American Savings

Personal Savings in the United States averaged 8.82 percent from 1959 until 2019, reaching an all time high of 17.30 percent in May of 1975 and a record low of 2.20 percent in July of 2005.

It is said that roughly half of U.S. consumers don’t even have one month’s savings, and couldn’t handle a single emergency, like an emergency auto repair.

American Savings

The reason for this is simple: People are spending more than they are earning, so there’s nothing left to save at the end of the month. Maybe they spend too much. Maybe they haven’t gotten a raise in a long time, so inflation is eating up their spending power. Maybe they think their rising home value will save them. Whatever the reason, it’s a precarious situation.

• Back in the 1960s Americans spent 10% of their food budget eating out. Now we spend 45% of our food budget on this more expensive food option. Almost everyone could find more money to save if they prepared their own meals.

  Consumer spending due to “optimism” is not a good thing for the market when the spending comes out of overconfidence. Warren Buffet is credited with a wise saying: “When the tide goes out you can see who’s been skinny dipping.” But, the cyclical nature of savings rates with drops in savings rates leading up to recessions would indicate that skinny dipping is what makes the tide go out in the first place.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

It has been found that Americans have six lifestyle choices as they age: continuing to work full-time, continuing to work part-time, retiring from work and becoming engaged in a variety of leisure activities, retiring from work and becoming involved in a variety of recreational and leisure activities, retiring from work and later returning to work part-time, and retiring from work and later returning to work full-time. An important note to make from these lifestyle definitions are that four of the six involve working. America is facing an important demographic change in that the Baby Boomer generation is now reaching retirement age. This poses two challenges: whether there will be a sufficient number of skilled workers in the work force, and whether the current pension programs will be sufficient to support the growing number of retired people. The reasons that some people choose to never retire, or to return to work after retiring include not only the difficulty of planning for retirement but also wages and fringe benefits, expenditure of physical and mental energy, production of goods and services, social interaction, and social status may interact to influence an individual’s work force participation decision.

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