Posts Tagged ‘households’


Debts lead to lack of savings for households

Friday, August 19th, 2011

It has been reported that factors such as high living costs, households debts, and a drop in income is results in millions of households across the UK being unable to save any money. New research has been carried on to show that around five million households in the UK are failing to save enough money whilst almost 50 percent of them are concerned about their debts.

The report was commissioned by the debt charity the Consumer Credit Counselling Service. Figures that were released by the Financial Inclusion Centre have revealed that around 4.3 million households have no savings at all and over 1 million households with savings of less than £1000.

Many of these households are already at risk of facing problems if there are any unexpected costs that they incur. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) found that around 27 percent of households that had no savings had become reliant on credit for day to day spending on a regular basis compared to 9 percent of those that had savings of between £1000 and £10,000.

The Consumer Credit Counselling Service also revealed that only 5.4 percent of people that sought help from the debt charity had any form of savings in place, and officials from the charity think that the situation could become increasingly worse due to inflation and high living costs. There are also rising concerns that struggling households could turn to high interest borrowing because they cannot get finance in the traditional way.

One official said: ‘Households that are already struggling may find traditional lenders unwilling to provide further credit and are therefore drawn to short-term credit solutions. Individuals turning to short-term loans and credit cards should be wary of the high interest rates that often accompany these products. Overall debt can quickly snowball out of control.’

Tags: Inclusion, debt, Overall debt, snowball, high living costs, households, savings

UK households struggle with debt

Thursday, September 9th, 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.

The 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.”

Tags: debt, credit, Consumer Credit Counselling Service, households

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