A rapid increase in the number of days that the UK population has to work to pay off the interest on outstanding loans and credit card balances has prompted a warning from one independent financial search website.

Unbiased have calculated that it now takes the UK population 70 days to pay only the interest debt owed on credit cards and loans, and that amount doesn’t even start to pay back the balances owed. The financial advisory website assigned the title ‘Debt Freedom Day’ to the hypothetical day in the calendar that the interest debt would be repaid and this year it was calculated to have fallen upon March 10th

What is particularly worrying to the website is how rapidly the UK’s personal debt has grown. They calculated that last year’s Debt Freedom Day fell on February 1st highlighting exactly how quickly Britain’s loans and credit card debt mountain has grown. Indeed, personal debt has grown by 10% over the past 12 months as people struggle to meet their bills and are opting to pay for more day-to-day items using credit.

Despite the onset of the global credit crunch in the middle of last year Britons took out even more debt. Mortgage balances increased by 10.8 per cent while the amount outstanding on credit cards rose by 1.25 per cent, according to figures released recently by Experian, and Bank of England figures show that UK households now owe £1.4 trillion to building societies and banks. Balances on UK credit cards and personal loans amounts to £225billion, and the remainder is owed on mortgages.

These figures have prompted many organisations, including Citizens Advice, to call for UK residents who are in difficulty to seek help with debt as soon as they can. The Bureau is currently receiving around 6,600 debt enquiries per day at its offices, and those numbers are causing concern not only because the organisation is struggling to keep up, but because the UK appears to be on the verge of a debt crisis.

The situation looks set to get worse as almost 1.4million householders are on fixed rate mortgage deals due to expire before the end of the year. On average it will cost each of them £100 per month, or £1,200 per year to pay their increased repayments, although for some that figure will be much higher.

There is a real danger now of a recession becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people follow the advice of many experts and cut back on spending, that in turn will prompt businesses to fail and spark a series of redundancies, causing even more debt misery. One thing is certain, the longer the debt crisis carries on, the more people will get sucked into it, and in turn Debt Freedom Day will slip further into the year.