It's likely those respondents that ticked the "living from paycheck to paycheck" box would likely be not that much into stock investments but it could still be of his own choosing to own a house and paying the mortgage instead of saving the money into a bank account.
House mortgage is not really debt. The survey is not specific on this.
The survey is not clear on the part of the respondents deciding not to save money because of low interest and a variety of other reasons, and rather putting it somewhere else that fare better in returns like stock holdings or buying a big house that would leave not much for savings in the bank.
Not saying the survey is not giving some good feedback.
45% having zero savings is unbelievable.
24% have less than $1000 in savings and if it turns out that most of them do not own any other kind of asset (the survey is not clear on this part of the equation) would be shocking.
I can well believe the claimed figures. Indeed it marries up quite nicely with statistics on the other end of the spectrum about the 1%ers owning and making more than ever in recent history.
In most developed western countries, rents are far more than mortgages. That is a massively regressive system whereby the wealthy can see their incomes rise with minimal or no effort on their part, while the have-nots are so squeezed they effectively have no hope of saving enough to afford a mortgage within a reasonable timeframe. Especially after the much more stringent lending rules introduced after 2008; inflation beating house price rises and stagnant wage growth.
The days when you can tough it out for a couple years and save enough to put down a deposit on a nice house are long gone for all but the highest paying entry level jobs. For most young people entering the job market earning medium level wages, they are looking at a decade or more of living at home with parents and effectively not having a social life to afford a mortgage.
And that’s just single people, couples who have children early have even less hope as anyone who is a parent will know what an absolute money black hole kids are.
What most well-off and moderately well-off people don’t realise is just how uneven the playing field is for people who are not lucky enough to be born into such a privileged social class.
It takes money and/or connections to be able to get your kid into the best schools, and from that point onwards, the advantages just accumulate exponentially.
Not only are the affluent kids given the best education possible, they are also placed in social circles with other similarly or even more affluent and well-connected families. That builds up massive social capital no poor kid could hope to access.
It is also incredibly easy and common for well-off children to be given high flying starter jobs by family or family friends. The high salary and low workload is easily justified by their exclusive schooling.
If you think you achieved success fairly easily through your own ‘hard work’ or ‘natural genius’, statistically speaking, the odds are laughably against that being the case, and I would bet good money that there were many more talented people who worked much harder, but still didn’t achieve anything like your success and wealth because they were unfortunate enough to be born into a poor family.
This is a classic cause of the shamefully belittling and cruel attitude many politicians from affluent backgrounds have towards working class people. These silver spooned scions never really knew what hard work and desperate is, because they are wilfully blind to the overwhelming role their upbringing, family connections and/or trust funds played in making their lives so ‘successful’ and carefree to start with; so they blithely think anyone with half a brain who puts in a modicum of effort can achieve success and wealth, because that’s how easy it is in their world.
Sadly, I have seen first hand just how unjust the world is outside the walled gardens many of us are privileged enough to have been born into.
I have seen a woman, who is honestly the smartest person I know in real life, and who came first in the country in professional qualification exams; work harder than all her colleges but ended up burnt out and broken simply because she didn’t have the right connections or the right social contacts or just didn’t behave as someone who went through a ‘proper’ privileged upbringing should.
I also know a young woman who works two jobs (one of them is a ‘proper’ respectable 9-5 professional office job), just so she could afford to live in a tiny, shared, rented house in a bad part of town, and she is pretty much living hand to mouth. And heartbreakingly, even at such a young age, she knows that’s pretty much as good as it is going to get for her for years if not decades. With what she is earning, it’s just an exercise in self torment to save much, as she would be subjugating herself to real hardship to save a respectable percentage of her pay that is really not a lot of money in absolute terms every month.
It’s just not worth it, it is a far better and more logical game-plan to use that little money on rare treats for herself, for the sake of her physical and mental health, and wait until she gets a few more promotions and pay rises under the belt, at which point she could save the same percentage of her pay without suffering anything like as much hardship, and probably save more money in a couple of years then she could have in a decade on her current salary.
It’s a risky strategy of course, and it could easily be derailed by things like kids or career setbacks, but it’s the best one she has given the hand she was dealt.
The west is more like Vegas than most people would believe, in that while it looks mesmerising and glamorous from afar, and can seem like all that was advertised and more when you are in amongst all the dazzling lights and music and excess; you don’t need to go far off the tourist paths to see a state of grinding poverty and shocking decay. The inequality of birth is a huge part of the cause of that massive wealth disparity and a massive vulnerability to hostile foreign powers.
If China spent as much money and effort getting gangbangers to riot and black panthers and the KKK to start race wars as the CIA does trying to ferment unrest in China, Civil War II would have probably started by now in America.
