I saw a headline about the average Canadian consumer (i.e., not including mortgage) debt being almost $27,000 and it reminded me of an ATM receipt I came across a few months back. The previous person was checking their credit card limit (they only had $40 left) but the big # that caught my eye was that they owed more than $20,000 on their credit card! How do you spend so much money without buying a car on your credit card?

So I was not too surprised at this headline. But then I read the article and this ended up being an example of a shock-and-awe headline. It turns out move than $19,000 of the $27,000 is due to a car loan and only ~$3500 is due to credit card debt. That’s not a lot of money, and if there is anything that Canadians can be faulted for, it might just be overspending on a nice car!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: canadians, financialsystem