Kansas has high credit card debt, Wallethub says

The personal finance website WalletHub has released its list of States with the Highest & Lowest Credit-Card Debts.

“Kansas ranked 11th,” said analyst Jill Gonzalez. “The closer to the top you are, the worse. Kansas has the 11th highest credit card debt.”

This is the median credit card debt per household. In Kansas, that’s $2,574.

“We look at the costs to pay it off, essentially how much you’d be paying in interest,” said Gonzalez. “Based on the average credit card monthly payment from each state, we figure out how long it will take you to pay off.”

That would take just over 14 months to pay down. Only nine states have a debt load small enough to take less than a year to pay off.

“The one mistake that most consumers make, is that if they do have extra money at the end of the month, they kind of sprinkle it equally across all of their credit cards,” said Gonzalez. “It’s good that you are trying to pay off your debt sooner, but, you want to be doing that in a strategic way. If you do have extra money at the end of the month, pay the minimum on all of your credit cards, except for the one with the highest interest rate.”

WalletHub drew upon TransUnion credit data to calculate the cost and time required to pay off the median card balances.