Bump in credit-card debt of Las Vegans almost double national rate

Elise Amendola / AP

Las Vegas residents racked up credit-card debt at nearly twice the rate of people nationally this past year, a new report shows, amid an improving but still lagging local economy and battered personal finances.

Southern Nevadans had combined credit-card debts of $4.2 billion as of June 30, up 9.4 percent from a year earlier, according to credit-reporting company Equifax.

Nationally, consumers’ credit-card debts stood at $634 billion by June 30, up 5 percent year-over-year.

Las Vegas had the second-fastest rate of debt-growth among the 25 largest metro areas, Equifax said. The valley trailed — albeit barely — another area synonymous with America’s real estate bust: Miami, which posted a 9.5 percent jump in credit-card debts.

Orlando, Fla., also pummeled by the real estate collapse, was just behind Las Vegas at 9.3 percent.

The rise in debts nationally, including in cities whose housing issues “are not completely resolved,” shows that people “are more confident about their financial futures,” Assad Lazarus, interim leader of Equifax’s Personal Information Solutions unit, said in the report.

“These trends suggest that American consumers are getting on with their lives,” Lazarus said.

Las Vegas’ economy, which all but collapsed during the recession, has improved the past few years, especially with job growth. The valley’s unemployment rate, which reached 14 percent during the recession, was down to 7 percent last month, federal data show.

But a number of problems remain, including foreclosures, subprime credit scores and weak wage growth. (The jobless rate, for instance, despite its improvement, is tied with Memphis, Tenn., for highest among the 50 largest U.S. metro areas, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

Nevadans’ personal finances are consistently ranked at or near the bottom of the country, and the increased consumer spending has raised fears that people once again are taking on too much debt and returning to the bad habits of the boom years — buying stuff they can’t afford.

The Silver State has some of the highest rates of lousy consumer credit, bankruptcies, foreclosures, underemployment, mortgage delinquencies and uninsured residents, according to a January report by the nonprofit Corporation for Enterprise Development, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group for lower-income Americans.

The group ranked Nevada’s overall economic health 48th among the states and the District of Columbia, saying many residents here “lack the most basic tools to save and build a secure economic future.”

Meanwhile, Nevada is second from the bottom among the states and D.C. for its percentage of residents who spend more money than they make; third from the bottom for the share of residents who borrow from nonbank lenders; and fourth from the bottom for people who pay only the minimum balance on their credit-card bills, according to a March report from personal-finance website WalletHub.

The site ranked Nevada second-worst in the country for financial literacy, behind Mississippi.

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