Striking Numbers

• £38.06m - daily write-offs of loans by banks & building societies
• 1,556 people - made redundant daily
• 797,000 - unemployed for 12 month
• 9,000 - number of new debt problems dealt with by CAB each day
• £56,690 - average household debt
• £181m - personal interest paid in UK daily
• every 14 minutes - a property is repossessed
• every 3.78 minutes - someone will be declared insolvent or bankrupt
• £362,200,000 - daily increase in Government national debt (PSDN) 

Servicing Debt

• Four in ten adults in Britain (almost 19m people) are worried about their debt, according to research by R3
• More than four in ten adults in Britain (42%) struggle each month to make it to ‘payday' (11% on a regular basis and 31% occasionally) and the average day this struggle begins is the 20th day after payday according to R3
• According to figures published by R3 over 2 million (2,329,500) holidaymakers have had to borrow on average more than £1000 (£1,130) and will spend seven months paying it back
• uSwitch estimate that every month, 5.4m adults (11%) spend more than they earn, 13m (26%) just break even and 26m (53%) have less than £100 left in their bank account when all else has been paid.
• 1,000 people are seeking some form of formal debt rescheduling every working day.
• 230,137 unsolicited telephone calls companies made to UK consumers daily by debt management and personal loan companies.

Debt iceberg

• Many people are in unrecorded Debt Management Plans which are not included in today’s statistics. According to estimates by R3 this could amount to 500,000 people, more than double the number in formal insolvency procedures. Below them, under the waterline are another 574,000 who are struggling financially but have contacted their creditors informally.
• More worrying are 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.

Plastic & Spending

• There were 143.7m debit, credit or charge cards in circulation in the UK at the end of 2009 according to the UK Payments Council
• Total credit card debt in August 2010 was £58.3bn
• The average interest rate on credit card lending is currently 18.67%, which is 18.17% above base rate (0.5%).
• At the end of 2009 there were 64.4m credit and charge cards in the UK compared with around 62m people in the country.
• According to the BBA the proportion of balances bearing interest is 70%

Source: creditaction.org.uk