To settle the question you'd really need to know how many people carry a balance.

Regardless, I think US citizens are carrying way too much debt and...one day, this musical chairs dance will come to a stop. :/

The right, most informative conclusion about one $10k balance and 9 $0 balances is that "almost everyone in this group carries no balances, but one carries unmanageable debt", not "the average credit card debt is a manageable but significant $1000".

Statistics guarantees they are guaranteed to be high, not low. Medians and top/bottom percentiles would be more informative.

Source: have moved a _lot_ of credit cards through SEM.

One thing I think we can all agree on is that American's are deep into debt and it's not looking good. :/

That is amazing and terrifying.

http://www.valuepenguin.com/average-credit-card-debt

And honestly both averages should be presented together, paints a terrifying picture

Take [0,2,100]: average is 34, but median is 2.

The average of a list of numbers is the value that minimizes the sum of squared difference to each value, sum([squared(mean - x) for x in list])

They're both summary statistics in that they're single numbers used to describe a dataset, but a median is not a "kind of average." The mean is the mean and nothing else.

"Average: a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data, in particular the mode, median, or (most commonly) the mean, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number." -- Google

There's a bunch of means (arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic, for instance), and they are all (as well as median and mode) averages.

Though, usually when people say "mean" without further specifics they mean the "arithmetic mean", and usually when they say "average" without further specifics they also mean "arithmetic mean" (though "median" is also fairly common, and "mode" isn't that uncommon.)

They say the average US household has $15,762 of Credit Card debt.[0] (that's disputed it could be from 5K to 15K depending on what numbers you believe) [1]

With an average rate of 15.07%[2]

Which works out to something like a minimum payment of $600 a month with $188 of it going to interest.

The Average US consumer is not just tapped out but actively being strangled by debt.

"47: The percentage of Americans who can’t pay for an unexpected $400 expense through savings or credit cards"[3]

What this really means is a near majority of the country is on the very brink of bankruptcy one trip to the ER (with insurance) or a tire blowout and down they go.

The terrifying part is that any hint of recession and the ripple effect could take a lot of us down with it.

[0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-card-data/average-cre... [1] http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/images/infograph... [2] http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/interest-rate-re... [3] http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/2014-report-econom...

For example, I can get a $20k limit card. It's pretty unlikely that you can get a secured card with a $20k limit.