exact amount I'd asked for.
So we did. Maxed out the card to build the ADU, got the property reappraised, then got the second mortgage, then used that to pay off the credit card debt, now renting out the ADU for $200 more per month than the loan payment. It all worked out and made perfect sense, but I carried 30k of cc debt for like 4 months while this all went down.