Californians suffer numerous stiff financial burdens, but on a national scale, credit card debt isn\u2019t one of them.<\/p>\n
My trusty spreadsheet analyzed debt data from earlier this year for the 50 states, including estimates of personal credit card balances<\/a> and late-paying card accounts from WalletHub<\/a>, as well as federal wage data<\/a> and credit scores<\/a>. To judge the burden of overuse of the plastic cards powering your wallet, the number of days of work required to pay off common outstanding credit card debts was calculated.<\/p>\n This math says that a typical Californian card balance is equivalent to eight days\u2019 worth of the average wage.\u00a0That ties Connecticut for the fourth-lowest burden among the states.<\/p>\n Californians\u2019 credit card debt is also below the median 9.9-day burden across 50 states. Only New York (6.3 days), Massachusetts (6.8), and Washington state (7.9) were better.<\/p>\n Where are the steepest card problems? Alaska had the highest burden at 12.7 days, followed by Mississippi at 12.1, and South Carolina, Hawaii, and Oklahoma at 11.6.<\/p>\n What\u2019s owed<\/p>\n How\u2019d we tabulate the card burden? Let\u2019s start with what\u2019s owed, using a WalletHub analysis of TransUnion credit data as of April<\/a>.<\/p>\n Californians who didn\u2019t routinely pay off their card bills carried a $3,044 balance, the 12th-highest among the states and 11% above the $2,750 norm for all 50 states.<\/p>\n Alaska has the largest credit card debt at $3,683, followed by Colorado at $3,305 and Georgia at $3,186.<\/p>\n Conversely, the smallest balances were found in Iowa ($2,148), Wisconsin ($2,239), and West Virginia ($2,261).<\/p>\n To gain another perspective on this debt challenge, we divided the states into three groups ranked by their card burdens.\u00a0Curiously, there was a negligible gap between what was owed in the 17 highest-burden states and the lowest burden ones.<\/p>\n Pay gap<\/p>\n What differentiated the burden was the size of the paychecks.<\/p>\n Consider a day\u2019s pay in each state as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in\u00a0the first quarter<\/a>.\u00a0The 17 most-burdened states had a median daily wage of $249 vs. $321 in the 17 lowest-burdened \u2013 that\u2019s 22% less pay.<\/p>\n The lowest daily pay was found in Mississippi at $204, in West Virginia at $230, and in South Dakota at $233.<\/p>\n California\u2019s daily wage ranked fifth-highest at $381, 40% above the $273 median for the 50 states. Tops? New York at $443, Massachusetts at $421, and Connecticut at $396.<\/p>\n Paying on time<\/p>\n Big card burdens meant late payments.<\/p>\n The 17 high-burden states had a median delinquency rate of 20% while just 17% of card users in the 17 lowest-burdened states missed repayment, according to WalletHub\u2019s late-pay stats as of the second quarter<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mississippi had the highest delinquency rate at 37%, followed by Louisiana at 32% and Alabama at 31%.<\/p>\n California has a 15% delinquency rate, eighth-lowest among the states and below the 19% 50-state median. The fewest missed payments were in Florida and Iowa at 14%, then Vermont, Massachusetts and Hawaii at 15%.<\/p>\n What\u2019s your score?<\/p>\n Having larger credit card debt also hurt one yardstick of bill-paying ability: the credit score.<\/p>\n