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Bridgeport, Connecticut.
- Loan comparison site LendingTree put together a list of the US cities with the most credit card debt, looking at the cities where the most people have at least one maxed out-credit card.
- Bridgeport, Connecticut tops the list, with almost a third of residents dealing with one maxed-out credit card, and one in 10 residents having multiple maxed-out cards.
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It doesn't matter where you live in the US - from the deep south to New York City, credit card debt is a problem all over.
CompareCards by LendingTree looked at credit reports from 1.3 million Americans using its service with active credit card accounts to find cards with balances equal to or greater than the cards' respective credit limits. It then looked at the number of accounts with at least one credit card equal to or exceeding its credit limit, and calculated the percentage of accounts which fell into this category within US metropolitan areas.
The cities are all over the US, from cities with low costs of living like Birmingham, Alabama and Jackson, Mississippi, to expensive cities like New York City. In the most-indebted city - Bridgeport, Connecticut - about one in three residents have at least one maxed out credit card, and one in 10 have more than one.
While these cities are all geographically different, they have one thing in common: very high debt-to-income ratios, according to calculations from Equifax and Q4 2018 Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the Federal Reserve Board of New York. In general, lenders define appropriate debt-to-income ratios as about .36 for homeowners, or .2 for renters, but many of the median debt-to-income ratios for people in these cities were between .51 and 1.81, well above the recommended amounts.
While credit card debt is a big problem in the US today, these nine cities are seeing it at very high rates. Here is each city's percentage of residents with maxed-out credit cards, along the city's median debt-to-income ratio.