Now, the Joneses have no debt, meaning to stay up you're going to have to get rid of it too

The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” has a special meaning. Any person keeping up their social status with the things they buy will use this phrase. This is the thing that most often causes spurts of getting with iPhones, flat screen TVs, riding lawnmowers and many other things. The Federal Reserve has explained that more individuals are getting debt settlement relief rather than using credit cards as the Joneses.

Fed things debt within the home has gone down a lot

The household debt in America numbers were shown by the Federal Reserve recently. It seems that once the recession came, people decided to tighten their belts and pay things off. Nobody will do poorly with debt consolidation. Seven quarters in a row had debt levels showed going down. This was reported by the Wall Street Journal. Second quarter of 2010 showed a 1.5 percent reduction from the past quarter and a 6.5 percent reduction from the previous peak, in 3rd quarter of 2008. That’s $ 178 billion of debt that’s been paid off in the last 3 months. That’s a lot of people essentially giving themselves a cash advance each month.

An additional warning

The increased savings and falling debt isn’t the only thing that is happening. Consumer debt is going down. But delinquency has gone up a bit. 0.5 percent was how much the delinquent debt rate went down. However, as a corollary, bankruptcies increased by 34 percent. Only 161 million payday loan accounts were opened when 272 million accounts were closed meaning that less people are signing up for payday loans to pay stuff off. Credit card companies aren’t doing all that well. They might need their own emergency cash loans.

Cutting debt out of your life

Overall, more Americans are trying to get rid of debt. Many aren’t getting new credit cards. Paying down old ones is the priority. Unfortunately, though, more people are filing for bankruptcy. Still, there are a lot of good signs that individuals want to stay out of debt, preferring the security of cold, hard, cash.

More on this topic

Wall Street Journal

blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/08/17/ny-fed-households-continue-to-reduce-debt/