average credit card balace

In message , snipped-for-privacy@no.spam writes

Do a survey, start with mine at around £12.26. ;-)

I did a Google search and came up with a figure considerably larger than that. I'm not sure why the original poster was incapable of doing the same as I did.

Chris

Looks quite tricky to me, but in the end I got to:

Rob

What is the definition of borrowing? For instance, my cc amount was running at nearly £2K for 3/4 weeks recently - but paid off in full after getting the statement

Then you had borrowed £2K from the credit card company for that period of time. Any money that does not belong to you and which will need to be repaid at some future date would be classed as borrowing.

Chris

What is the definition of borrowing? For instance, my cc amount was running at nearly £2K for 3/4 weeks recently - but paid off in full after getting the statement

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This will average out across the sample set

some people will be included in the survey the day that they have paid off their balance, right up to some people being in the survey the day before their payment is due.

(assuming the companies don't take everyone's payment on the same day, of course)

tim

Interesting...?! How does that differ from invoice factoring, whereby the seller gets paid within a day or two (just as with CC) but receives a bit less than the buyer gets charged (just as with CC).

Applying your argument, the buyer is "borrowing" from the factoring bank. But of course, he isn't really "borrowing" - he's simply using the credit period (say 30 days) as offered by the seller. (For the moment, I'm ignoring what happens after the credit period expires, and/or the monthly CC repayment date passes.)

Or do you regard any credit period as the buyer "borrowing" from the seller?

You'll see the definition in the documents and footnotes - I find some of the comments baffling, frankly. The OP asked for average - 33m active cards are carrying £57B debt - so about £1700. But (I think) 1/3 of debt is paid off before incurring interest.

Latest figures at:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't think it's a survey as such - simply raw data from a 100% sample. But it's not very useful as a snapshot - just totals giving averages. I'm sure demographic variables are in there, but I don't know where the 'figures behind the figures' can be obtained.

Rob

My bill is often £2000-3000 paid off in full on the last day to avoid paying interest. Works wonders with an offset mortgage :-)

I suspect most of those who pay off promptly spend rather less than £1700, or even £3400 a month, so those who don't presumably have much higher average debts.

I haven't mentioned borrowing in the context of invoice factoring. Any argument you think I may have put forward on that exists only in your imagination.

The question was about credit card borrowing, and I've already given my opinion on that.

Chris