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Athens Among Top Third of Cities for Paying Down Credit Card in 2018

WalletHub

Americans hit the trillion-dollar mark in credit card debt for the first time ever. In spite of the record amount, some cities, including Athens, did well in paying down that debt during the first quarter of the year. Jill Gonzalez is an analyst with the Personal Finance website WalletHub. She says consumers did manage to repay more than $40 billion so far this year.

"Some cities do it better than others,” According to Gonzalez. “Athens actually did pretty well. The 99th percentile would be the best case scenario, but Athens wasn’t too far down. It’s in the 66th percentile. The average household there has around $14,000 in credit card debt, paid off around $600 just in the first quarter of the year.”

That puts Athens in the top third when it comes to paying down credit debt.

Last week the Federal Reserve increased interest rates for the second time this year. Gonzalez says each hike adds 1.5 billion dollars to our current debt levels overnight. She says this is a time when everyone should try to curb spending.

“Now it’s the summer months, people tend to spend more money on travel right now. Q4 is then coming up when people are spending on gifts around the holiday time, so this really is still the time to kind of lay low, make sure that you’re paying off your debts, also make sure you’re not piling more on.”

The Federal reserve is expected to raise rates twice more in 2018.

For more information: https://wallethub.com/edu/credit-card-debt-study/24400/#average-paydowns-by-city.

 

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