Holy Spirit
Member
- Jan 4, 2020
- 13
- 3
If Im not mistaken todays economy is primarily based 70% on consumer spending! There's no incentives for people to save! And, I know from experience, your savings can be wiped out overnight when the economy crashes!!! Millennials were affected by the crash more then any other generation x, y or z...People can no longer save because they don't put any effort into saving even a small part of their income but would rather spend beyond their means to achieve that which they cannot afford.
I remember back in 1985 when I was working in the logging industry for a $5.00 / hr. wage resulting in a paycheck of $165.00 per week. I am surprised I remember this so well. 2 Anyway, our mortgage was around $352.00 per month including taxes and insurance in escrow. I had a student loan for just over $50.00 per month, electricity was about $30.00 per month, water/sewer was about $30.00 per month, and we were still paying for medical bills from our son's birth in July, 1982.
Doing the math, we were left with approximately $215.00 per month on average to buy groceries, clothing, fuel for our vehicles, and so forth. It made things rather tight but I believe it is important to build up an emergency reserve fund so I asked myself if we could save just $.25 per hour. So every week when I deposited my paycheck, I immediately put $10.00 into a savings account. That would add up to $520.00 per year. We did not miss the money and it provided a little breathing room as it grew over time. I continued this concept for my entire career and as my incomes improved I added to the amount saved.
When my company began to offer a voluntary savings program in the middle 90's, I decided to find out how much each tax withholding exemption amounted to. At that time it was about $20.00 per exemption per pay period so I changed my W-4 accordingly and then had my company auto-deposit $80.00 per paycheck to our savings account where it can earn interest, even though it may not be much. At tax time, instead of getting a tax return I would just pay whatever income tax we owed. I figured it was foolish to let the government use my money interest-free all year when I could get that same money to work for me.