Dallas/Fort Worth Getting (a Wee Bit) More Responsible About Credit

But this one is a total shocker for me: residents in San Antonio, our sizzling sister city to the south, are as maxed-out on their credit cards and debt as are residents of Los Angeles and San Diego. Go figure! These folks carry an average of about $6500 every month in debt. 

Houston is on the list, too, but come on: with all the repairs from Hurricane Harvey underway, Houstonians are likely charging as much as they can, awaiting insurance reimbursement.

Credit card balances in the U.S. are now almost $800 billion, the highest they have been since 2009, according to Federal Reserve data. That is not a good sign, and I was most definitely expecting to see Dallas as being one of the top areas where a consumer might be in trouble with credit. What kind of trouble?  At least one credit card is “maxed-out,” with a balance that is equal to the total credit limit allotted on the account. And they are using revolving credit heavily. Revolving credit was created as a way to buy big ticket items and then pay them off, not make the interest and payments a lifetime payment plan. That makes it hard for consumers to get solid financially, because they are always paying off debt.

The folks at LendingTree analyzed a sample of more than a million (anonymous) My LendingTree users in 50 of the largest metropolitan US areas. They created a “Maxed-Out Score” between 0 to 100 for each metro, with 100 signaling metros where consumers are most maxed-out on their credit. (Personally, I’d love to see a report like this from Citibank.)

The cities with the most maxed-out cards are

San Diego, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Houston, Virginia Beach, Sacramento, Jacksonville, FL (what?), Seattle WA (too much Amazon shopping?), New York, New York (duh) and New Orleans LA (what?).

These Cities take It To The Max:

#1 San Diego, California
Maxed-out score: 98
San Diego residents carry $6,629 in credit card balances on average. Nearly one in five (18%) have at least one card maxed-out. That’s second only to Oklahoma City, where 18.5% of residents have a maxed-out card. San Diego residents also use more of their credit lines overall, with 32.8% utilization. That combination makes San Diego the highest-ranking metro.

#2 Los Angeles, California 
Maxed-out score: 93
Los Angeles residents also push their credit further than most, with 17.5% of residents having at least one maxed-out card. Those that do have a maxed-out card have 1.33 maxed-out cards on average. Balances average $6,472, a touch lower than their neighbors to the South in San Diego, helping utilization come in at 32.0% versus San Diego’s 32.8%.

#3 San Antonio, Texas
Maxed-out score: 92
San Antonio residents don’t face the same high cost of living that Southern Californians deal with, but they share an affinity for using their credit cards. The study findings revealed that 17.2% of San Antonio residents have a maxed-out credit card, and their total credit card balances average $6,474, similar to those among Southern Californians.