Today in the UK

• 334 people every day of the year will be declared insolvent or bankrupt. This is equivalent to 1 person every 59 seconds during a working day

• 1,391 Consumer County Court Judgements (CCJs) were issued every day during Q2 2011 and the average judgement amount was £3,345

• Citizen Advice Bureaux dealt with 8,910 new debt problems every working day in England and Wales during the year ending June 2011

• The average cost of raising a child from birth to the age of 21 is £27.50 a day

• 99 properties were repossessed every day during Q2 2011

• 140 new people became unemployed for more than 12 months every day during the 12 months to end July 2011

• 1,775 people reported they had become redundant every day during 3 months to end July 2011

• £111,500,000 is the amount that the Government Public Sector Net Debt (PSDN), including financial interventions, will grow today (equivalent to £1,291 per second).

• £141,370,000 is the interest the Government has to pay each day on the UKs net debt of £2258.8bn (which includes financial interventions). This is estimated to rise to £182m a day in 2015-16

• 197 mortgage possession claims will be issued and 154 mortgage possession orders will be made today

• 383 landlord possession claims will be issued and 258 landlord possession orders will be made today

• The UK population is projected to grow by 1,205 people a day over the next decade

• 25.2m plastic card purchase transactions will be made today with a total value of £1.278bn

• 8.0m cash withdrawals will be made today with a total value of £530m

• The average car will cost £16.08 to run today

• It costs £67.85 on average to fill a car with a 50 litre tank with unleaded petrol

• The average Mortgage Interest rate is 3.41%

Plastic/Credit Card Debt

• There are 62.2m credit and charge cards in the UK, compared with around 62.3m people in the country

• Total credit card debt in August 2011 was £57.0bn

• The average interest rate on credit card lending is currently 18.26%, which is 17.76% above base rate (0.5%)

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

Servicing Debt

The Insolvency Service said there were 30,513 individual insolvencies in England and Wales (334 people a day or 1 every 4.31 minutes) in Q2 2011. This was an increase of 1.2% on the previous quarter and a decrease of 12.2% on the same period a year ago.

However, these figures do not include the number of people using informal insolvency solutions such as Debt Management Plans. R3 estimate that there may be as many as 700,000 people using these.

R3 have also previously suggested that there are another 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.

Source: creditaction.org.uk