Household Credit Card Choice And Usage

In response to growing interest in household finance, this collection of essays with a foreword by John Y. Campbell, studies household and consumer use of credit instruments. It shows how individual consumers and households utilize various credit alternatives in managing their consumption and savings and suggests areas for future research.

Who would not be interested in getting an interest-free loan for 12 months for any type of purchase just for taking a few minutes to complete a credit card balance transfer offer? Or a free round-trip airline ticket twice a year just for making purchases on a rebate card? Or lowering their insurance premiums by hundreds of dollars a year just by raising their credit score? Obviously, just about every consumer is interested in saving money and getting freebies! Hence, the universal appeal of this book cannot be overstated. Today, the average American household has 12.7 credit cards. Banks maximize their profits by "nickel and dimeing" and outsmarting their cardholders: that's why credit cards are their most profitable product. Banks spend billions enticing consumers with rebates, freebies, low-introductory rate offers, and airline miles. Learn how to take full advantage of these offers, without paying for them through brutally high interest rates, fees, and penalties! Arnold offers specific advice targeted to young consumers who are being aggressively targeted by credit card marketers; retirees facing credit discrimination; Americans recovering from bankruptcy or other debt problems; and even consumers with great credit. You'll learn the techniques he has personally used to escape credit card debt, "creatively finance" his wedding, car, and home purchases, and earn thousands in credit card "perks" every year.

Merchant fees and reward programs generate an implicit monetary transfer to credit card users from non-card (or ¿cash¿) users because merchants generally do not set differential prices for card users to recoup the costs of fees and rewards. On average, each cash-using household pays $151 to card-using households and each card-using household receives $1,482 from cash users every year. The payment instrument transfer also induces a regressive transfer from low-income to high-income households in general. The authors build and calibrate a model of consumer payment choice to compute the effects of merchant fees and card rewards on consumer welfare. Reducing merchant fees and card rewards would likely increase consumer welfare.

This chapter uses data from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances for 2004 (the quot;SCFquot;) to examine the penetration of credit cards into LMI markets. The chapter has two purposes. First, I discuss the rise of the modern credit market, emphasizing the segmentation of product lines based on behavioral and financial characteristics of customer groups. Among other things, that trend involves the use of products aimed at LMI households that differ significantly from those aimed at middle-class households. Second, I describe the extent to which LMI households borrow on credit cards, the types of LMI households that borrow, and how they differ from the more affluent households that borrow. Despite lower incomes, credit card use is almost as common among LMI households as it is among more affluent households. Indeed, measured as a share of income, the credit card balances that LMI cardholders carry are substantially higher than those of more affluent households. To check the robustness of those results, the chapter closes with the results of a multivariate regression analysis of the characteristics of LMI households with credit card debt. Generally, those results suggest that the demographic characteristics of LMI households that have credit card debt are different in material ways from the characteristics of those with credit card debt in the overall population. The models that I summarize here suggest that age, race, and education are important predictors of credit card use in the population at large. At least in these models, however, age and race become insignificant and education is only marginally important in predicting credit card use in LMI households. In LMI households, by contrast, the most significant predictors of credit card use are employment status, the use of other financial products (checking accounts, mortgage loans, and car loans), and marital status.

Of Data Compiled From Three Nationwide Studies Conducted in 1970 and 1971 by the Survey Research Center At the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.

Using the 2010 and 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances (N=12,497), this study investigates the relationship between credit constraint and credit use of U.S. households after the Great Recession. Credit use is identified for two major categories of household debt, (1) installment loan debt and (2) credit card debt. Results of a Heckman selection model indicate that households experiencing credit constraint are more likely to hold installment loan debt and have higher loan amounts than those not experiencing credit constraint. Constrained households are also more likely to hold outstanding credit card balances, but have with lower balance totals than households not experiencing credit constraint. This research provides important insights into consumer credit research as well as related consumer policy.