By Melissa Sim
CREDIT card debt hit an estimated $3.4 billion last December, the highest for that month in 20 years. More people have also sought help in settling their outstanding bills.
Going by figures from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the number of credit cards rose 11 per cent in the last year, but rollover balances jumped more than 13 per cent.
Rollover balances, which are the unpaid amounts that are subject to interest charges, have been climbing steadily since 2006.
Also up: The proportion of card holders with bills unpaid 30 days past the due date. It rose from 1.38 per cent last July to 1.67 per cent in December.
All this has made for a busier time for Credit Counselling Singapore (CCS), a non-profit organisation which helps debtors work out instalment plans to pay off their debts.
It said it handled a third more cases in the second half of last year than in the first half - 415 counselling appointments in the second half of the year, up from 299 in the first half.
Talks on credit management organised by CCS also started drawing bigger audiences - 1,254 in the second half of the year, against 929 in the first half.
Who is the typical debtor? That person is likely to be male and aged between 35 and 44, said the Credit Bureau (Singapore), which collects credit-related information and supplies this to credit providers such as banks.
The profile pieced together by the bureau is of a person likely to have defaulted on bill payments and, as a result, has had a credit account with an outstanding balance closed in the last….
See full article here.
http://www.asiaone.com/Business/News/My%2BMoney/Story/A1Story20090226-124756.html
Click on image to enlarge
Other Related Articles:
- MoneyTree Singapore on 938LIVE - The Living Room
- MoneyTree Singapore in St. Anthony Canossian Sec. Sch
- June 2009 Holiday Programme
- 3 Impressive MoneyTree Video - Seeing is Believing
- MoneyTree on the Papers Again!
Other Updates in News
Email to your friends
0 Responses to “Credit card debts ballooning”