|
|
|
How
is Your Plastic IQ?
How is Your Plastic IQ? From Parade Magazine - November 1, 1998
1. How many credit cards does the average household own? (Hint: 3 should be plenty)
a. 2
b. 5
c. 8
d. 11
2. What is the maximum limit Americans can charge against all the credit cards in circulation? (Hint: In 1954, the total of all debt in the US - the National Debt + all local government debt + corporate debt and personal debt and all home mortgage - was $585 billion)
a. $200 billion
b. $585 billion
c. $850 billion
d. $2 trillion
3. How much credit-card interest did US consumers pay last year? (Hint: The entire Gross
National Product of Egypt - a nation of nearly 65 million people - was $50 billion)
a. $100 million
b. $1.7 billion
c. $28 billion
d. $65 billion
4. How much interest does the average household with credit-card debt pay in a year? (Hint: Too much. And it’s not tax-deductible. And at the end of the year it just vanished - you have nothing to show for it)
a. $100
b. $300
c. $500
d. More than $1000
5. For people who go bankrupt the most “popular” way (called Chapter 7), how high, on average,
is their income? (Hint: This includes people with high incomes. I know a guy who earned
$300K the year he filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy)
a. 30%
b. 50%
c. 70%
d. 90%
6. What percentage of credit-card households say they have “great difficulty” making their
payments? (Hint: Great difficulty should be reserved for great challenges, not for paying off the
debt on dinner)
a. 10%
b. 20%
c. 30%
d. 40%
All answers are “d”.
Student Credit Card Debt -- Did You Know?
.
More than 1 in 4 undergraduate students respondenting to a survey had used credit cards to pay tuition
.The unrestricted marketing of credit cards on college campuses is so aggressive that it now poses a greater threat than alcohol or sexually transmitted diseases.
.In an effort to pay their credit card bills an increasing number of college students are using federal loans to pay off credit cards; appealing to their parents for loans, cutting back on course work to increase time at paid jobs and dropping out of school to work full time
. Student credit card debts are being scrutinized during the employment recruitment process, and may be an important factor in evaluating prospective employees
. One of the most disturbing aspects of the student credit card issue is the seduction of colleges and university officials by the credit card industry
| |
|
