Disposable Personal Incomes Crash Under Quayle Administration

[Donald Trumps]

If you say so, but please keep my name out of it

[pongo]

8 hours ago, Andy Onchan said:

I find this statistic hard to believe:

Non-consumption Expenditure: Interest on credit cards £2.26/week.

I was expecting that to be much more.

It's dumb not paying them off every month.

[the stinking enigma]

Well that's that solved.

[Mr Helmut Fromage]

20 minutes ago, pongo said:

It's dumb not paying them off every month.

a: Sarcastic genius

b: Whoooooooshhhhh

c: Stunning irony given the OP

d: Mortgage Free Civil Service Pension Recipient

[pongo]

47 minutes ago, Mr Helmut Fromage said:

a: Sarcastic genius

b: Whoooooooshhhhh

c: Stunning irony given the OP

d: Mortgage Free Civil Service Pension Recipient

Very few people on the IOM are using credit cards to stop-gap poverty or need.

Most people who get into credit card debt (ie not paying it off each month) do so because they buy stuff they want but don't need.

[Mr Helmut Fromage]

10 minutes ago, pongo said:

Very few people on the IOM are using credit cards to stop-gap poverty or need.

Most people who get into credit card debt (ie not paying it off each month) do so because they buy stuff they want but don't need.

Unfortunately Pongo I would tend to disagree - and whilst neither of us can produce anything other than anecdotal evidence I will still respond.

The IOM is almost caught in a poverty trap - and people will use whatever available means there is (From Professional Experience on the other side of the desk) debt goes from card to card to card on balance transfer with increased limits and no increase in initial payment - which is ok if you don't spend the cleared limit on the first cards - and that's where the spiral worsens.

The social pressure to conform is enormous and the pressure on youth to fit in is astonishing these days - 5 year old iPhone £250 in CEX add in the credit - or no deposit contract at MT or Sure for the latest model - defer the consequences over 24 months...... Keep the kids happy and socially accepted or ??????

There is a huge debt crisis currently on the Island, phones, cars, mountain bikes, kids nursery fees, it keeps going when credit companies such as Conister sponsor major events the marketing budgets gone up for a reason....

 

 

[The Dog's Dangly Bits]

People have always bought things on finance though.  It isn't a new phenomenon. 

There is no evidence to suggest debt or finance is more prevalent here than anywhere else.

Many items these days are bigger tickets.  Phones over a grand.  Cars are expensive and available.  Plenty of people choose to finance things because it suits them.  Not because they desperately live month to month on a credit card. Of course some do.  But that will always be the case.

[Max Power]

57 minutes ago, The Dog's Dangly Bits said:

People have always bought things on finance though.  It isn't a new phenomenon. 

There is no evidence to suggest debt or finance is more prevalent here than anywhere else.

Many items these days are bigger tickets.  Phones over a grand.  Cars are expensive and available.  Plenty of people choose to finance things because it suits them.  Not because they desperately live month to month on a credit card. Of course some do.  But that will always be the case.

To be fair, people are pushed into debt to feed the economy, without readily available credit the huge mass of manufacturing would collapse, along with that economy. I have always avoided borrowing, except for buying houses. I always saved for anything I wanted, and usually by the time I had enough, I didn't need or want it anymore.  

[Chris C]

8 minutes ago, Max Power said:

 I have always avoided borrowing, except for buying houses. I always saved for anything I wanted, and usually by the time I had enough, I didn't need or want it anymore.  

Wise words Max.

[Non-Believer]

16 minutes ago, Max Power said:

To be fair, people are pushed into debt to feed the economy, without readily available credit the huge mass of manufacturing would collapse, along with that economy. I have always avoided borrowing, except for buying houses. I always saved for anything I wanted, and usually by the time I had enough, I didn't need or want it anymore.  

Me too. And usually by the time I'd saved up for the latest gimmick or fad it had been superceded or gone out of fashion. And I didn't need it.

We live in a world of clever consumer marketing.

[thesultanofsheight]

6 hours ago, english zloty said:

It is the biggest pile of crap out of the cabinet office and that takes some doing. A random sample of 18,000 became an actual test on 1,000 and in return there was a minimal 'bribe' of £50 for allowing the govt to snoop into your spending habits and household affairs, and that's the average ffs. Just over 5% return rate and most likely the ones in need of the additional cash. The 95% who just said fuck you may posibly have influenced the outcome no? They should be embarrassed publishing this shite.

I imagine it was completed by the sort of people who if you offered them £50 they’d suck you off. 

[Mr Helmut Fromage]

1 hour ago, Max Power said:

To be fair, people are pushed into debt to feed the economy, without readily available credit the huge mass of manufacturing would collapse, along with that economy. I have always avoided borrowing, except for buying houses. I always saved for anything I wanted, and usually by the time I had enough, I didn't need or want it anymore.  

Nice stuff - but can you honestly tell me you have never or been advised, extensively trained by someone into buying a franchised supplied car on credit to hit your own / manufacturer targets (or bike) more recently, without thinking of your reasons over theirs.....

[Non-Believer]

48 minutes ago, Mr Helmut Fromage said:

Nice stuff - but can you honestly tell me you have never or been advised, extensively trained by someone into buying a franchised supplied car on credit to hit your own / manufacturer targets (or bike) more recently, without thinking of your reasons over theirs.....

We've all been pulled in at some stage - why else do salesmen exist?

Think back to the TV adverts of the early noughties for easy credit though, Carol Vorderman and Ocean Finance for instance. Money that's not yours made available at a price. (Though that price was in the small print at 1275%).

If you're not too knowledgeable about money, including your own, you're part of a big ocean of consumer aspirations driven by clever marketing that's easy fishing for the credit market?

[Max Power]

1 hour ago, Mr Helmut Fromage said:

Nice stuff - but can you honestly tell me you have never or been advised, extensively trained by someone into buying a franchised supplied car on credit to hit your own / manufacturer targets (or bike) more recently, without thinking of your reasons over theirs.....

Businesses operate on credit, a dealer may buy cars on credit but with the intention of selling them on. Other than that, they are just providing what a customer wants or needs and that is the point, without available credit, the whole thing collapses due to low product demand. That's the problem with capitalism, always looking for growth and ways to achieve it. 

[Roger Mexico]

7 hours ago, english zloty said:

It is the biggest pile of crap out of the cabinet office and that takes some doing. A random sample of 18,000 became an actual test on 1,000 and in return there was a minimal 'bribe' of £50 for allowing the govt to snoop into your spending habits and household affairs, and that's the average ffs. Just over 5% return rate and most likely the ones in need of the additional cash. The 95% who just said fuck you may posibly have influenced the outcome no? They should be embarrassed publishing this shite.

Actually, as I pointed out earlier on this thread, it looks like the opposite is true.  The participants in the survey were much more likely to be home owners than you would expect if it was a proper random sample (46% rather than 34%) which suggests that there are a lot of affluent older people in the sample (the number of mortgage payers was about right but there weren't enough renters).  Older people will have more time and are more likely to be tempted by the £50.  The younger and less well off haven't got the time and may be too ashamed to admit their poverty.

In truth this is something that you see in all surveys of public opinion.  Older people are more likely to respond than younger ones; the well-off more than the less-so; those in non-manual jobs more than in manual (if you think about it filling in a survey is a clerical job); women more than men.  Proper pollsters try to compensate for this in a number of ways - they can ask more people in groups that respond less (so if women are twice as likely to respond you ask twice as many men) and they can use something call 'weighting' so that the end result is truer of the population.

The Cabinet Office don't seem to have done any of this.  And while a sample of 1000 is about the minimum for a decent survey if you take all the precautions, without such very careful adjustments it becomes meaningless quite quickly.  It gets even worse when you start deriving figures from sub-samples of the data, not only are they based on much smaller numbers, but, even if your total sample is a good one, a part of it may be biased as a sample of that particular bit of the overall population.

A lot of the figures in this survey look wrong[1], but that will probably be because those who answered were too rich rather than too poor.

 

[1]  There's also a surprising number of simple arithmetical errors, which suggest that it wasn't even checked by someone with the most basic numeracy skills.  So there may also be all sorts of errors in the data processing that have been missed.