The Quicken Loans Skip-A-Year Mortgage Sweepstakes | An infographic by the team at Quicken Loans Racing

This infographic was submitted to us by Quicken Loans Racing.

This infographic is organized pretty clearly, and the message is obvious: what if you didn’t have to pay your mortgage for a year, and what could you do with that money instead? There’s some data viz and a lot of numbers to digest, but the text is kept low and the design clean enough to follow it.

I do wish the “How Could $14,160 Impact Your Financial Future” section was a little more to-the-point, though. It shows how much average debt is, how much all Americans owe, and how long it would take to pay that all off, but there’s no simple correlation to show how much of the average debts would be paid off by not paying mortgage for a year! Looks like it would pay off 53% of the average student debt, 81% of the average car loan, and 91% of the average credit card debt. And instead of showing how many minutes of work it would take to pay off the whole thing, maybe how many minutes or hours of work you’d have left to pay it off afterward? Something to bring the correlation between those numbers and the money/time saved even closer.

I’m also a little unclear on the stacks of money being used as data viz. Without a key, I can’t determine what one stack of money stands for, so I don’t see the relationship between the money and the number. $26,682 has 12 stacks of money (3 stacks, 5 stacks, and 1 stack), $17,433 has 10 stacks of money and $15,587 has 9… That means each stack of money represents, respectively, $2,223.50, $1,743.30, and $1,731.89. Consistency is important for the most effective data viz, so that readers don’t have to examine too closely to get the takeaway.

In all I’d give this infographic a B-. It’s clearly laid out and has a good overall message, but could use a bit more examination to the most effective points of comparison and the most effective use of data viz.

Via Payplan

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This infographic was submitted to us by Payplan.

I really like the sliding feature on the debts for each country. It’s pretty interesting to see debts grow (and in some cases shrink, then grow again!) over time.

I also like the varying sizes of arrows showing relation to debt. Details like that are easy ways to include data viz without reverting to a standard bar chart or line graph. There’s plenty of data viz and iconography throughout, making it easy to get the information you came for without wading through excess text. The escalation graph gets a bit wordy in its descriptions, but that’s really the only instance–and some text will always be necessary for certain bits of information.

There are a few typos (“instalment,” unnecessary capitalization of “banks,” no period at the end of the May 2011 section, and more). Frankly, nearly every infographic has a typo or two, but it’s still good to be on the lookout for it!

I don’t have too much else to say on the negative side. It’s pretty cleanly laid out, easy to interpret and very informative. It’d be fun to see more of the tricks like the sliding graph, since some of the examples of data viz are less visually interesting than others.

Overall I’d give this infographic a B. It does its job quite well, but just needs some further editing to push it up to top-notch!

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This infographic from BillShrink.com displays the average savings accounts of typical Americans. It begins by shoing the median household income, minus taxes, plus tax returns, which equals about $40,500 per year. The average American spends 94% of their disposable income, leading only $2,400 to be saved each year by this “average American,” but only 41% actually put that money into savings. That said, 43% of Americans spend more than they earn, leaving them in debt. When compared to the rest of the world, Americans save far less, with China saving 30% of their income on average.

After displaying this staggering data, the infographic goes into a list of reasons by Americans can’t save money. These reasons include the following:

• Lifestyle maintenace
• Instant gratification
• Credit cards don’t feel like real money
• Avoiding the truth about their bank account
• Keeping up with the Jones’

For anyone who has a problem saving, this infographic could be eye opening. If we as Americans could come to terms with the 5 reasons it’s hard to save, we could likely overcome these and start saving more.