Mid-term Writing Test

CREDIT CARD HABITS

Introduction

Credit cards are all around us. A recent study of Statistic Canada showed that there are around 3.1 credit cards per adult in our country. We also observed that people tend to use credit cards younger than before because it is accessible and simple. Even though companies and banks are pleased to see this great market of customers, we think that those people are dangerous for our economy because of their credit habits. We believe that young people are not enough responsible to manage credit cards or to have good credit habits.

Method

First of all, we created a survey that contains ten questions. We send it to two groups of people. Our first selected group was 33 people between 15 and 25 years old. Twelve people of 26 years old and over were in the other group. We ask them several questions to understand their credit situation and habits. Moreover, we wanted to have their opinion about credit cards so we asked them: what word comes to your mind when you think about credit card?

Results

To our surprise, young people were not has bad has we thought. On the one hand, they have fewer credit cards than older people and more than 80% of them always pay their bill. Our survey demonstrates that 78% of the participants between 15 and 25 years old who answered to our questions have less than 100$ of debts on their credit card. On the other hand, some of them have an enormous credit card limit. The other problem is that young people use their credit cards often and not necessarily for excellent reasons. More than 60% of them told us that they use their credit cards for clothing and 50% of them use it for hobbies like cinema and music.

Discussion

To summarize, our hypothesis was partially true. Teenagers and young adults have better credit habits than what we thought. If we had to do this survey again, we would ask it to more people because are survey was not enough representative of the population.

Finally, we concluded that our expenses should always correspond to our incomes. We should not live a lifestyle that we cannot afford because it will catch us up someday. That is why we think people between 15 and 25 years old should not have more than one credit card. Although some teenagers and young adults are as responsible as adults, they don’t have big incomes to cover an important debt if they load their card.

420 words