Striking Numbers

Today in the UK

• Citizen Advice Bureaux dealt with 9,500 new debt problems every working day in England and Wales
• 850,000 people unemployed for more than 12 months
• 1,384 people made redundant daily
• every 4.36 minutes someone will be declared insolvent or bankrupt
• every 14 minutes a property is repossessed
• 372 people every day of the year will be declared insolvent or bankrupt. This is equivalent to 1 person every 53 seconds during a working day.
• £55,884 is the average household debt
• £179 million in personal interest paid in the UK, every day
• 1,000 people today will seek some form of formal debt rescheduling
• £20.71 million daily write-offs of loans by banks and building societies
• 1,577 Consumer County Court Judgements (CCJs) were issued every day during Q1 2011 and the average judgement amount was £3,118.
• The average person will save £2.73 every day
• The average car will cost £16.08 to run today
• The average cost of raising a child from birth to the age of 21 is £27.50 a day
• £199,700,000 is the amount that the Government Public Sector net debt (PSDN) will grow today (equivalent to £2,178 per second)
• £1,156,000,000 total value of all purchases made using plastic cards today.

R3 have suggested that there are 574,000 who are struggling financially but have contacted their creditors informally. More worrying is another group further down comprising of 961,000 individuals who are struggling with debts but have not sought help. This group could find themselves in formal insolvency procedures unless they take swift action.

A survey by Scottish Widows has also found that 35% of UK adults (equivalent to 17 million people nationwide) admit to neglecting their finances. Of these people, 21% said that their debt levels are currently too high for them to feel financially secure, and 25% simply tried not to think about money in their day-to-day lives.

Research by Scottish Provident has found that the average person only considers themselves to be in serious financial difficulty once their debts exceed £15,837. This increases to £16,646 for 18-34 year olds, but is slightly lower for over-55s at £14,424.

Research by unbiased.com has revealed that a striking 22% of homeowner mortgage repayments if the Bank of England base rate were to rise from its record low of 0.5%. According to the findings, 16% of those on a standard variable rate mortgage and 13% of those on a tracker rate mortgage did not know that their repayments would go up if the base-rate increased.

Credit cards

There are more credit cards in the UK than people according to the UK Payments Council. At the end of 2010 there were an estimated 63.0m credit and charge cards in the UK compared with around 62m people in the country.

Total credit card debt in April 2011 was £57.8bn.

The average interest rate on credit card lending is currently 18.36%, which is 17.86% above base rate (0.5%).

According to the BBA the proportion of credit card balances bearing interest is just under two-thirds.

Source: creditaction.org.uk