The average U.S. household owes approximately $8,000 in credit card debt. Consumers in the U.S. carry 3.2 credit cards, on average, with 46% of the U.S. population holding at least two credit cards that are open. http://www.nationalscoreindex.com/ScoreNews_Archive_01A.aspx Credit cards can be a trap for many people especially when making only minimium payments or a little more than minimum payments each month. One of the problems is that while you may be able to carry the debt load for a while, what happens when financial factors change in your life such as income goes down, or prices for the products and services you buy each day goes up? What happens for a lot of people is that their debt balances grow larger, so they are only making minimum monthly payments towards the debt balance. Interest charges and fees continually increase our and debt and it then may seem that you will never be able to pay it off. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/business/13count.html?_r=1

A growing problem as reported by CNN Money is "Hidden Debt". This serious issue arises as families are charging more and more debt on credit cards, but are hiding these charges from their spouse or from their parents. This form of cheating is being exposed across the country and is the cause of great ruin in many families.http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/25/pf/hiding_debt/

Consumer debt, while still at record highs, is on a downward trend. In 2008 Q4, total revolving consumer credit was at $958 billion. As of January, 2010 total revolving credit stood at $867 billion. Total consumer debt shows a similar trend. In the same time period total debt went $2.561 trillion down to $2.459 trillion. http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/G19/Current/ Of all U.S. credit card holders, approximately 50% only make minimum payments each month against the balance on their cards. http://www.freedomfinancialnetwork.com/market_statistics.htm