Credit Cards

CNN runs a little poll on their home page every day. The question being polled may change once or twice a day. I just about always answer the question just to see how many are responding and what the sentiment is at the time. On January 7, 2009 the question is about credit card debt and has five categories to answer, first is I pay my credit cards off every month, second is less than $1000, third is less than $5000, fourth is less than $10,000 and the fifth alternative is more than $10,000. It is not an accurate poll, I understand that, but enough answer that there is some truth in the data.

This morning with 90,000 responding 49% paid their credit cards off monthly. However, the second largest category behind paying off monthly was more than $10,000 and 20% of the respondents fell into that category for about 18,000 respondents. I was surprised. This afternoon the number of respondents has increase to 180,000 and the percentages haven't changed. About 89,000 pay their credit cards off monthly, but 32,000 have over $10,000 in credit card debt. Wow! Think about the interest rate on that. Sounds like a racket to me.