England is a place that knows a lot about borrowing money. There are more credit card borrowers in the UK than any other part of Europe, and in fact most of Europe added together only begins to meet the amount of consumer borrowing going on within the shores of blighty. With things going bad for the economy, it's also fairly obvious that personal debt in England will begin to increase too. It's shown quite a direct trend since 2008, and it doesn't seem to be getting better.
At the end of 2010 it was estimated that 1.5 billion pounds worth of debt was owed around the UK. That works out to about 300 per person, which is a staggering amount for a nation. But the nature of this debt is often inaccurately portrayed in the media. The presumption seems to be that debt directly correlates to spending too much money on consumer items. As such it has a stigma attached to it, and one that the statistics show it really doesn't deserve.
So then critics fall back on the notion that borrowers should be able to anticipate a change in their work status and squirrel something away for rainy days. With about 1,700 people getting laid off each day, it seems ridiculous to suppose that all of them could have predicted what was coming. Things are changing too fast for that, and it's this cataclysm between the lag of spending and repaying that's causing the personal debt crisis in many ways. As for squirreling bits away, pay has flat-lined across the UK. Keeping up with standard bills is hard enough without making allowances for bad times ahead.
Almost fifty percent of debt is caused by these kinds of circumstances, and only 10% is accounted for by people spending too much on luxuries. That's the real story behind the mounting levels of debt in England. When you look at what it takes to live these days, it's not surprising that so many people are dependent on loans or credit. As a first time buyer, you need to put down 20% of a house's value as a deposit. That's an average of around thirty thousand pounds.
Similarly, more and more rental properties demand that leasers use six months rent upfront: so just to temporarily rent an average property, you have to put down around four thousand pounds in one go. There doesn't seem to be a clear end in sight when it comes to personal debt in the UK.
At the end of 2010 it was estimated that 1.5 billion pounds worth of debt was owed around the UK. That works out to about 300 per person, which is a staggering amount for a nation. But the nature of this debt is often inaccurately portrayed in the media. The presumption seems to be that debt directly correlates to spending too much money on consumer items. As such it has a stigma attached to it, and one that the statistics show it really doesn't deserve.
So then critics fall back on the notion that borrowers should be able to anticipate a change in their work status and squirrel something away for rainy days. With about 1,700 people getting laid off each day, it seems ridiculous to suppose that all of them could have predicted what was coming. Things are changing too fast for that, and it's this cataclysm between the lag of spending and repaying that's causing the personal debt crisis in many ways. As for squirreling bits away, pay has flat-lined across the UK. Keeping up with standard bills is hard enough without making allowances for bad times ahead.
Almost fifty percent of debt is caused by these kinds of circumstances, and only 10% is accounted for by people spending too much on luxuries. That's the real story behind the mounting levels of debt in England. When you look at what it takes to live these days, it's not surprising that so many people are dependent on loans or credit. As a first time buyer, you need to put down 20% of a house's value as a deposit. That's an average of around thirty thousand pounds.
Similarly, more and more rental properties demand that leasers use six months rent upfront: so just to temporarily rent an average property, you have to put down around four thousand pounds in one go. There doesn't seem to be a clear end in sight when it comes to personal debt in the UK.
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