Debt Stress & Health
High credit card debt is bad for your financial, emotional and physical heatlh!
A published study in 2000 reported that people with high levels of stress about debt had more physical and emotional problems. According to the February 2000 issue of the Journal of Social Science and Medicine, people who reporting significant levels of debt related stress had more physical problems and reported worse than average health than those with little or no debt. In general, people with a high credit card debt to income ratio were in poorer physical health.
The study was based on two separate telephone surveys that reached a total of 1,036 individuals living in Ohio. "Any one of us who has debt knows that it can cause stress in our lives, and it makes sense that this stress may be bad for our health," said Prof. Paul J. Lavrakas, director of Ohio State's Center for Survey Research and the study's co-author, along with Patricia Drentea, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Alabama-Birmingham."The stress of owing money, and [the] knowledge that we're paying high interest rates may lead to increased stress resulting in worsening health."
It was also noted that another aspect to explore is the degree to which credit card stress is reflected in more tense interpersonal relations with family members.
To measure health, the Ohio State researchers asked respondents to rate their own health on a scale of very poor to very good. They also used a standard scale of physical impairment, which involved asking respondents to rate how difficult it was for them to do simple activities such as climbing stairs or carrying groceries.
The results were then compared to responses on a debt stress index. This index, designed by Lavrakas, asked participants to rate their degree of worry about debt. This method showed a strong relationship between debt stress and health - the more people worried about debt, the more it affected their health.
With debt settlement, you can reduce the effects of related stress in a shorter period of time than generally any other solution.