Some Sobering Facts

These figures may underline the seriousness of our situation in the UK in prepect of debt and finances.This is frightening basis or where our economy stands.
Total UK personal debt at the end of February 2008 stood at £1,421bn. The growth rate increased to 8.9% for the previous 12 months which equates to an increase of ~ £111bn. Total secured lending on homes at the end of February 2008 stood at £1,194bn. This has increased 9.4% in the last 12 months. Total consumer credit lending to individuals in February 2008 was £227bn. This has increased 6.6% in the last 12 months. Total lending in February 2008 grew by £9.8bn. Secured lending grew by £7.4bn in the month. Consumer credit lending grew by £2.4bn.
Average household debt in the UK is ~ £9,100 (excluding mortgages). This figure increases to £21,166 if the average is based on the number of households who actually have some form of unsecured loan. Average household debt in the UK is ~ £57,050 (including mortgages). Average owed by every UK adult is ~ £29,926 (including mortgages). Average outstanding mortgage for the 11.8m households who currently have mortgages now stands at ~ £100,990. Two fifths of mortgagors have secured debts of over £90,000, up from one fifth in 2004.
Britain's interest repayments have soared to £94.5bn in the last 12months. The average interest paid by each household on their total debt is approximately £3,794 each year which has increased £380 in the last 12 months. Average consumer borrowing via credit cards, motor and retail finance deals, overdrafts and unsecured personal loans has risen to £4,774 per average UK adult at the end of February 2008.
Britain's personal debt is increasing by ~ £1 million every 5 minutes.

Today in the UK:

Consumers will borrow an additional £304m today
Consumers will pay £259m in interest today
The average household debt will increase by over £12.22 today
74 properties will be repossessed today
292 people today will be declared insolvent or bankrupt
2,750 County Court Judgements (CCJs) issued
4,000 fixed rate mortgages will come to an end today.
388 mortgage possession claims will be issued and 272 mortgage possession orders will be made today
404 landlord possession claims will be issued and 306 landlord possession orders will be made today.
Citizen Advice Bureaus will deal with 6,600 debt problems today
The average car will cost £15.42 to run today
More than 7,716 loan repayments are going unpaid every day
The average home will cost £30 today to run
Raising a child to the age of 21 will now set you back £23.50 daily
£526m will be withdrawn from cash machines today.
24.5m transactions worth £1.4bn will be spent on plastic cards today
1/3rd of all groceries we buy today will end up in the dustbin.
Servicing Debt:
A survey by price comparison site moneysupermarket.com found 30 per cent of Brits don't think they can cope much longer financially and 84 per cent said that they have financial worries. Up to 6.5 million people have been forced to consolidate their debts in the past three years in a bid to keep borrowing under control according to MoneyExpert.com. 1.29 million of them have moved debts of more than £20,000 run up on loans, credit cards, store cards and overdrafts to one lender and people consolidating debts of £20,000 or more are likely to be using loans secured against their house. According to uSwitch the recent fuel price rises will plunge a further 500,000 into fuel poverty, bringing the total number of people caught in the trap to 4.5 million. After this year's pay rises, UK workers will be taking home an extra £44 a month on average but millions of families will be worse off as they already facing an increase of £148 a month in essential living costs.

Last Quarter 2007
35,662 mortgage possession claims were issued on a seasonally adjusted basis, 14% higher than in the fourth quarter of 2006 and 2% higher than in the third quarter of 2007. 25,008 mortgage possession orders were made on a seasonally adjusted basis.
37,127 landlord possession claims were issued and 28,116 landlord possession orders were made on a seasonally adjusted basis. 27,100 properties (74 a day) were taken into possession during 2007. This is a 21% increase on 2006.
According to uSwitch Britain is suffering from a bad case of affluenza - "we are caught in the grip of a spiral of conspicuous consumption where it's no longer enough to keep up with the Joneses, but instead we want to live like our favourite celebrities". 4.8m adults spend more than they earn and 9m adults just break even at the end of every month.
MoneyExpert.com research shows that some 6.9 million household bills went unpaid in the past six months, showing that household budgets everywhere are feeling the strain. Figures show that of all household bills people are most likely to overlook their council tax bill, with a staggering 2.3 million people - around one in twenty adults - claiming to have paid their council tax late or not at all in the past six months.
Money worries concern UK adults more than any other social issue, over and above terrorism, immigration, climate change and gun crime, according to a new report from AXA. However, despite the fact it worries more adults individually than any other social issue, as a nation we class terrorism, immigration and gun crime of greater social concern. 43% of adults said money worries is the social issue that has the greatest impact on them
New figures show that debt enquiries to Citizens Advice Bureaux in England and Wales have hit a record high, increasing by 20% in the last year and bringing the total to 1.7 million in 2006/07. The number of debt problems brought to bureaux has doubled in the last 10 years. Debt is now the number one issue advised on in bureaux, accounting for one in three of all enquiries and equates to 6,600 new debt problems a day. According to research by the Conservative Social Justice Policy Group between 7 and 9 million people in Britain claim to have had a serious debt problem and they estimate that British consumers are on average twice as indebted as those in Continental Europe. Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) clients have an average of £13,000 of debt which is nearly 17.5 times their monthly income. On average it would take CAB clients 77 years to pay back their debts in full.
Three quarters (74%) of British couples find money the hardest subject to talk about with their partners according to the Financial Services Authority (FSA). They also found that over a quarter (27%) of couples regularly argue when they try to discuss their finances; about a third (32%) of couples lie to their partners about how much they spend on their credit cards; over a third (35%) of British couples are kept awake at night worrying about their money situation
Total credit card debt in February 2008 was £54.8bn. The UK collective credit limit on credit cards is ~ £177bn. The average interest rate on credit card lending is currently 17.77%, around 12.5% above base rate (5.25%). More than five million people have missed monthly payments on credit cards in the past six months (11% of credit card customers). Late payment fees average £12 a time for missed payments which totals to £61 million for the six months to December 2007.
Research from the Post Office reveals that one in four credit card holders will be starting the New Year more dependent on credit than in 2007, with 41 per cent intending to rely on their credit card for day to day living costs such as grocery shopping. The combined value of transactions made on charge, credit, debit and store cards was £511bn in 2006. Plastic cards in issue were 181m in 2006. This works out at just under 4 plastic cards for every adult in the UK.
284 plastic transactions took place every second in the UK using payment cards (excluding petrol and oyster cards) and there were 92 cash withdrawals / second (equal to £6,305 / second) from UK's 63,420 cash machines in 2007.
Adult children are ‘sapping' their parents' savings and investments at an increasing rate of knots, as Scottish Widows reveals the position has got even worse over the past year. Over half (55%) of parents have given or loaned their children or grandchildren thousands of pounds compared to a figure of 39% last year - an increase of 16%. The average amount given by parents to their offspring is £12,610. Four in ten (42%) adult children have used their handouts to pay off debts and 29% to buy a house.
Research from the Personal Finance Research Centre shows young adults seemed especially susceptible to strong pressures to consume, and were prepared to borrow to do so. The use of credit to meet everyday expenditure was a way of life. For some the line between needs and wants was virtually indistinguishable.
CCCS research shows that debt levels for the under-25s increase with age. The average consumer debt for 24 year olds in 2006 was £16,351.Personal loans make up the largest part of this debt (56%), followed by credit cards (28%). Homebuyers under 25 owe an average of £20,290 on unsecured credit, compared to £12,113 for tenants in the same age group.
Pensioners / Pensions:
23% of households headed by a person over the age of 60 owe money on consumer credit agreements. 1 in 8 over-60s were repaying a mortgage including 4% of people aged 80-84. 1 in 20 people in their 60s, 70s and 80s admit to constantly struggling to keep up with commitments or having fallen into arrears.
According to the Consumer Credit Counselling Service (CCCS) for the first time, clients over 60 have the highest levels of debt, averaging £29,642. New estimates from Age Concern put the number of pensioner households living in fuel poverty now at 2.25 million, with an estimated 250,000 pensioner households pushed into fuel poverty by the price rises this year. Research from Scottish Widows reveals that over 1.5 million of those aged 55 and over (34% of those aged over 55) claim they can't afford to retire at state retirement age due to lack of pension savings.
Citizens Advice Bureaux in England and Wales have seen mortgage arrears problems shoot up by 35% in the first two months of 2008 compared with the same period in 2007The Bank of England said 73,000 new mortgages were approved in February 2008 which is the lowest monthly figure since July 1995.
Gross mortgage lending declined to an estimated £24 billion in February, down 7% from £25.9 billion in January and 6% from £25.6 billion February 2007, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders.
37% of mortgages taken out by home movers in January 2008 were "interest only" mortgages compared with only 12% taken out in June 2003. 28% of these "interest only" mortgages were taken out without a repayment plan specified to repay the capital.
At the end of 2007 there were 129,808 mortgages which were > 3 months in arrears.
According to the FSA over the next 12 months, approximately 1.4 million fixed-rate mortgages will come to the end of their fixed-rate term. For many consumers, this will mean that the cost of their mortgage will increase significantly (an average of £210 a month if they simply revert to their lender's standard variable rate).
At the end of 2007 there were 463,000 people have missed a monthly repayment on their mortgage in the past six months, representing around four per cent of the 11.8 million outstanding mortgages.
Research from Alliance & Leicester reveals 4.2 million Britons could be reaching for the brochures without having paid for their previous jaunt. More than one in five (22 per cent) spent as long as a year paying off their last main holiday and nearly 900,000 (2 per cent) still haven't paid the final bill.
The average wedding costs around £20,000. It costs an average of £386 to attend a wedding. Research by WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) has revealed that households in the UK throw away around a third of all of the food we buy.
Money Education / Financial Literacy:
A high number of people regularly fail to budget effectively each month resulting in 64% of people running out of cash on average 5 days before their next pay cheque.
Research from Nationwide Building Society reveals that 75% of people in the UK don't understand the monetary value a 1% difference in mortgage rates can make.
National Consumer Council research reveals more than 27m people in England and Wales do not have a will.
Around 15 per cent of 18 to 24- year-olds think an individual savings account (ISA) is an iPod accessory, and one in 10 reckon it's an energy drink. With rising personal debt levels in Britain, and a lack of long-term savings, better money management seems a pressing issue.
Savings:
Recent research reveals there has been a dramatic fall in level of savings. 37% of people claim to be unable to save anything at all and 3.74 million people are saving over 20% less than they were a year ago.
Half the population (52%) could survive financially for just 17 days, should they suffer an unexpected loss of income, according to research by Combined Insurance.