While browsing some of my RSS feeds the other night, I stumbled upon a rather interesting survey over on the Lending Club website. The site, which offers a peer-to-peer lending marketplace, took a survey back between May 20th-24th to try and gauge consumer knowledge of credit and debt, especially in light of recent hard times.
The results were… a little discouraging, to say the least.
The survey found that, despite the hard lessons you’d think most people had learned during the economic downturn, many are continuing to carry high levels of credit card debt, while remaining clueless about not only their credit score, but how to improve it as well.
What we have here, is… failure to communicate
One of the key findings of the survey was whether or not consumers attempted to negotiate interest rates on their credit cards. According to their findings, 93% of those polled knew it was possible to negotiate their rates, yet only 29% actually tried to talk their rates down. That’s right, less than half of those polled even bothered to try and renegotiate even when they knew they could. No wonder so many people are in desperate need of debt relief.
Furthermore, they found that 64% of everyone polled had an interest rate of 14% or more on at least one of their cards, with another 31% paying 20% or more in interest. Meanwhile, those people who bothered to try and negotiate their high interest rates? 68% of them were successful, according to the survey.
Boys vs. Girls
The survey then went on to perform a gender breakdown. They found that women are less likely to know either their credit score or their interest rate than men (65% of women know the score, as opposed to 74% of men who are aware of their score). Finally, they reported that a total of 31% of men and women do NOT know their credit score.
Now have we learned anything?
More than ever, it’s apparent that people are in need of credit repair, but this survey raises the question, “Do they even want it?” I mean, how else can you explain the fact that just about everyone knows they can do something about their credit score and interest rates, but won’t? If anything, this proves that the current financial debacle we’ve gotten ourselves into hasn’t really taught us anything about our spending habits; that we’ll just keep digging ourselves further into this hole until we dig our way out of it.
Want to take charge of your credit NOW?
If you look at this survey and find that at least one of these results apply to you, you should know that you can actually do something about your situation. Find out what your credit card interest rates are, and see if they’re negotiable. Pull a free copy of your credit report from annualcreditreport.com, and if you find that the picture it paints isn’t as pretty as you’d thought, start working to repair it or give one of our specialists a call. Trust us, this is one statistic you don’t want any part of anymore.
