Church and state divide in our newsroom like any other media outlet in the country. My role basically is to be the person who goes out and tells the truth and help people make smart decisions about cards. Host when it comes to the overall topic of consumer debt, how are residents of the United States doing generally . Guest they are still handling their business pretty well right now. Delinquencies are climbing up a little bit but they are still generally low. There are definitely signs that we are starting to run into some issues. That is to be expected because there is 1 trillion in Credit Card Debt and essentially people are going to have to start having a hard time with that. We sorted to see we started to see some signs of people becoming less confident about their ability to pay. Host such as what . Guest we do polling every month, asking people how confident they are in being able to pay their statement balance in full this month. How often they have paid in full in the last six months and how often they expect to do it in the next six months. What we have seen is basically all those numbers are at the lowest they have been in the year that we have been doing this. The really troubling aspect of it is that there is a gender gap the size of the grand canyon, where women are three times more likely to say that they have never paid their bill in full in the past 6 in the past six months and to say that they are not confident in being able to pay their bills in full. That is tough. Host to go through the numbers. 40 saying very confident in their ability to pay. 30 said they always pay the monthly statement balance in full. 21 say they never once paid monthly statement balance in full during the last six months. Lets start with those three. You are saying that collectively, this showing of concerns could be a possible bubble situation . Guest i dont know if it will be a bubble, but i think it is going to be an interesting transition over the next there is so much recession talk. I personally believe that americas financial margin for error is so small that even those even though those to link with cs are small right now, it will not take all that much right now to have people from going to have people going from feeling ok about things to being in some scary situations. Host talk about the comparisons you are seeing between what you are seeing now and 2008 at the height of the financial crisis. Guest that was such a crazy time. Banksuencies spiked and were cutting off accounts because they did not want to take any risk. Not there in not there yet and it is going to take some sort of external trigger like we saw in 2008 with the housing bubble in order to really send things over the edge. We dont know how high Credit Card Debt can go without causing a lot of issues because that peak we saw in 2008 was stopped cold by other economic issues. Host are just as with us until 9 30. If you want to ask him questions concerning can Credit Card Debt, you can call us. 202 7488000 for the eastern and central time zones. 202 7488001 in the mountain and pacific time zones. The final line of the report taking a look at women and the approach they have in paying off Credit Card Debt. Expand on that. Guest there has been a lot written about the wage gap and women have so many things stacked against them financially, not the least of which being the wage gap. Being theikelihood of head of a Single Family household. A lot of things that make things difficult for women in this particular space. In the year we have been doing this tracking of confidence, we have seen the gender gap be completely obvious in the numbers we have done and in all the surveys we do, there can be a pretty good amount of difference between men and women in what we dont want is for that gap to expand. We want it to go the other way. It is going to be interesting to economic downturn eventually comes and how that looks. Host how does that number compared to men who responded . Guest men are much more confident when it comes to being able to pay their bills, and much more likely to have said they pay their bills in full. For example, about 30 of men said they were confident in their ability to pay their bills , but only about 10 of women said that. I think that is right. There are a lot of numbers in my head. Host a couple other numbers to show you. This was the Consumer Financial protection bureau. They put out a report on their own. 2018,aid by the end of total balances when it came to credit cards, about 900 billion, well above their recession peak. Cardholders were using prime and subprime Credit Scores to set off most of that Credit Card Debt and the look the delinquency rate had declined sharply. Guest what is interesting is in the past few years, when we have seen things really good in the credit card space, people were spending and going crazy with it. We sought expansion into the subprime space we saw an expansion into the subprime space. A lot of the growth and delinquencies is in that subprime space which should not be surprising. It just ends up being the cycle that credit cards get in. It is not just credit cards, it is the whole thing but that is kind of how it ends up going. What we have seen in the past year or two is a little bit of tightening when it comes to lending standards and banks being less likely to lend to those subprime folks because they are girding themselves a little bit for whenever any downturn comes up. Host who is filling the gap as far as approaching those in the prime or subprime area and meeting their needs . Guest there are always people who will go after that. The personal loan space has been really interesting, where it is not even necessarily banks. It can be banks but sometimes it is Tech Companies who are offering personal loans to people, to get started with credit or to help rebuild their credit and we have already we have already we have actually seen signs in the credit card space of people using personal loans in the way that people used to use Balance Transfer credit cards. A lot of that Credit Card Debt that people are trying to consolidate and manage is now appearing in the personal loan space and may actually be making it to where it looks like there is less Credit Card Debt than there actually is because it just move somewhere else. Host this is matt schulz, chief analyst for comparingcards. Com. Our first caller is helen from maryland. Caller thank you for calling thank you for taking my call. I am glad to know this subject is out in front of me. I have been talking to one of my credit card providers and trying to get them to stop doing some of the predatory things they are doing. A 745 credit rating. I have a low amount on my credit card. 150 or 75 more each month. They changed me from a 12 Interest Rate to a 20 foot 28 so i started went from that paying 200 a month. Arbitrarily setting me at 200 a month. The last three payments ive made i made 200 for three payments that gives me 600 and they charged me 147 dollars in Interest Rate. So i dont know how to get ahead of them other than trying to pay it off. I am at a fixed income, they are eating up my income. Utilities are eating up my income. We have our utilities, we have mortgages, medical bills and these things are playing together all at one time. Host thank you very much for the call. Guest Credit Card Debt is a big problem for many people in the country, there is no question and generally speaking when it are beinghat people charged and what they have to pay in terms of minimum payments, generally there are formulas that are involved that help calculate based on how much of it balance you have and that number moves with the palance balance you have but it shouldnt move on a monthtomonth basis if your balance hasnt moved that much. Since there are restrictions as to how quickly the bank can change your Interest Rate without something having happened because regulations we 2008, 2009 make it where in most situations the banks have to give you 45 days notice if theyre going to increase your Interest Rate. If Something Like that happens more quickly or you werent notified, thats a whole other issue. Generally speaking most things shouldnt change that much in that direction so i am not sure what the case might be there. Host if you are off twitter says overall Interest Rates are going down, yet card rates are staying the same. The movement in credit card rates over the last few years has been driven by the fed. Cards in of credit this country are called variablerate cards and they move when the fed moves rates. Is raisinghe fed rates and things move that way but before that it was interesting, after the Great Recession after banks slashed credit card lines, there was a whole lot of movement. Apr for a little while and then everything got volatile for short time and it flattened out for the few years and it was pretty stable until the fed started to raise rates. So now what we see is according to our latest report we did last month, the average credit card apr is about 20. 9 and the and the average offer comes the range of apr basically 17 to about 23 . Depending on your creditworthiness, a big difference. Host this is lindsay, hello. Caller ive had a couple of small questions if i could. To switchone is how to a different card and cancel one without hurting your credit score and the other is i have a visa card and ive tried for a few months to pay it off and i paid it off a couple of times and i keep getting this deal so when i called, my bill is due on the 12th of each month but they didnt add the interest from that bill until the 15th of each month so i kept getting a bill for the interest and it a neverending thing so i had to pay in more than my bill was so i would have a negative balance so i still get a bill every month but its negative. I know the answer, so they can keep you on a continuous billing but if you could tell a little bit about that, i appreciate it. There can be times where there ends up being a little bit of residual interest after you close a credit card. Islly the best thing to do to call the 800 number on the back of your credit card and say im closing it and ask them about any other interest going to be accrued on this account and they should be able to give you that final closeout number that you should be able to wrap up that card and not have to worry about it anymore. With that said, generally for your credit score the best move is to keep that credit card. Maybe you cut it up, stick it in a desk. Fronted fronted in their freezer so they cant use it. Generally the best thing for you to do is to keep that credit card open because it impacts something called credit utilization which is basically how much debt you have compared to how much available credit you have. So if your 3000 in debt and 10,000 in available credit, your utilization rate is 30 but if you knock that down to 5,000 in available credit, all of a sudden utilization rate is 60 and that is going to hurt your credit score and credit utilization is the second most important aspect of your credit score behind your payment history, so really a good thing to do would be to keep that card and maybe put a recurring small subscription charge, maybe netflix or spotify or some particular subscription that you setup that auto pay and that billing to where it is there, it is active and youre not going to miss any payments and it is doing the work for you in preserving the credit. Host donna off of twitter asks how well do those Debt Relief Companies work, adding she doesnt know anyone that use one personally. Ifgenerally speaking something is being offered up sounds too good to be true, it probably is and there is a whole lot of that in that space. And it is important for people to understand that if debt gets forgiven and you dont pay the full amount that you o2 somebody, it will shoot your credit in a pretty significant way and the other thing a lot of people dont know when it comes to forgiving debt is that that forgiven debt is viewed as income by the irs and a lot of people think they are done with that debt and then they get themselves a bill from the irs. Host from california in san jose, renee is next. Caller good morning. Thank you for taking my call. Im glad this topic is on the air. I have a question about digital example ies for finally got credit established, it was great. I got an expansion for a larger amount, everything was going great. Im very responsible with my debt. I have a Health Situation that insurance covers. If i didnt get it done i would lose the function of my jaw completely. So i needed a significant amount of money. Was ired interest want to know how this has changed health care. Does it change the format of credit cards and what is the digital aspect of the credit card being digital because they give you a choice and i just thing itember for one is overwhelming and my mom also has alzheimers which is not covered by health insurance. The health care and the debt and credit cards, i dont understand how my credit is down to five something. How important is it. Guest health care is an enormous issue. It is crazy. Most americans muster a lebron james or someone super wealthy is really one medical emergency away from being in pretty significant financial trouble. Credit cards are tough in that situation because the Interest Rates are so high that a lot of times those medical bills are astronomical and bigger than anybodys credit limit would be so it can make it a challenging thing. There are things which im not extremely familiar with but i know there are services out there and their personal things you can take to help out with that sort of thing as well as some goodwill programs that some of the pharmaceutical companies are for up for people on fixed income. Comes to the digital aspect of a credit card, we are going to see that a lot more. Theapple card was kind of first big example of a wellknown big brand card that came out and said we are in Digital First and we will give you the physical card but we want you to use it for your iphone, online, that sort of thing. All of that is coming. Ultimately the thing to know is that it is all just credit, whether you are using it through online, through a plastic card or a titanium card or whatever it might be, it is still just basically credit and all the rules. This is robert in baltimore maryland. Questionefore asked my can you confirm i think you said 10 of women report being able to being able to pay their bills and only 30 of men, is that right . Guest it was getting at the andidence that people have the number of women who are confident in their ability to pay their bills in fall, credit card bills in full this time is in the Single Digits and men is about three times higher. Caller god it. That single factoid describes the state of the economy for people on the street better than complex economic results that politicians selectively cherry pick findings. Fore is no single metric we can go offhat of our numbers from income which i think is particularly valueless. Wealth probably makes more sense. But none of it makes a lot of value given the cost, especially health care radicallyexpenses change the Playing Field is in terms of security for individuals. That statistic i think is more valuable than many i have heard. You arelike to suggest uniquely positioned to weigh in on the actual state of the economy for people on the street better than economists or politicians. Guest thank you. When is kind of my hope started doing this polling. State and view of the the fragility of peoples personal finances took a shift when the last Government Shutdown happened because what we saw was it lasted 30 or 40 days, but the amount of people, people who make good incomes, people who pay bills regularly who missed a month of pay and found themselves in some really difficult scary situations seemed to me like it is Proof Positive that most americans financial margin for error is really small and again like we said earlier on in the show, i just dont think it is going to for americansmuch who are doing a fairly good job now of paying bills consistently to be in some real trouble and hopefully that stays a little farther away but im afraid it is not going to. Host you mentioned the credit card act of 2009. Talk about what its intended purpose was and what it accomplished. Guest it has accomplished a lot. The intent was essentially to sumersand help protect consumers against unfair and potentially deceptive practices out there and it was one of the big centerpieces of president obamas early years. It was one of the first things was itand what it did made a lot of changes and among regulatedthe fact it where your payment was applied for example. After the minimum payment, any amount you paid to your credit card has to go to the highest interest portion of the balance first and that is a significant thing because those calculations can be manipulated pretty quickly and easily to make some substantial issues for people. Rid of whats called universal default where if you miss a payment on one credit can, all the other issuers jack up your rates pretty quick. Another thing it did was make it harder for banks to do their work on College Campuses and it ability for the folks under 21 to get a credit card because when i was in college my dorm room mailbox was overrun with credit card offers, but now in order for someone under 21 to get a credit card you either need to show proof of income or get a cosigner. That has changed the game a little bit. A bunch of other things it did. Find a wayhe banks to work around that . Guest they have. It was a really volatile time because it did hit them in the bottom line and they had to kind of scramble and see exactly how they could generate some more of awayrevenue that it took and they pressed some buttons and pulled some levers and managed to be ok. Host this is dana for our guest. Caller this is important. My sister passed away in michigan so we had to get a plane ticket to get in and then we had to get a ticket to get home. Getting in was fine. Getting home we called and found an agency called just fly. They gave me a price, i took the price and we went over it many times because i have discovery card and we never charged anything. Overcharged my credit card of a different price of what they quoted me on the phone. We never got a confirmation number from them so we called the next morning to make sure the flight went ok. Well it didnt. So we called our Credit Card Company to see if would it was even charge. From 138 ad ticket, they charged her credit card 500 something a ticket. So now we are trying to fight discovery to we didnt ok that charge because we couldnt afford it. So we wind up going and applying for another company, they didnt we didnt even take that flight. We got another flight and took that and came home on that one. How do we fight these charges that wrongfully charged our card. First of all im sorry for your loss. But second of all, it is tough. The short answer in this is that documentationre and the more proof you can have of that charge and of who you talked to and confirmation numbers and things like that, the more likely you will be to get a refund from your credit card issuer because to be honest credit card issuers, it is a pretty cut and dry straightforward sort of saying, they will generally be pretty willing to refund you or to waive a fraudulent fee, it happens hundreds of times every day around the country. But i suspect what the issue might be in your situation is the lack of documentation and that is a challenge of having something done over the phone as online to via emailer where you might get some sort of documentation that you can use as proof of what you were told. That is a tough situation. Host we will hear from terry in indiana. Caller good morning. First i wanted to say i do some tutoring online and we might learn something because i know my italian students, they cant carry a balance on their credit card. They have to pay it off every month. Againestion i had is these commercials ive been seeing on tv to make your credit card . Away, my understanding is it makes they tell you to stop a paying your bill altogether until it gets turned over for collection. Once its turned over collections, this company will send a demand letter to the collector saying give us proof of these debts, of course they cannot and basically it just goes away. , am i mistaken on how this works or could you comment on this . Guest you are not entirely mistaken. The truth is any time you are talking about Debt Settlement or debt consolidation or Debt Management or anything like that, it is really important that you understand what you are getting into and ultimately what the ramifications of these aregs can be because if you told to stop paying your bill as part of a program, that bill is not going to get paid, that will do a lot of damage to your credit. And honestly my personal view on things you hear from folks, whether it is debt repair or credit repair or all of that sort of stuff, these are things, these are companies that are Offering Services that a lot of us can do ourselves with a couple of phone calls and a little bit of knowledge and we have a lot of information on but it is really important to understand that not making that payment, stopping making that payment will destroy your credit because ultimately people overthink credit. They think it is this unknowable beast but really what it comes down to is paying your bills on time every single time, keep your balance as low as possible and not applying for too much credit too often. If you do those over and over again, you will be just fine. Anybody who tells you to do something that will disrupt any of those, take a step back and think about it before you do it. Host it has been about two years since the equifax data breach. What if we learned about Data Collection and data privacy . What we have learned is theres a lot of people starting to see this as some white noise. , it seemsequifax was like there is a data breach every other day or every day and we did some polling recently with the second anniversary of the announcement coming up and we found a lot of people, 95 of people are doing one of the 10 or 12 things we ask them if they are doing, but a lot of the basic blocking and tackling of credit protection and Identity Theft protection are not being done and the best example of about 60 ofact people said they check their credit score in the past year and that is great. But only about 40 said they check their Credit Report and when you are talking about Identity Theft, Fraud Protection , there is no comparison between those two as a tool because the Credit Report is somebody takes your Social Security number they found on the dark web after somebody sold it, the way youre going to find out about that account is to see it on your Credit Report, not to find it out any other way. It is really incumbent on people to do that as well as to do things like checking your online bank statement, your online credit card statement as often as you possibly can. Host what does equifax offer as far as rectifying rectifying the situation . Guest they have a site set up or you can check to see if you have been hacked and put your information and they will tell you and if you have been impacted. You have until january i think to submit your claim and you can either apply for monetary claims , there has been some debate as to exactly how much that will be. Host i think the initial amount was 125 per guest so many 125. Guest you can also apply for Credit Monitoring Services and that can be useful as well, we have some credit monitoring stuff from lending tree that we offer as well. Can bet sort of Service Really useful because we all try to do it we can to protect ourselves but it can be helpful and give peace of mind. Host winchester, virginia next. Thanks for taking my call. Myould like to relate situation with credit in this effect of what happened to me and if you can bear with me, this goes back to i owneding crisis and my house. My wife and i bought this house and we raised our children in it. There is a housing bubble. We were approached by several Mortgage Companies to refinance our house, Everybody Knows the value of houses went up. , took and my house equity and my wife and i proceeded to fix up a house we had lived in, raised her children in and that we intended to spend the rest of our natural lives. While the housing debacle was going on, im making my house payments regularly, ive never missed a payment on a house. My credit of the time was impeccable. I could walk into any bank, any car dealership, any dealership and buy whatever i wanted with my signature. I was not aware because of the way the housing crisis was communicated to us what was going on. I signed when i refinanced my loan, i did one of those stupid bubble balloon notes and i had four years and insurance said we will refinance you right away. Time andame refinance i contacted my bank and they informed me the house value had dropped in for me to refinance my home, i would have to pay cash and thenin they would finance the balance of 250,000. Guestwe will let our respond. Guest housing isnt necessarily myspace but i do know that there were a lot of people in your situation in the a lot of places around the country and it has been interesting. When it comes to Credit Scores today, since we are 10 years down,hen all of that went we now have the highest overall average credit score in this country than weve ever had, a little over 700 which is a pretty good credit score. In some of the fear doing that is that it is a little bit unnaturally high because times thatood and there is fear it wouldnt take all of that people fromo take feeling really good about things financially like you are talking andt to feeling not so good this is all about that razors edge that a lot of americans are on and whether its a housing bubble coming around, whether its a medical emergency or an unexpected job loss. Things can get tough quick. Host what do you expect as far , what do youredit think the future is . Do you think changes will happen . Guest i think it is hard to imagine the delinquencies wont keep going up. I think they will continue to be very slow and steady unless something happens where we see some Major Economic trigger that causes people to really start to struggle right off the bat. Fact we think just the have this trillion dollar mount itrest of Credit Card Debt, is starting to cause issues and there is no way that it wont cause more. It is just hard to know how that is going to be affected by the bigger economy as a whole. Host where can people find the research you do on credit theft . Guest we are at comparecards. Com we have information about getting a credit card and using it wisely once you get it. Is one hour. Good morning and welcome to the center. I hope you liked our movie and hope you like this event, Chicago Council engage in