More than one million people have borrowed on their credit cards to pay their mortgage or rent in the last 12 months.
The estimate comes from Shelter after a YouGov poll questioned over 2,000 tenants and home-owners and found that 6% – rising to 12% in London – had borrowed against their credit cards.
Shelter is warning that many people could find themselves facing homelessness this year, as borrowers struggle to make repayments with enormous interest rates. Credit card companies have to recover their debts and are not subject to the same rules as mortgage lenders.
A spokeswoman for Shelter said that the statistics had not been broken down between home-owners and tenants, but Graham Kinnear, managing director of Landlord Assist, said: “We are acting for a number of landlords where their tenants are considering bankruptcy as they have paid their rent with credit cards to maintain a roof over their head but now cannot maintain their finance payments.
“By effectively paying the rent with credit cards, tenants are swapping one debt for another. The longer this continues, the more we will see people struggle to cover their rents and end up in significant arrears with their landlords.”
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Comments
Mike - sorry to go back again, but could you explain your last sentence? I fail to see how this story, or any of the comments - MY comments, as you are the only other respondent - paints any picture at all of our profession. Please enlighten me. Many thanks in advance.
Mike - to call this a 'responsible story' is playing straight into the hands of the doom-and-gloom merchants that are in no small part responsible for the continuing quandary that is the housing market. Negative news gets read - and is believed by the majority... including obviously yourself in this instance. 'Polls' of insignificant numbers of people - who, by nature of the body carrying out the poll may well be vunerable in the first place - which are then multiplied many thousand times in order to come up with the actual number of households in the UK is a ludicrous way of assessing the true situation. Had the CC companies and banks released this information, we would have the definitive picture. You must also realise that they will be referring to ANY instance of payment by this method - whether done as a one-off or otherwise. I think we all know someone who has paid a major bill on theirs at some time... does THAT hit the press - NO!
Not sure what a charity hopes to gain from a story or if we should be having a go at such an organisation that does such good work for a responsible story- even if spun a bit. Rather paints a poor picture of us as a profession. Sad.
First heard this 'story' about three months ago. So now Shelter have decided to become proactive in doom-and-gloom mongering for the housing market. Might as well - everyone else has been doing it for the last two years... And from a poll of 2000 who would be prepared to answer (probably in return for a bowl of soup and a bottle of paint-stripper...) we get the figure of ONE MILLION countrywide. Lies, damn lies, and Shelter.