Debt has become a four-letter word to many Canadians. They don’t want to hear it, they don’t want to talk about it and, many are even getting tired of hearing Mark Carney and Jim Flaherty warn us about HELOCs and mortgages in Ottawa. But, even though we want as little to do with debt as possible, we’re still taking it seriously. A new report from TransUnion, one of Canada’s credit reporting agencies, shows that while our overall debt is down, it’s car loan debt that still remains quite high – and that could be a good thing for Canada!
The new report shows that during the first quarter of 2012, our total average consumer debt grew by only $69 to a total of $26,029.That falls right in line with how we’ve been viewing debt for the past year or so – it’s been rising either very slowly, or the numbers have been fairly balanced, for over a year. And it’s been even longer than that – since the last quarter in 2009 – that our debt has slowly been declining. Even though the numbers for the first quarter of 2012 are positive and don’t show a huge increase, there is still an increase of 1.66 per cent. This is something that is just slightly above what we’ve been seeing for the last couple of years.
However an increase doesn’t automatically translate into an economic crisis, or allude to the fact that homes in Canada will soon be underwater. In fact, it’s auto loans that are causing the numbers to show slightly higher than normal averages, but this too can be a good thing, according to TransUnion.
Car loans did see the biggest increase in averages when compared with the first quarter of last year to the first quarter of 2012. In fact, these types of loans went up more than $2,000 from the $16,181 where they sat in the first quarter of 2011. But, TransUnion still shows that we can pay off those car loans, even if we are taking on more of them; car loan delinquenci
