One-in-four Americans are having major problems handling credit card debt, say the results of a Bankrate commissioned survey. A staggering twenty-five percent worry about how they are going to pay their credit card bills each month and 28 percent feel guilty about how much money they are putting on their cards.
“If the poll had only surveyed people who carry a balance on their credit cards, I’m positive you’d find that those percentages would be much higher,” says Robert Manning, director of the Center for Consumer Financial Services at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
A third of the people surveyed said they had three or more credit cards and a whopping 23 percent have four or more with nearly 10 percent
of those acknowledging they had more than five credit cards. Seventeen percent said they had only one card and the same number of people carry two credit cards. A good chunk of people say they have no credit cards at all (31 percent).
While 55 percent of people surveyed said they pay off their credit card balances each month, another 9 percent say they make only the minimum payment and, scarily, 3 percent say they sometimes cannot make the minimum. That means that close to half of Americans are paying interest to the credit card companies and may be making purchases that they can’t always afford.
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