South Dakota Credit Card Debt Low; Sioux Falls Credit Scores High

In our conversation about South Dakota's nation-leading multiple-job-holding rate, Joseph Thompson brought up South Dakota's low credit card debt. Indeed, we upper Midwesterners are relatively restrained in our plastic payments:

South Dakota would rank better, but Kristi Noem is dragging our average up.

Our fourth-lowest average of $4,075 sounds like an awful lot of money to be paying 19.9% interest on every month. But at least we beat the national average of $4699, as well as these top four plastic borrowers:

Alaska is quite the outlier. Maybe they're all banking on their oil dividend checks to bridge the gap in Quarter 3.

Commenter John Hess wondered if maybe South Dakotans were working more jobs because low income around here means they are offered less credit. He might apply the same speculative reasoning to the above stats... but new data on credit scores says that, at least in the Sioux Falls metro area where nearly a quarter of South Dakotans live, banks are likely eager to extend credit. USA Today publishes a list of U.S. cities ranked by average credit score. Sioux Falls (the only South Dakota city analyzed) ranks ninth among among a top ten dominated by upper Midwest cities:

With credit like that, folks in Sioux Falls and their like-minded credit-savvy parents back on the farm ought to have no lack of offers from banks eager to do business with them.