9 September 2010
According to a recent report UK households are increasingly struggling with personal debt problems, and many have no solution to help them out of their debt problems. A report has been released by the debt charity, the Consumer Credit Counselling Service, showing that nearly one third of people seeking assistance from the charity have been told that there is no solution to their financial problems.
Over 96,000 clients were counselled by the charity in the first six months of the year, and of these over 30,000 were told that there was no solution to their debt issues. The charity said that in cases such as these consumers needed to earn more but in many cases this simply wasn’t possible.
On average those that could not be helped had outgoings that were around £449 higher than their income. This was for a variety of reasons, such as losing income, having hours shortened at work, or having an extra expense such as a baby.
Debt problems in the UK have been further highlighted in a report from the UK’s Office for National Statistics, which showed that nearly four million households, equating to 20 percent – had no adult in work living in the household. The situation could be worsened as a result of the job cuts expected due to the cutbacks being made in the public sector as part of the emergency budget to cut the public deficit.
Tags: debt, Consumer Credit Counselling Service, households, creditThe Money Advice Trust said: “We have grave concerns that households witnessing a fall in income due to unemployment will start to default on debt repayments, and that we may start to see a sharp rise in personal insolvencies. Research undertaken by the University of Wales last year found there were 2m ‘iceberg bankruptcies’ in the UK – employed people who could not afford any fall in income without defaulting on debt repayments.”