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.
Research from Alliance & Leicester has revealed that for 3.4 million Britons, money is the biggest concern in their life, with nearly a fifth (18%) worrying about money on a daily basis, and nearly a third (30%) fretting about money several times a week.
As many as 7.5 million parents (40% of parents with adult children) have had to help adult children pay off their debts with the average family forking out £2,540 on behalf of their kids, according to research by MoneyExpert.com. The most popular forms of child debt slashed by parents are mobile phone bills, car finance and credit card bills, although nearly one in ten parents have had to help their child keep up with mortgage repayments.
The majority of people who take out a personal loan to consolidate existing debts go on to build up more debt and struggle with the consequences. Research commissioned by moneysupermarket.com shows 28% of Brits (12.7 million people) have taken out a loan to consolidate some or all of their existing borrowing. Worryingly, of those who took out a personal loan to merge their existing debt, 8.4 million people (66%) continue to build up even more debt.
14,000 properties (77 a day) were taken into possession in the first six months of 2007. This rose by nearly 18% compared with the previous half-year, and nearly 30% compared with the first half of 2006.
The number of mortgages in arrears of three months or more at the end of June 2007 rose to an estimated 125,100, up 4% compared with the end of December 2006.
There were 26,956 individual insolvencies (bankruptcy or IVA - Individual Voluntary Arrangement) in England and Wales in the second quarter of 2007 on a seasonally adjusted basis. This was a decrease of 8.1% on the previous quarter and an increase of 4.2% on the same period a year ago.
8.2m British adults are in serious debt and 2.1m are struggling with repayments according to the latest quarterly research commissioned by Thomas Charles and conducted by YouGov. They found that 18% adults in Britain have £10k or more of unsecured debt, equivalent to 8.2 million adults. This is a rise of 30% on last year.
Over two million British consumers (6%) cannot quantify how much debt they’re in, according to research carried out by Unbiased.co.uk. This trend seems worse amongst young people, with 41% of 18-24 year olds unaware of their current debt burden to within £500.
Around a quarter of working Britons will be refused loans, mortgages and credit cards by 2011 as they struggle with mounting debts. Analyst Datamonitor said the number of borrowers blacklisted by mainstream lenders will increase from 7 million to 8.6 million over the next four years.
Borrowing costs hit a six-year high as the Bank of England pushed up interest rates in July 2007 by a quarter-point to 5.75% following a jump in inflation. This was the fifth rise in 12 months.
1.2m electricity customers and 0.8m gas customers are in debt and have debt payment arrangement scheduled to last longer than 13 weeks.
Almost half of working Brits were in the red at least once last year and over 2.1m are permanently overdrawn.
More than 7.4m household bill payments have been missed or paid late in the past six months. 1.23m regular bill payments ranging from gas and electricity to mobile phones and council tax have been missed each month.
More than 160,000 people contacted the Consumer Credit Counselling Service (CCCS) in the first half of this year - an increase of 18.5% on the same period last year.
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.
Personal debt as a proportion of income has risen from 105% in 1997 to 164% in 2006 - the highest ever recorded and the highest in the developed world.
The number of county court judgments (CCJs) has risen to a near 10-year high. A total of 247,187 consumer debt related CCJs were issued in the first three months of the year - the highest quarterly total since the summer of 1997.
According to a recent report by the Legal Services Research Centre (LSRC) 89% of debt clients interviewed reported worrying about their money problems ‘most’ or ‘all’ of the time. Perhaps as a consequence, the great majority of clients believed their health had been adversely affected by their debt problems. 48% of clients described the impact of problems on their health as ‘great’, and 43% felt that their heath had suffered ‘to some extent’. Around three in five clients reported having received treatment, medication or counselling as a result. 45% of clients stated that debt problems had a negative effect on relationships with partners
Almost half of people in the UK are getting stressed at least once a week (47%) according to the Samaritans, with three quarters of people getting stressed at least once a month (74%). The biggest cause of stress for most people is money (51%), followed by job (38%), then family (27%).
Research by BBC Breakfast suggests that more than a quarter (27%) of us are anxious about how to pay the bills.
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
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