The effects of excessive Christmas spending will be felt by 47% of Poles in 2023, up 3 percentage points year-on-year, according to a survey commissioned by BIG InfoMonitor. 22% of people will feel it for up to a month, while 19% will feel it for 2 to 3 months.
The rate of people indicating that they are not affected by excessive Christmas spending fell from 44% in 2021 to 35% in 2022, it was reported.
“In January and February, it will already be clear how December ended for household budgets. Certainly, prudent financial management will help avoid entry in the debtors’ registry. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, almost 21,000 unreliable payers were entered in the BIG InfoMonitor Debtor Register, that’s almost as many as in the whole year, and the arrears of new and already entered debtors increased by more than PLN 3.7 billion. To what extent this change was influenced by the holidays and December spending is hard to say, but certainly their piling up is one of the main reasons for Poles’ financial troubles. It should also be remembered that a creditor has the right to enter in the BIG a person who delays payments by min. 30 days and for at least PLN 200,” said BIG InfoMonitor CEO Slawomir Grzelczak.
During the 11 months of 2022, the number of debtors increased by 20,813 people, and non-credit and credit arrears increased by a total of nearly PLN 5.8 billion.
According to a survey conducted for the InfoMonitor Economic Information Bureau, 13% of Poles plan to pay off outstanding obligations as part of their New Year’s resolutions, including 11% paying off loan and credit installments, 2% paying off bills and 3% paying off debts to family or friends. 79% of Poles believe they have no outstanding obligations, and the remaining 8% are those who, although they have debts, do not plan to pay them off because they are unable to.
Quality Watch survey for BIG InfoMonitor, conducted on a sample of 1,042 adult Poles using the CAWI technique, December 9-12, 2022.
Source: BIG InfoMonitor and ISBnews
