Savings? You heard it here first. Well, you heard it from Your Money or Your Life – again and again. Stand still long enough and the world does come back to your door. Saving money – living within your means – is making a comeback. For me it never left, butlisten to this from the Christian Science Monitor today:
Last year’s 0.6 percent savings rate meant that, on average, 99.4 percent of Americans’ disposable income was being spent.
But with a host of financial shocks hitting Wall Street and Main Street – a recession, rising job losses, tumbling real estate and stock values – attitudes toward savings are changing. “We’re going to start being moderate savers and not live beyond our means,” says David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s Corp.
Moreover, he expects that behavior to last until the “economy has stayed good enough for long enough” for people to forget what has happened, especially to the value of their homes and equities. “Normally, it takes around 10 years of steady economic gains for them to forget” any economic woes that they’ve endured, Mr. Wyss says.
And why would we want to forget common sense and sanity?
Anyone have a ball of string anymore inherited from your Grandma who went through the depression? Glad you have it? What kind of world do we want to pass on to our kids – a world of enough, or a world of “more is better… and it’s never enough”?
Balls of yarn, actually, and her knitting needles, as well as various knitted items that I still wear. Vintage is in. Knitting with her yarn gives me a magical, fulfilling feeling and sense of continuity. More is saved and passed on than money and possessions. Skills and memories are always worth reviewing in our quest to determine “What is enough?”