When faced with an unexpected $1,000 expense, more than one-third of Americans would borrow the money, according to a new Bankrate survey. That may include tapping their credit cards, seeking money from friends or family or taking out a personal loan.
Most would not turn to cash savings because they don’t have it, the personal finance website found.
Fewer than half of Americans, 44%, say they can afford to pay a $1,000 emergency expense from their savings, according to Bankrate’s survey of more than 1,000 respondents conducted in December.
That is up from 43% in 2023, yet level when compared to 2022.
“We’re just not wired to save,” said Brad Klontz, a certified financial planner and expert in financial psychology and behavioral finance. Our brains are instead programmed to focus on our immediate needs.
“We’re just not wired to save,” said Brad Klontz, a certified financial planner and expert in financial psychology and behavioral finance. Our brains are instead programmed to focus on our immediate needs.
Hahaha, this guy can legit go fuck himself. We’re in a fucking Gilded Age where we’re being fucking bled dry by fucking corporations ripping us off, nickel and dime-ing us to death, and just fucking over customers as much as they can to make a buck.
But nooooo, it couldn’t be that half the country isn’t paid a fucking living wage!
You couldn’t get by in the cheapest places in the country.
Right now Lubbock, Texas has rents roughly $900 a month for a one bedroom apartment (Lubbock is cited in many studies as one of the cheapest rental markets in the US).
Minimum wage is $7.25 in Texas.
To afford a $900 apartment on your own, you would need to be making $16.87 an hour.
The average wage in Lubbock is $26,413/year, or about $13.75, which is about three dollars short of a renter allowing you to rent that place (income per month x 3 is the standard).
So, even in the cheapest places to rent in the country nobody can actually afford to live alone.
But sure Klontz, you fucking clod, it’s that “wE’rE jUsT nOt wIrEd tO sAvE!” What a fucking crock of shit. Can someone who knows this person in real life maybe try slapping the fucking stupid out of his idiot face?
EDIT: Shit like this why idiotic people like Trump voters don’t trust “experts.” If he’s an expert I’m Mickey Fucking Mouse and Disney can just try suing me for existing.
We were also wired not to be born rich with a silver spoon up our asses. We’re wired for higher education to cost 180% higher than it was 20 years ago. We’re wired that our healthcare expenses can cause bankruptcy if we develop a serious illness that requires surgery. We’re wired that car insurance went up 20% in one year. We’re wired that grocery costs went up 35% in one year, in some states. We’re wired that all these gigantic cost increases happen, but our compensation only goes up 2.5-3% depending on employer…or we’re laid off entirely.
Everything you just said was extremely well put, and this guy needs to be TOLD to fuck off.
I won’t lie, I’m lucky and make a good living but I still had to pay $17,000 just for groceries last year for a family of five. It has gotten fucking crazy!!
EDIT: Shit like this why idiotic people like Trump voters don’t trust “experts.” If he’s an expert I’m Mickey Fucking Mouse and Disney can just try suing me for existing.
He’s an “expert” in selling his services as a financial advisor.
I have pretty decent savings, but I also live in a country with public health care. With some health incidents in the last few years that required the ER, I suspect that in the US I’d be broke.
This is true. I pay a lot for health insurance and it still cost me a lot to go to the doctor. Other countries got profit out of their health care. We can do it to. I don’t mind paying taxes for healthcare.
Americans pay more for healthcare than any other country. In fact, Uncle Sam pays more per patient than any other government in the world, and patients still have to pay an obscene amount on health insurance premiums, high deductibles before insurance will actually pay for anything, and then a 20% co-pay on everything that your insurance company decides they will actually “cover”.
Both things can be true. I think there is something to the remark that people aren’t wired to save. I don’t feel like I can afford to buy frivolous things at every store I go into and I make decent money. On the other hand, I know someone making FAR less than me who literally does buy junk every chance they get.
I do feel like I am the outlier, I’ve been saving money since I was a child and everyone else around me tended to blow any lump sum of money as soon as they got it. Whereas I would spend 0-10% and put the rest in savings.
Land of the free with Capitalism sounds like a pretty great way to run a nation!
“we’re not wired to save” is a weird way of saying
44%56% of Americans barely make it paycheck to paycheck with no disposable income.Edit: wrong percentage
It’s propaganda to make you blame yourself for being essentially indentured.
Yeah something like 25% of Americans make under $35k. That’s poverty wages in this economy.
You kidding? That’s almost a congressman’s wage in my country. I want 35K a year 😭
Doesn’t change the fact that such a wage barely covers rent and food for someone with no dependents
What’s rent cost on a 2 bedroom apartment there?
500 dollars on average
Exactly. Cost of living is way higher than that in the US.
Insanity…
I mean that’s just how it works. I bet there’s cities in your country that cost more to live in than others. Salaries and availability of jobs in those more expensive cities will probably also be higher and the middle of nowhere.
Cool, I’m not in your country. I pay $10,000 a year to live in a one bedroom apartment in Nowhere, Ohio. That doesn’t include my utilities, my student loans, my car payments, or my health insurance.
Holy shit, do they have any openings there? <$900/month sounds pretty good.
Yes but there are no jobs there that support it and no infrastructure to do remote, gl.
You need to check what the purchasing power parity between US and your country is.
Someone making 35K USD per year in USA is doing roughly as well as someone making 15.3K USD per year in Lithuania. That’s a higher end retail wage here, or 1170 euros.
I make more than that after taxes, and that includes national health insurance and national pension fund.
The caveats are that plane travel, vehicles and electronics will be more expensive to a Lithuanian but fresh food, real estate, rent and services will be more expensive to an American.
56%, the 44% is the part that can pay the $1k
Whoops! Thanks!
This is correct.
It is a spending problem. I know people who make $500k/year who live paycheck to paycheck. I know other people who make $35k/year who have money left at the end of the month (not $1000).
Now i will grant it is a lot easier to live on 500k than 35k, and a lot easier to save. However living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t tell us anything.
“live paycheck to paycheck.”
That may be generally true, but they likely have a bunch of equity in their homes, and I’ll bet their retirement accounts are generous. Sure, there are some who just spend everything, but most people at that level are already “hiding” as much money as they can from taxes.
How many people actually own homes?
What do you mean by own? Own as in 100% paid for - not too many. Own as in their name is on the deed, but most of the value belongs to the bank - more than half of the US.
Lots of people don’t own their homes in any sense it’s my point. They rent.
Their names are on the titles, they own the homes. Their banks - the mortgage lenders - hold a rights to a lien placed on the property, but they have no title to the property unless they enforce the terms of their lending contract in the event of default.
The owners making 500k may very well be just a few months from foreclosure if they lose their job, but they likely have at least 20% (likely much more unless they bought at a premium two years ago) equity and can probably salvage at least half - even after fees - if they were to become “destitute” and undertook a regular sale of the property. 10% of a million dollars (or more), for most of the country, is still a healthy sum of money.
But they own portions of it. It isn’t like it’s 100% the bank’s house until the last payment is made. You build equity that is in fact yours. And in the last decade you could have made a killing if you’d bought a house at the right time. We sold a house last year for almost twice what we paid for it 7 years before. The bank doesn’t get any of that extra money.
The ones making $500k a year own multiples.
You’re fucking saying this nonsense on an article about how 44% of the country can’t come up with $1000 in an emergency.
By definition, if the people making $500k/year have been saving, that means they have money to pay off that emergency, even if comes from a fund they didn’t intend it to.
So nearly half the country isn’t in that bag. Can we stop with this “pAyChEcK tO pAyChEcK tElLs uS nOtHiNg” bullshit. There’s plenty of other data to show that more than half the country is fucking hurting. US average salary is right around $60k. That’s because there’s a shitload of people making $30k and a small sliver of people making $900k.
For example, to get an average of roughly $60k between a group of people making $30k and people making $900k, you need thirty people making $30k to one person making $900k. That’s our fucking economy, dude.
44%. That is far too many to be believable or explainable as a poverty problem. Well before you that many people there are plenty of people who on a similar income can find $1000. Getting a credit card with more than $1000 limit is easy if you have income - unless you already have so many maxed out, or otherwise have not made payments. Maybe not for everyone, but they are claiming > 40% of Americans here which means many of them have a good enough jobs and means to pay off a $1000 loan - so if they can’t get that it means they are way over extended.
The people I know making $500k/year have debt payments so high they can’t come up with $1000, and if they could get more debt they would have done so already.
The only thing I’m taking from this is that your friends (and by extension, rich people in general) are bad at managing their money, and they project that on to the poor.
The important point here is you cannot project this statistic on the poor! Maybe poor have problems, but there is no way 40% of the US is that poor. The majority of that 44% has a spending problem. If you want to make a statement about the poor you need to study the poor and that means you won’t study everyone and talk about 40+%.
Dude go jump in a wood chipper, please.
I’m poor and I have cancer meds that cost $16k a month. You literally don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I can’t spend money on anything extra if I fucking wanted to.
So you’re better off being used as kindling. Because you’ve got no evidence your position is true other than your feelings.
Man, fuck your feelings, put them in a wood chipper, too. Come with some data or fuck off into a wood chipper.
My guy, you can’t just dismiss the stat because it’s so high. The fact that it’s so high shouldn’t trigger skepticism, it should trigger alarm.
I’m not dismissing it. However I am dismissing the idea that this has anything to do with poverty. That later is what most people commenting seem to be assuming and that is not supported by the data we have.
Nobody here gives a fuck about the people you know.
You’re right, it is unbelievable. Unbelievable that the wealthiest nation in the world, which built that wealth off the backs of those people (ignoring for the moment the colonialism, slavery, and other forms of economic abuse over its brief 250 years of existence), allows them to exist on the fringes of society where a $1000 emergency can be life or death. Unbelievable that there are tools like yourself who still insist this is an individual problem rather than a societal one. Unbelievable that we continue to do nothing about it but turn a blind eye and vilify them as they sink further and further into instability and poverty, and then turn around and wonder why half of society has given up on the very idea of society. And unbelievable that you can say the shit you say with a straight face without someone smacking the taste out of your mouth.
And unbelievable that you can say the shit you say with a straight face without someone smacking the taste out of your mouth.
*chefs kiss
God Damn! 👏👏👏
c/murderedbywords
If you make 500k and live “paycheck to paycheck”, you have a BIG spending problem or massive debt. When people with low income live paycheck to paycheck, it isn’t because they are spending too much, it’s because they get paid peanuts and necessities are too expensive for that.
Almost all people who live paycheck to paycheck aren’t doing so because they are spending too much, they are doing so because their income and necessary living expenses are too close and they have no disposable income.
Blaming people who struggle when most of them are already frugal out of necessity is the sort of thing billionaires wants you to believe so you’ll not look at the actual problem.
“Not wired to save” … Mother fucker is completely out of touch with systemic pressures squeezing every last ounce out of people.
Friends of ours busted their asses to raise kids and simultaneously go to college for accounting. The other parent rose up to management in a factory.
They still can’t afford a basic house and are endlessly caught in a loop as renters where they get fucked even more.
My wife and I were lucky in the timing of getting our home and lucky to just know a realtor in our family. Luck, luck, luck. I’m not working half as hard as they are if I’m honest and they are getting fucked by a system that doesn’t give a shit about them, all the while the rich get richer then turn around and tell all the plebs to blame the poor immigrants seeking a better life.
I got injured overseas and after some years got a pension. I held a job down for a while and bought a house as it fell through. Couple years later I got bumped to a conditional 100% with the va. (a LA your point, alot of luck - most people fight for years to get close to the 70% I got out the gate)
My benefit payment (basically $45k as of this year) is more than people I know in their late 30s with college degree jobs and skilled labor jobs with years under their belts. My mortgage is under $500. (again, luck, got alot of house for the price at the time) Granted, I do live in a pretty “economically depressed” rural city, but my house I paid 75k for ~8 years ago now spitballs for 190k for reference.
You gotta make 100-150k to live comfortably (not luxuriously) in most major cities… Has not much to do with not being “wired to save”, agreed
But why have children if you can’t or struggle to afford them? Save for longer…then have kids.
Even if they didn’t, it would make little difference.
But (and I don’t know in their case) unplanned kids or not aside, now you’re saying they should wait for this magical time where they might be able to afford owning a home (when in reality they probably did at the time feel they could when prices were lower), versus the fact that you can’t just magically have kids whenever. The older you get, the more risks and complications versus the challenge of simply raising kids when you’re older in general.
The point is there was a time when this sort of calculated planning wasn’t necessary; yet the squeeze from the rich now makes it so we have to literally postpone fucking life because of how rigged the real estate market and the broader wealth gap is.
The point is there are only dilemmas and no good options while societal pressures continue to increase for the poor and middle-class. Besides that, there’s a lot of tolerance and room for forgiveness when you’re rich. Not so much when you’re poor. Make one mistake and you’re fucked. And no, this is not a meritocracy.
According to his job description, the dude is a “Mental Wealth Advisor” 🙄
“Mental Wealth Advisor” Loosely Translated: Scum Sucking Piece of Shit
Gross
Bull shit we’re not wired to save. This fool talks like the rich haven’t been stealing our wealth for the last 50 years and we aren’t left with nothing.
But then they say we waste our money because we have a fucking phone or the internet or avocado toast which last I checked avocados are pretty fucking cheap, as is bread. Like you can function in this world without having a phone or Internet, nowadays. Even homeless people have a fucking phone. Try finding a job without the internet or a phone.
We’ve been robbed our whole lives, and this fuck says that’s your fault.
When I was young I planned to be so smart about retirement.
I’ve yet to make enough money to even cover basic expenses all these years later.
affordable housing, healthcare, and education might help. can we get some of that?
If I had affordable housing and education I might be able to afford healthcare. MIGHT be.
Be careful, you may have it good now. For the next generation, they will make them pay a subscription to the police and firefighters service.
I think it is more like people don’t have high paying jobs with extra money to save.
The media has been blaming poor people for not having money for forty fucking years or more.
"Over the last 40 years, sadly, I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top, or to be mad at folks at the bottom, Obama said. “And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction.”
To illustrate his point, the president brought up Fox News.
“If you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu,” Obama said. "They will find folks who make me mad. I don’t know where they find them. They’re like, ‘I don’t want to work. I just want a free Obama phone’ or whatever. And that becomes an entire narrative, right? That gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview of a waitress, which is much more typical, who’s raising a couple of kids and is doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills."
Yep, and this is from when he was president. Fox News is propaganda.
Excellent pull-quote except for this part: “I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top”
No, Obama. No. We don’t have power to do that. FOX News isn’t trying to make folks mad at people at the top. They’re only trying to do that to you, Obama, because you’re black. They’re propping up every rich fucking piece of shit they can, otherwise!
I believe he was saying other news networks were trying to make people mad at the top. But Fox News is casting poor people as bad and lazy when they are not.
other news networks were trying to make people mad at the top
Yeah, none of them actually do that. People are angry at the top because we constantly see them getting away with shit in the media. Like Trump, for example. I’m fucking pissed at him and the entire Republican establishment, because they’re criminal fascists who tried to do a fucking coup, and I’m pissed at the Democrats for fucking glad-handing and footsying around with fucking fascists instead of treating it like the serious fucking problem it is. I’m pissed at AG Garland waiting until it was clear that Trump wasn’t going to give back classified documents after two years to finally file charges. Anyone else would have been in chains almost immediately, and we literally had an air force kid that happened to recently as an example. I’m pissed at Obama for not putting an AG that would go after Bushes war crimes. No, we have a lot of glad-handing and letting people off at the top and that’s where that sentiment fucking comes from Obama you “we need to look forward not backward” piece of shit. His lack of will in prosecuting war crimes is part and parcel to why they’re so hesitant to prosecute Trump. It’s all a fucking joke.
That is why people are angry at the top, not because any fucking media told us to. FUCK! Because it’s painfully obvious there’s two justice systems, one for the rich and politically connected and one for everyone else!
Tbf it’s rich people who’ve been saying that, with media parroting them … but I get what you mean.
with media parroting them
You mean the media that those rich people own? Huh, I wonder why the employees can’t go against the boss’ narrative without getting fired?
This is literally part of why Musk bought Twitter.
Those are the same people.
You’re right. I’ll amend my comment.
… with the media, that they own, parroting them.
If people are hungry then let them eat cake!
Been going on for a lot longer than fourty years.
Lmfao WHAT savings I was almost homeless this year working full time for CVS
Not wired to save? Fuck off! We are collectively underpaid, you disingenuous shitwit!
The factory i work at has had three 45¢ raises since 2008. Sure the $20/hour was great during the recession, but it’s hardly enough to live on today, and that’s over double my state’s minimum wage.
I remember reading a study from about 10-20 years ago that found the average income for Americans to actually get by with enough to make it to retirement and have adequate healthcare was $75,000 a year. It’s probably much higher now too: The increasing levels of disparity are just fucking disgusting.
I sold my car and quit driving altogether and bought a bike and scooter and I save money now.
If I made more money I could have that luxury but take a look around, so many car loans are shit. The cars are shit too. And drivers keep getting worse imo.
Cars are a huge drain on the wallet and an unnecessary expense for many.
Good for you!
Of course, because of the car-centric nature of the US, you have to already live in area that a bike or scooter can get you around in. That discounts a lot of the rural US.
Yup. People don’t think about it like that too often. It’s presented as a necessity, but there are no budget options. They’re a never ending expense.
Cars are regularly called money pits.
Owning almost any type of vehicle is going to necessitate maintenance, there’s a classic saying that the two best days in a boat owner’s life are the day they buy the boat and the day they sell the boat.
I’m just going assume they wanted to say “not wired enough money to save” but forgot the middle part
Can you expand?
deleted by creator
The rich not only control the media, but vast swaths of our academics as well. Especially so-called economists and “business experts”, like the bootlicker quoted here.
These people know nothing about neurology or psychology. They’re being paid to repeat bullshit so people get complacent (and worse, use their ‘expertise’ to influence lawmaking).
but vast swaths of our academics as well
They literally drive what academia cares about. They’re the reason there’s been so much push to drop all arts and humanities, because FUCK CRITICAL THINKING AMIRITE?
Precisely. Our education system is deeply mired in the muck of privatized funding of public education. Hopefully we can root this shit out and enforce some regulations soon.
Honestly just restricting private donations and forcing them to fucking pay taxes like the rest of us would fix a large part of this.
Here’s what happens, at least to me: If I manage to have extra money, I start saving and build up a little nest egg, then need to empty it because of an unexpected expense. And then I start saving again only for that to happen again.
Controversial thought maybe, but I indeed have many friends who should and could afford to save, and choose not to.
None of these friends are wealthy or have high salary’s, they’re just bad with money
Yeah, I’m curious as to what percentage of that group simply can’t afford to save, and the percentage that simply choose to spend instead. Like you, I know people who certainly could be saving money, but instead have new phones all the time and also are driving leased luxury cars.
Saving is slow and boring, it’s easier just to get a credit card and buy something cool. Much more of a rush va seeing a number go up a tiny bit every month.
i would save if i actually had something to save; and i suspect many are in the same boat.
Wow, it’s like encouraging people to live on credit and debt is actually bad for people!
I seriously hate how much the US fucks over people who can’t make enough to even consider saving money; overdraft fees from banks, having to get loans and debt in order to pay for big expenses, punishing people who need to use credit by lowering their credit score… list goes on and on.
as the saying goes, it’s expensive to be poor.
