YNAB You Need A Budget

[roger]

[U.S.] Credit-card debt fell to $679 billion in the first quarter of 2012 vs. $837 billion in the same period in 2008: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/consum ... 2012-07-24

$158 billion is a lotta billion. My story is gonna be that YNAB and Dave Ramsey are responsible for this.

[DeguelloTex]

They don't really talk about what they consider credit card debt, as far as I could tell. Almost every single penny I spend shows up on my credit card balance at some point but exactly $0.00 is what I would consider debt.

[brown685]

In these calculations, whatever balance you had when they reported it to the credit agencies would be the debt you contributed to the figure. So if you have about $1000 on your credit card that you pay off every month, and that is what they are reporting, then you are contributing $1000 to the national credit card debt. In this case, what you have is short term debt, that you are probably paying no interest on. Of course the retailer paid a fee for you to use the credit card, so the CC company still got paid for this debt.

What I would like to see is how much CC debt actually had interest paid on it by the consumer.

James

[jessiebird]

$679 billion is still a lot of debt. But a considerable portion of that is mine, so...

[roger]

I'm like the guy who said if he had all the money in the world he'd pay off his debt as far as it would go.

[Patzer]

$158 billion is a lotta billion. My story is gonna be that YNAB and Dave Ramsey are responsible for this.

My story would be that half of that is the card issuers writing off bad debt, and another 10% of it is people who pay the balance in full every month spending less.

I've got a piece of that debt number, because each month my card issuers report my current balance. Never mind that I pay in full and never pay interest; they report the statement balances and that gets rolled up into the debt number.

Patzer

[smallLife]

Another option: with all of the banking scandals and increased awareness over fees and charges, people are using cards less overall. There is a marked trend towards debit card usage and away from credit card usage for regular items as a byproduct of the recession. So part decreased spending, part decreased credit card usage, and potentially part debt payback.