There’s a statistic that claims the average American carries more than $8,000 in credit card debt. This statistic is widely believed because of its publicity. However the fact is that the statistic itself is skewed in the way it was found. The average American is conceived of as having kids and living in a multiple bedroom house with a basement. We can see that the word average can easily confuse a person about what it really means.

Only 1 in 20 American households actually carry $8,000 or more in credit card debt. The truth about credit card debt is that most American families actually owe nothing to credit card companies. This is because most of them don’t have credit cards or pay off the bill in full. Out of the households that do owe credit card companies money, most of them only owe $2,000 or less. It’s clear that an average can’t give you the real answer to how much credit card debt the American people have.

You may ask why the number is a skewed number. The answer is based on how they arrived at their average debt number. They got the average American debt number by taking $750 billion in credit card debt and dividing it by 84 million American households which is the number of households that have one or more credit cards. The resulting number is the average. This number however is inaccurate when compared to the truth about credit card debt.

An astounding 23.8% of American households don’t even have credit cards! These households weren’t included in the calculation since they don’t have credit cards. Another 31.2% of Americans pay off their cards as soon as they get the bill. This totals to an astounding 55% of American households that have no credit card debt.

Out of the remaining households only 29% owe more than $1,000 to credit card companies and only 21% owe $2,000 or more. If you consider that only 4% of households owe more than $10,000 and only 1% owe more than $21,000 then you will realize that most Americans owe very little in credit card debt. Most American households owe very little to nothing in credit card debt. The truth about American credit card debt is often hidden because of influences such as the media.

Layla Vanderbilt is the content coordinator for a leading website that offers for instant bad debt consolidation advice and guidance.