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Consumers may be spending less, but credit and debit cards, and electronic access to account information play important roles in helping them manage their finances, suggest survey findings published today by Forrester Research Inc. Sixty percent of consumers surveyed last fall said they were spending less than they did a year earlier, according to the Cambridge, Mass.-based consulting and research company. Forrester conducted the online survey of 1,009 U.S. adults in October. Twenty-four percent of respondents said they paid cash for more purchases than they did a year earlier, 17% used their debit cards more often, and 11% used their credit cards more often. Ten percent said they were spending more than they did a year earlier, and 21% said their spending habits and methods had not changed. Thirty-four percent of respondents said they had paid a bill with a credit card at least once during the previous year. Some 71% of respondents said they were paying more attention to their finances. Twenty-eight percent said they used online-banking channels to access their accounts more often than they had a year earlier, and 44% said the frequency of their online-banking access was about the same as a year earlier. Ten percent of respondents said they used ATMs more often to access account information, and 51% said their use of ATMs for that purpose remained about the same. Fiserv Inc., a Brookfield, Wis.-based transaction processor that owns online bill-payment service CheckFree Corp., commissioned the study.
