Blog Master G

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Negative Savings Rate

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 · 2 Comments

It’s probably a good thing my blog isn’t quite as popular as that of fellow Saratoga Springs blogger Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler. If I had even half the number of comments that his most recent post about the housing market in Saratoga and across the country, Jitters, has garnished, then I’d never get anything done. Of course, many of the comments have taken on a life of their own and turned into the personal soap box of those commenting.

Yesterday I joined the comment extravaganza and added one of my own:

It’s pretty scary that this country has a negative savings rate.

I fear for what will happen when everyone who bought a house with an interest-only loan can no longer afford a mortgage payment of interest AND principal when the interest rates continue to climb. Will all those houses flood the market? And who will buy them?

Thanks, kd, for the particularly poignant glimpse of life in San Marcos, TX. In the words of the characters in Team America, all I can say is, “America! Fuck yeah!”

Pretty depressing… this unsustainable landscape of strip malls and SUVs we’ve created called America.

Posted by: Gabe | March 20, 2006 at 09:07 AM

Tags: home ownership

2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Alex // Mar 21, 2006 at 4:09 pm

    Yeah, I have actually considered teaching a community ed course on personal finance. Teach people how to develop a budget and save money, etc. Maybe when I am done with school I will look into it.

  • 2 Jonty // Mar 23, 2006 at 12:35 am

    First, let me start off with saying that our consumer-driven socity needs to collectively save more. I commend anyone with the time and energy to teach community-oriented personal finance classes.

    That said, there was an interested article– I belive in Businessweek, but I can’t be sure– about the savings rate in this country.

    It’s wrong.

    Basically, long story short, economy uses a whole host of statistics that many feel are outdated. I am no fan of “new math” or “new economics”, but here’s an example:

    When you buy a beer and drink it, and it’s gone, that money is counted the same as when you pay tuition for college or graduate school.

    The current definition of “savings and investments” does not fully capture all the things that people truly do with their money. For example, while it’s true that pure savings is pretty low, there are also more people going to schools.

    Additionally, while many corporations are also in debt, the private sector has been finacing an increasingly larger portion of technological R&D.

    Not 100% on point, but still an interested footnote to the blog post.