The credit card market remains awash with 0% balance transfer deals, but new research suggests that customers who take on these offers are still struggling to reduce their debts.
A report from Consumer Intelligence suggests that over a third of consumers who take out a 0% balance transfer offer fail to clear their debts before the offer period ends.
Customers are left with an average of around £2,400 after their 0% deals had ran out, it said.
The report also found that around one in five customers had seen their 0% offer terminated prematurely after they had failed to make the minimum monthly payments on their credit cards.
Longer Balance Transfers, Higher Costs
Credit card providers have steadily increased the duration of their 0% balance transfer offers in recent months.
Barclaycard, which has traditionally set the pace over recent years, extended to an unprecedented 30 months earlier in the autumn before reverting back to 29 months.
But average interest rates have crept upwards as a result, meaning that those who fall outside the introductory period end up paying far more to service their remaining debts.
David Black, banking specialist with the firm, said that balance transfer deals remained a useful tool for consumers to reduce their debts without the additional burden of interest.
However, he noted there had been no clear correlation between longer offers and consumers’ ability to pay off their debts in full.
“It is clear that substantial numbers of customers are still not able to clear debts despite [0% offers] becoming longer and longer,” he said.
Massive Burden of Debt
The findings will be of concern, with new Bank of England figures showing that Britain’s total personal debt stands at a colossal £1.43 trillion.
A ‘Maxed Out’ report released in November by the Centre of Social Justice found that personal debts had reached a “massive” level, with the average household owing over £54,000, including mortgages.
But the increasing cost of living, and particularly energy bills, has contributed both to the debt level and to the inability to repay debts in full.
The energy regulator, Ofgem, says that the average debt owed to gas and electricity companies has almost quadrupled in the ten years to 2011.
And the revelation that customers are struggling to repay credit card debts at a zero-percent rate is indicative of the higher borrowing and rising costs that have propelled many into a serious debt trap in recent years.
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