Some say we’re focusing on the wrong thing if we’re looking at the outward signs of wealth. The reality now is that if we’re going to envy our neighbors, it shouldn’t be for their BMW or new swimming pool. It should be for their fat 401(k) or gold-plated health insurance, because the ability to put away large amounts of money to secure our future and our children’s future is the sign of real wealth now.
The top 1 percent of households still spend money on conspicuous consumption but “the thing that really separates them is their spending on inconspicuous consumption,” said Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, who analyzed Americans’ spending habits for her book “The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class.”
Over the last few decades, wealthy people have increased how much of their spending they direct to education and retirement, compared with members of the middle class, whose expenditures in those areas have remained more or the less the same.
This is an interesting article more about statistics then retirement.
The dollar sign is among the world’s most potent symbols, emblematic of far more than US currency.
It’s shorthand for the American dream and all the consumerism and commodification that comes with it, signifying at once sunny aspiration, splashy greed and rampant capitalism. It’s been co-opted by pop culture (think Ke$ha when she first started out, or any number of fast-fashion t-shirts) and borrowed by artists (Salvador Dali fashioned a moustache from it, Andy Warhol rendered it in acrylic and silkscreen, creating an iconic body of work that itself now sells for $$$).
It’s used widely in computer coding and it provides money-mouth emoji with its dazed eyes and lolling tongue. Yet despite its polyglot ubiquity, the origins of the dollar sign remain far from clear, with competing theories touching on Bohemian coins, the Pillars of Hercules and harried merchants.
Americans’ difficulty saving, Daniel Eckert told me recently, is a textbook example of how brains wired to reckon with short-term threats and opportunities struggle to think about long-term consequences—and struggle even harder to take current action to stave off future disaster. Eckert, who oversees Walmart’s financial-services businesses, became interested in behavioral economics while earning his M.B.A. at the University of Chicago in the early 2000s.
Take a walk through a retail store—a Walmart, let’s say. You’ll pass heaps of products in every category, big signs advertising prices that seem too good to pass up, TV screens touting bargains galore. I shop at Walmart frequently, and somewhere in the long walk from the dog-biscuit aisle to the yogurt case I am at the very least tempted to buy something I didn’t know I needed when I arrived.
While I'm not sure I agree with his paid post that a paid financial advisor is essential or even recommended for most families, I do think people should read up and listen to practical advise on saving and investing, and give up more luxuries and be prepared for a more uncertain tomorrow. It's a very risky proposition to think the government will always be there to bail you out, or that things won't be as bad as you might they think they would be.