U.S. National Savings Rate breaks a bad barrier

Our National Savings Rate Is Embarrassing [Fool.com] January 17, 2007

Wow… this was surprising to me:

…consider these historical numbers for the U.S. personal savings rate:

* 1984: 10.8%
* 2001: 1.8%
* 2003: 1.4%

Do you see a troubling trend? So do I. Care to guess where we landed in 2005?

* 2005: (0.5%)

That’s right — negative savings!

Is that unprecedented? Well, not exactly. We hit negative levels for two years — during the Great Depression.

I figured Joe American wasn’t doing that great at savings, but those numbers point to a situation much worse than I anticipated. It is definitely my goal this year to help bring that number up a bit.

[tags]personal finance, savings[/tags]

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