HOW much did Christmas cost you? That’s a real question, not some way of getting around to the old chestnut about how much more it cost God. Instead it’s a real question because, for very many people, the real cost of Christmas is calculated at the end of January when the dreaded credit card bill drops through the letter box or the overdraft limit hits the bufer. This is when Christmas has to be paid for and that’s OK if you’ve been in a position to budget for what lies ahead, but it is a living hell if it’s the last in a line of inancial pressures.
Did you know that almost a quarter of all households in Scotland (600,000) have no savings to fall back on? Many of these households are described as the ‘just about managing’ others are the working poor, some are even more disadvantaged than that and not enough is being done to protect those who ind themselves trapped in perpetual poverty. The dice is loaded against the most vulnerable in our society and there are many fronts on which the battle for a fair deal, a decent wage and a reasonable safety net has to be fought. One of them is in the world of high cost credit which simply magniies the problems faced by the poorest and most vulnerable. In 2016, up against the limits of inancial survival, 4.4m people in the UK borrowed £4.5bn from the high-cost payday, home credit and rent-to-own sectors of the money markets. In total they owed £8.8bn – almost twice what they had borrowed. At that time 8% of people in Scotland had high cost loans on their credit ile (the UK average is 6%) this rose to 12% in “G” postcodes. The poorest are paying the most for almost everything and that includes gas and electricity and credit. Those who can least aford are being commercially exploited by those who can most aford.