Despite financial advisers’ oft-repeated advice that we should have in savings an amount that’s the equivalent of at least 3 months’ income/salary, Americans simply refuse to save.
I’ve posted on this again and again on FOTM. See:
- Nearly 1 of every 2 Americans live paycheck to paycheck
- Huge gap in Baby Boomers’ retirement savings
- Majority of Americans unprepared if economy collapses
- America’s Retirement Disaster: 50% of 55-64 y.o. have only $12k in retirement savings
- U.S. elderly hounded by debt collectors
Here I am, once again sounding the alarm like Cassandra, with the latest shocking statistics on the financially dangerous and irresponsible way most Americans choose to live.
- A new Bankrate.com survey found that 63% of Americans do not have enough savings to pay for a $500 emergency, such as a car repair, veterinary or medical bill. Only 37% of Americans have at least $500 in savings! For the other 63%, to pay for a $500 emergency they would have to resort to measures like cutting back spending in other areas (23%), charging to a credit card (15%), or borrowing funds from friends and family (15%) in order to meet the cost of the unexpected event. Bankrate senior investing analyst Sheyna Steiner asks: “I did wonder what would happen if it was $10,000, what would the answer have been then?”
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Magnify Money released the results of a study that found that 56.3% of people have less than $1,000 in their checking and savings accounts combined.
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Pew Charitable Trusts reported that 1 in 3 or 33% of American families have no savings at all.
H/t FOTM‘s josephbc69
See also:
- Minimum wage hikes hasten replacement of human workers by robots
- Nearly half of U.S. college graduates can find only low-wage jobs
- No one works in 1 of 5 U.S. families
- White men increasingly don’t work
- 86M Americans simply don’t want to work: 40% of women, 28% of men, 39% of youth
- Many on Social Security Disability can but don’t want to work
- More Americans are on disability than the entire population of Greece
~Eowyn
