“Contrast that to Fed’s 2022 Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households, 37% of Americans do not have enough to cover a US$400 expense (not $4,000), up from 32% in 2021.”
That’s a survey that asks if you have $400 in cash or not, it doesn’t ask if you can come up with $400 without borrowing it. I mean, there’s a difference.
Turns out 13% of US households actually don’t. They would have to borrow it or steal it. That’s nothing to brag about – I agree that the US is a fucked up place. But that 37% thing is just bullshit. Do we need more bullshit here?
‘People have unlimited desires but only a limited amount of resources to fulfil those desires’
Most people can save money, it’s just what they’re willing to sacrifice in order to make it happen
Me and my husband earned combined about $100,000ntd a month and saved maybe $35,000 a month. And we definitely could have bumped that up to $60k if we sacrificed a bit more
No I’m not. The fact that they had to raise the bar in question to NT$100,000 in Taiwan shows that people on average are financially healthy. If they had asked about $12,000 it would’ve been a moot question.
The fact that 37% of Americans don’t have $400 in cash is ridiculously bad in the country where wages are the highest in the world and have cheap real estate, cheap groceries and cheap gas. This indicates very poor education on personal finances. Americans who are broke should blame themselves before they blame Biden.
According to the TABF survey, only 27.4% of Taiwanese don’t have NT$40,000 aka $1,300 in cash, and the situation is improving unlike in America and Canada where it’s rapidly deteriorating. If the cutoff had been $400 it would’ve been much lower.
All numbers and no experience makes jack a dull boy.
And I doubt those numbers are any more than an average of an average. Poor people are more liquid, so they won’t have money in the bank. It’s in their pockets.
If they receive government subsidies they can’t keep it in the bank for fear of losing their subsidies.
I wonder how many of those 37% have smart phones, internet access, cars, Lids, kicks, Beats, cable TV, WIC, Welfare, Obamacare. It ain’t poor, like SE Asia poor.
The survey doesn’t ask anything about cash in a bank. It asks if they have $400 in cash. Cash in pockets is cash.
Ok? I never said Americans were poor. I said Americans often have terrible financial sense and are often very wasteful. Carrie Bradshaw goes to fancy parties and restaurants in Manhattan all the time and she only has like $900 in cash because she spent $40,000 on Manolo Blahniks. Many Americans are like her.
The $400 question is from a Fed survey which asks words-to-the-effect-of “If you have an immediate and unexpected emergency expense of $400, could you cover it with cash and equivalents?” (cash-equivalents are immediately liquid assets such as demand deposits at a bank). And the answer is that 37% of respondents can’t cover this expense with cash / cash-equivalents, but that doesn’t mean they can’t cover the expense at all. Something like 13% say that they couldn’t pay for it at all, whereas the other c.26% say they would borrow or sell assets (real or financial) to cover it. No data on how many would shoplift to cover it or how many would just shoot the person asking for $400.
This $400 thing gets spun into the notion that “37% of Americans are one $400 emergency away from bankruptcy” – not by you, but by innumerates like Kamala Harris – which is not accurate.
However, we don’t need to use that $400 story to prove our argument. To be clear, I completely agree with your overall conclusions on US consumer profligacy and squander.
The financial illiteracy of Americans is a national disgrace and a tragedy for millions, and I believe that this is very much an intentional policy. I do not rejoice in this situation.
Kids are supposed to be mentored and protected, right? Well, apparently public school (US sense of the term) economics courses teach teenagers that they should carry revolving consumer debt as part of their personal financial planning. I suspect that most of the teachers of this insanity are themselves debt slaves – if not, they would have to be sociopaths.
It wasn’t quite so blatant when I was in high school in the 1980s, but even then we were encouraged to take out personal loans from a bank, and then deposit the money at the same bank so as to repay the loan over 12 months or whatever, thus generating a nice risk-free profit for the bank and guaranteed negative spread for ourselves. The reason for this scam was that it would allow us to “build a credit history” – so we could then borrow more from the bank.
This is all before we get into student debt. Jeebus – what a cluster fuckery that system has become.
US financial profligacy is appalling. No argument from me on that.
The credit score system of the US is a scam on its own. You shouldn’t need debt to have a good credit score/rating/etc.
In Aus just paying your bills on time and having no debt will give you a good credit score, although our credit score isn’t really used in daily life unless you’re applying for a mortgage. I don’t even know what mine is
Not as far as I can see. In 2018, average income of the top 1% in the US was 1.32 million while average income of the other 99% was 50k. I’m sure things are worse now.
