Tag: Debt Posts

I’ve slowly been chipping away at my loans these last few years, hoping for that day to come when I’ll be debt free. My net worth is positive, thanks to some RRSPs and the down payment I put into my car, but having debt hanging over your head obviously kind of sucks. I have a little spreadsheet that sort of tracks where I’m at. In April of 2008 I owed around $25,500 in both student loans and car loans. At my peak, I had around $40,000 worth of student loans, a fairly hefty debt load by anyone’s standards. Back in January I finally paid my car off. The payments on that were $400 per month, so it was nice to have that money back in my pocket each month (and somewhat of a necessity for moving back to Chilliwack). The current value of all my loans today is around $11,500, […]

I ran across this article this morning about credit card debt, and started trying to figure out what it meant in terms of numbers. Nearly 80 percent of American families have at least one credit card, 44 percent of families carry a balance on their credit cards, and Americans pay about $15 billion a year in penalty fees, according to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s office. The current population in the US is around 305 million (2008 census). I don’t know how many families are in the US, but let’s take a rough stab and there are about three people per family, or around 100 million families. If 44% of those people typically carry a balance on their cards, then we’re left with about 44 million families that carry a balance on their credit cards monthly. So, if we take $15 billion dollars and spread that out over 44 million people, […]