Younger Women Building Up Huge Unsecured Loan Debts
Sorry girls, I don’t mean to be sexist about this, but we all know the cliché stories about women and their shopping trips (shoes and hand bags ring any bells?) and the amount which they spend on their retail therapy! Well it would appear that in many cases, these stories are true, particularly when it comes to women in the twenties and thirties age group.
A recent survey from the credit reference agency Callcredit has revealed that a large number of younger women are building up enormous debt levels on unsecured loans and other credit.
The survey has also shown that, due to the effects of the credit crunch, the monthly cost of an unsecured loan has increased dramatically, which is leading many of these women to use credit and store cards and in some cases, even turn to expensive pay day loans.
According to the report, the number of women in their twenties and thirties who spend more than 50 per cent of their net income on repaying their unsecured loans and other credit, has doubled since August last year and now accounts for around ten per cent of this age group.
Part of the reason for this increase is down to the higher interest rates which are now being charged on unsecured loans, but the main problem is clearly that these people cannot stop shopping and will use whatever credit is available to them, however expensive it may be. One credit reference agency said that 38 per cent of young women who had applied for a new loan had been refused, due to their existing commitments.
One twenty six year old woman admitted the problem, she said “Although I am not earning a bad wage in my job and I still live with my parents, I seem to be paying a huge amount of money out on debts that I’ve run up over the past year, such as store cards, credit cards and a couple of loans that I took out over the past couple of years.”
