JOHANNESBURG - South Africans are spending 68-percent of their take-home pay servicing debt.
Consumers also have 33-percent less purchasing power as compared to 2016 according to Debtbusters 2022 Debt Index.
Its COO Benay Sager says people must realise how expensive borrowing is.
READ: South Africans worry about debt, inflation, running out of money
"If you look at three different types of debt, the largest one is personal loans, overdraw facilities.... average interest rate of the income cohort for 2022 was 23,6% per annum. Now, if you put that into context, if you compare it to something like a bond, where the average interest rate was 10.8%...if you're paying a bond and large personal loans, almost all of our consumers have something like this, it's going to eat up a lot of your paycheck...reason for that is that interest is so high that this type of debt is extremely expensive."
"Now, it's easy to sit here and blame the consumers, I think what we see and when we ask the consumers how did you end up in this situation? The answer is we needed the money and the only way was to borrow. And, I think that's were we are, it's an accumulation of the difficult financial conditions for the consumer," he said.