<Anchor> This
is a friendly economic time.
Reporter Han Ji-yeon is here.
Vegetable prices have risen a lot.
<Reporter>
Yes, the price of gold is already at a minimum, but as the rainy season continues, there are signs that it will rise further.
If you look at the retail price of vegetables right now, the price of 100g of lettuce is 1,68 won, up 21% from last month.
Also, 1kg of Korean cabbage rose more than 12% from last month and more than 32% from last year.
Fuel costs have risen due to the Ukraine crisis, and labor costs have risen as farm workers are running.
Vegetable prices have risen sharply due to poor crop yields due to drought.
The problem is that the rainy season continues.
If it rains often, the vegetable will soften or wither, so the value of the product will drop and the production will also drop and the price will inevitably rise again.
<Anchor>
It really isn't easy to eat vegetables now.
From next month, electricity and gas rates will go up at the same time.
If this is the case, it seems that only ordinary people will have a harder time.
<Reporter>
Yes, if you look at the recent high inflation, energy and food prices are raising overall prices.
Therefore, the low-income class is inevitably more painful, and the concentration of consumption among the low-income class is strong in these two items.
In the first quarter of this year, in household spending, the bottom 20% of income earners consumed more than 44% of total consumption for food, housing, and water and electricity.
On the other hand, the top 20% of income earners only make up 24%, a difference of more than 20%.
As a result, the suffering of inflation experienced by the working class is bound to increase in the future.
The government is proposing a universal support method that reduces taxes such as fuel tax and customs as a whole to catch the rising inflation, but it seems that measures that focus more on the vulnerable are needed.
<Anchor>
Are low-credit people being driven into high-interest bonds?
<Reporter>
Yes, the difficult situation has become even more difficult.
After Corona, it became difficult for low-credit people to get loans from institutional finance, so 2 out of 10 people took out loans at high interest rates of over 240% per year.
As a result of surveying about 7,000 people with low credit, more than 43% were rejected by registered lenders. .
In fact, after Corona, it has become difficult to borrow money from financial institutions or registered lenders.
More than half of the respondents answered this way, up 10% from the previous year.
Of course, this demand is bound to be driven by illegal lenders, and 58% of them said that they borrowed money even though they knew it was an illegal lending company.
More than 68% of the respondents said they received a loan at an interest rate exceeding the legal rate.
One in four was paying more than the principal in interest every year, and the borrowed money was most often used for basic living expenses.
<Anchor>
It is a bit unfortunate that there are still people who have no choice but to use illegal loan companies like this, and that there are people who have a hard time getting loans like this.
I hope it gets better soon.
Are you saying that consumer damage related to gyms is also increasing?
<Reporter>
In the past three years, about 8,200 applications were applied to the Korea Consumer Agency, and the item that suffered the most damage was ranked first.
From 1,900 cases in 2019 to 3,200 cases last year, it seems that the number of cancellations during the pandemic has increased the number of disputes.
If you use the gym for three months longer than one month, there are many cases of long-term contracts because they give you a greater discount.
In this way, damage related to excessive penalty charges or refusal to terminate the contract accounted for 92.4% of the damage.
In addition, personal training, that is, damage related to PT use approached 30%.
There were cases where they said they would let me use the gym for free when I got PT, but if I canceled it midway, I had to settle the usage fee.
Also, this happened to me too. I signed a contract for the number of times I used PT, but after a while I went and said that the period had expired and there was no refund.
When drafting the contract, you should check the refund conditions carefully.