Canadians reduce debt, except in Vancouver: TransUnion
Posted February 26, 2014 7:20 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – People in Vancouver are piling on debt while other Canadians are reducing theirs, according to a credit monitoring company.
TransUnion says the average credit balance in Vancouver topped $41,000 in the last quarter of 2013, up more than seven per cent from a year earlier.
TransUnion’s Thomas Higgins says local incomes are up, the real estate market is doing very well and unemployment rates are down.
“There is the ability to carry a higher load of debt, but it did seem to be a little bit out of whack with Vancouver and BC jumping up that much over the last quarter and year versus the rest of the country.”
Other major cities had sizeable drops in their consumer debt: Calgary and Toronto were down more than five per cent.
But Higgins notes that BC has one of the lowest loan delinquency rates in the country.
On a year-over-year basis, total debt decreased 0.42 per cent from $27,485 in Q4 2012, which was the highest debt level on record.
