The Average Family Credit-Card Debt

Use of credit cards is ubiquitous in the U.S. Whether you use credit cards to purchase necessary items such as groceries and doctors' visits or for luxury items such as big-screen televisions and family trips, understanding how your family's credit card debt compares to the average family can help you determine if you need to curtail spending.

National Figures

The average American family carries somewhere around $8,000 in credit card debt, according to the Federal Reserve, notes an MSN Money Central article. Tally that up and you get about $700 billion in credit card debt in the U.S., notes the same article. When you look at the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finance from 2007, however, the average family with credit card debt carried a mean debt load of $7,300.

Misconceptions

This doesn't mean that your neighbors are likely to have a credit card debt load of more than $7,000. In fact, they may not have any credit card debt at all, points out a Bargaineering article. When you include every household in coming up with a median credit-card debt, that figure drops to just over $3,000, since many households carry very little or no debt from plastic at all.

Accuracy

A Money-zine article explains that statistics on credit card debt cited by the press, economists and pundits tend to be out of date and should be taken with a grain of salt. That's because credit card debt statistics aren't routinely gathered nationally or in a uniform manner that allows for easy reporting. For instance, surveys by private organizations tend to be quite localized and ask about overall debt, not credit card debt alone.

Trends

The balances of credit card debt held by American families seemed to fall as the economy worsened from 2007 to 2010.That may be because as jobs became less secure, families reined in spending on nonessentials to put themselves on better financial footing should an income be lost. It's normal for consumer spending to decrease in a depression. As the economy rebounds, however, this trend may reverse itself, as it has historically done with the ebb and flow of the economy.

Solutions

Raking up high balances on credit cards is surprisingly easy. Not only is paying with a credit card convenient, especially in the Internet shopping age, but it also makes it easy to rationalize spending beyond your means. Cutting down on your family's credit card debt requires that you stop pulling out the plastic for purchases. In addition, you must pay more than the minimum on your credit card bills each month. Otherwise, your credit card debt remains largely unchanged even if you cut up all your cards.