Credit cards users sensible spending habits: RBA

Wednesday August 26, 2009

The Australian Bankers' Association (ABA) has completed an analysis of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) collection of credit card data which documents the changing debt repayment and credit cards habits in the current economic environment. The latest data demonstrates that consumers are becoming far more sensible with their credit cards expenditure and are managing their debt repayments.

In fact, the RBA data has shown that the growth levels for the main factors used to determine credit cards habits and repayments were all at low levels for the 12 months to the end of June 2009. These factors include balances outstanding, amounts accruing interest and credit card limits. In fact, the amount of credit card balance accruing interest declined over this 12 month period to almost 1 per cent less than for the previous year.

David Bell, Chief Executive of the ABA, said: "While this result stands out, if we look at the past three months, the amount accruing interest has fallen by a very large $1 billion or 3 per cent. On a per card basis, it's a fall of $83 or 3.7 per cent for every credit card account over that time."

Repayments of credit cards debt is also indicating that Australians are managing well with RBA data finding that consumers have repaid $4.9 billion more than they have spent which is a new record for this index. Over the last four years consumers have consistently been ahead in their repayment activity on an annual basis.

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