Many use debt as tool to catch up, move up
Utahns, like others, can get caught in credit trap
One of his modern-day namesakes hasn't heeded the admonition. Benjamin Franklin Baggett of Salt Lake City got his first credit card on his honeymoon in 1990 and promptly maxed out his $300 credit line. Baggett wanted to buy himself and his wife some new clothing, and he hadn't saved enough to buy it outright on his $11-an-hour concierge job at a Doubletree Hotel.
The charges were the first of many for Baggett, now 38. In 1995 he moved into a house in the Harvard-Yale section of Salt Lake. Baggett used credit cards to furnish the home with the kind of carpets and furniture his wealthier neighbors and relatives could afford.
"I felt insecure; I was an hourly paid worker in this fancy neighborhood," says Baggett. He says he was making $13 an hour for a time doing back-office work at a local bank while supporting two children.
Twice he used a home-equity loan to pay off his credit-card debts, and twice he ran up steep credit-card bills again. When his debts reached $30,000 and he ran out of home equity, he filed for bankruptcy in 2003.
"We came to rely on credit as part of our income, even though it wasn't part of our income," says Baggett.
To some, the expansion of credit is a milestone of democracy, giving middle- and lower-income people financial flexibility that only the rich used to enjoy. Others see the borrowing binge as a way for average households to make up for sluggish growth in income over the past several decades.
Since 1990, income for the median American household has risen only 11 percent after adjusting for inflation, while median household spending has jumped at 30 percent, according to an analysis by Economy.com.
Utah vividly illustrates the changes credit has wrought in the United States. Last year, 28 of every 1,000 Utah households filed for bankruptcy, twice the national average and nearly triple Utah's rate a decade earlier, according to Economy.com, a West Chester, Pa., consulting firm. Utahns often get married early and have the largest families in the nation on average. That makes for a lot of young parents with modest incomes looking for big homes and cars. The median monthly mortgage payment in Utah equaled 45.3 percent of a worker's average monthly income in 2002, the fourth-highest level in the nation, according to the Utah Foundation, a Salt Lake think tank.
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