Saving Less
A new record was broken this year, but it wasn’t one we can be proud of… Apparently this is the first year, since the Great Depression, that America has had a negative saving rate for an entire year.
This shouldn’t surprise any of us that continue to live ‘paycheck-to-paycheck’:
With retirement looming soon for the baby boom generation, the concern is that a dearth of savings now could cause a cutoff in spending later.
Some economists say that’s far-fetched. They argue the personal savings figures are artificially low, since the numbers don’t include increases in assets such as equities and homes. Yale University economics professor William D. Nordhaus made that argument in 2002 congressional testimony, saying that once assets were included, the savings rate for the 1990s would have been a robust 25 percent.
We know saving is important, yet we continue to eat out, buy new clothes, put sweaters on poodles and buy monogrammed towels, even when we don’t have 3 months salary in the bank.
We need to get our priorities straight, huh?
Relevant Tags: debt strategies, debt to income ratio, debts, paying off debts, refinancing, saving money