Debt Stats - Christmas Debt Special

• Almost 4m people (3,989,272) have already gone into debt to pay for Christmas in 2009, according to research by R3.
• The research also finds that over 6.5m fear they won’t have enough money to pay their bills at the end of the month due to Christmas spending, and 3m admit they’re still paying off debts from Christmas last year.
• Of the 84m unsolicited telephone calls made to UK consumers every year by debt management and personal loan companies, the highest volume of sales calls are received between November and February
• Barclaycard said Christmas transactions peaked on Saturday 19th December at 370 per second at 12.48 pm.

Savings

• Research from Abbey Savings reveal that over one in four (28%) British parents with young children have no savings or investments to use in times of difficulty
• Abbey Savings also reveal that four out of 10 Britons still save nothing at all
• 31% of savers don’t think they have enough money to cope in an emergency. In real figures, this equates to over 15 million people

Debt

• 1,000 people are seeking some form of formal debt rescheduling every working day.
• 386 people today will be declared insolvent or bankrupt. This 1 person becoming bankrupt or entering into an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) every 3.72 minutes
• 128 properties being repossessed every day or 1 property being repossessed every 11.2 minutes.  
• 12.2m people – almost one quarter (24%) of adults in the UK – are hiding some form of debt (be that overdrafts, credit cards, store cards loans etc) from their partner, friends or family according to research completed by AXA. With an average hidden debt of £4,096 this means that there is potentially £50.1bn worth of ‘hidden debt’ in the UK
• The estimated number of households in fuel poverty in the UK rose between 2006 and 2007 by 0.5 million, to stand at around 4 million (around 16 per cent of all households)
• Citizens Advice Bureaux in England & Wales deal with 9,300 new debt problems every working day. 
• A recent profile of CAB clients revealed that CAB debt clients owe an average of £16,971, an amount it would take an average of 93 years to pay off at a rate they can afford.
• 230,137 unsolicited telephone calls made to UK consumers daily by debt management and personal loan companies.
• 2,000 Consumer County Court Judgements (CCJs) were issued every day in the first 3 months of 2009.
• 2,247 people reported they had become redundant every day during 3 months to end September 2009.
• 25,250 applications for consumer credit have been turned down every day.
• 267 mortgage possession claims will be issued and 188 mortgage possession orders will be made today.
• 368 landlord possession claims will be issued and 258 landlord possession orders will be made today.
• The average car will cost £15.13 to run today.    

Plastic card & Personal Loans

• 21.9m plastic card purchase transactions will be made today with a total value of £1.05bn.
• 8.1m cash withdrawals will be made today with a total value of £530m.
• 768,000 (47.5%) applications for consumer credit were rejected by the major UK lenders in July.
• According to the BBA the proportion of credit card balances bearing interest was 73.6% in July 2009.
• Total credit card debt in October 2009 was £54.5bn. The UK collective credit limit on credit cards is £158bn, which is an average credit card limit of £5,129 per person.
• The average interest rate on credit card lending is currently 18.4%, which is 17.54% above base rate (0.5%).
• There are more credit cards in the UK than people according to APACS. At the end of 2008 there were 71.3m credit and charge cards in the UK compared with around 60 million people in the country.

Young people - the IPOD generation (under 30)

• The proportion of 18-24 year olds not in education, employment or training (NEET) increased by 113,000 in the last 12 months to end Q3 2009 and now stands at 933,000 (19.7%). The proportion of 16-18 year olds not in education, employment or training (NEET) stood at 261,000 (13.4%) at the end of Q3 2009. The total of 16 – 24 classed as NEETS now stands at 1.082m which is the highest on record.
• AXA estimate that a fifth of 18-24 year-olds drink alcohol to take their mind off their financial concerns.
• The unemployment rate for 18 to 24 year olds increased by 24,000 (3.3%) on the quarter and 165,000 (28.5%) in the last 12 months to reach 746,000. This means that 18.0% of all 18 to 24 year olds are unemployed which is the highest figure since records for this series began in 1992. 325,000 (43.6%) have been unemployed for longer than 6 months.
• Research from Sainsbury’s Finance highlights that over half of undergraduate students (53%) in the UK are to be given financial assistance by their parents to see them through the financial burden of university.  The average amount of parental financial support given to undergraduates is £8,070 per student during their university life. 
• The UK's largest survey of student finance, published by Push.co.uk, reveals that students who started at university last year can expect to owe nearly £21,200 by the time they leave and new students should reckon on at least £2,000 more than that.

Source: creditaction.org.uk