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- Summary of The Annual Bulletin
- Challenges in Consumer Education for Preventing Over-indebtedness
Challenges in Consumer Education for Preventing Over-indebtedness
Hiromi Arita
Non-Profit Organization Association for Promotion of Women’s Self-sufficiency
The growth of credit cards makes people get credit cards easily and people enjoy using them. Consumers as users spend money using credit cards at any occasion of daily life, but they have never learnedhow to correctly use credit cards anywhere. On the other side, convenient services provided by credit cardstend to eliminate our attentionto thedangerous usage of money. Credit card users get into heavy-debts without even realizing the crisis. Also, an information-oriented society by diffusion of internet environment makesit possible for users to reach exact information just in time.However, not everybody have literacy to obtain the correct information in such an information overload. Sometime, users are tossed into wrong information and ask for answer in the web not in person. The users oweheavy-debts at last.
On 18th June 2010, the revised Money Lending Business Actwas fully in force for the purpose of reducingheavily-indebted people in the society.This enforcement hadsome positive effects on theover-indebtedness problem.But, even though strict regulations exist, we can predict another consumer problem such as “softer Eillegal money lenders (soft Yamikin) whose practices are generally less abusive and violent than hard-core Yamikinwill come.In addition to restrictions by law and superficial cure, it is necessary to educate every consumer to get the “correctknowledge “to avoid the risk of life.
At Non-Profit Organization Association for Promotion of Women’s Self-sufficiency, wetacklethe challenges in two ways:Counseling for people who repeatedly fell into over-indebtedness, and Preventive education for college students. Throughout the actions, we found out that consumer decisionson how to judge and act are based on idea, feeling, habit, values from the environment where they have been brought up.Not only general knowledge of consumer or alert notice, but also knowledge conjugatedto their real life is needed.To utilize knowledge as a “live knowledge, Eit is necessary to educate knowledgesystematically and periodically from childhood to grown up.