Free-spending Americans
~ Monday. October 2, 2023 Blog Post ~
I have written an article recently about my older sister who is a shopaholic. She is my only sibling who is also a millennial born in the early 1980s.
My older sister and her Gen Z daughter are fond of spending their money on anything they fancy.
These items and expenses include Starbucks drinks, K-Pop concerts, clothes, makeups, Sonny Angel dolls, Chance by Chanel fragrance, Jellycat plush stuff toys, sweet, colorful, and fruity-flavored Mogu Mogu drinks, Chick-fil-A Nuggets and Waffle Potato Fries and other fast food, repeated trips to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Vietnamese pho dinner, and so forth.
My older sister who is a Massachusetts registered nurse already has lots of clothes, designer bags, shoes, and so on. My Mommy helped her discard some surplus stuffs by donating them to The Salvation Army.
Anyway, my older sister who has made my Mommy and her daughter her cohorts are examples of free-spending Americans. They really enjoy their hard-earned money.
Being the polar opposite of my generous and free-spending older sister and father, I have constantly lectured my family on the significance of saving money for the sunny and rainy days. As the miser family member, I have emphasized that they should avoid wasting their money on stuffs.
Don’t get me wrong. My family is definitely not stupid with their hard-earned money and have their investments and savings already in place. But they argue that it is best to enjoy your hard-earned money today because we never know what lies ahead.
Interestingly, a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article was published today regarding free-spending Americans. Similar to my free-spending family members, the people featured in the article believe it is best to relish your hard-earned money and get its value now for nobody is, indeed, guaranteed tomorrow.
Here is the WSJ article:
Americans Are Still Spending Like There’s No Tomorrow (From The Wall Street Journal)
By Rachel Wolfe, October 1, 2023
Concerts, trips and designer handbags are taking priority over saving for a home or rainy day
Consumers should be spending less by now.
Interest rates are up. Inflation remains high. Pandemic savings have shrunk. And the labor market is cooling.
Yet household spending, the primary driver of the nation’s economic growth, remains robust. Americans spent 5.8% more in August than a year earlier, well outstripping less than 4% inflation. And the experience economy boomed this summer, with Delta Air Lines reporting record revenue in the second quarter and Ticketmaster selling over 295 million event tickets in the first six months of 2023, up nearly 18% year-over-year.
Economists and financial advisers say consumers putting short-term needs and goals above long-term ones is normal. Still, this moment is different, they say.
A tough housing market has more consumers writing off something they’d historically save for, while the pandemic showed the instability of any long-term plans related to health, work or day-to-day life. So, they are spending on once-in-a-lifetime experiences because they worry they may not be able to do them later.
“It’s not a regret-filled, spur-of-the-moment decision,” says Michael Liersch, who oversees a team of advisers as head of advice at Wells Fargo. “It’s the opposite of that, where I would regret not having done it.”
Liersch cautions that it’s too soon to say whether the spate of spending is a fleeting moment or a new normal. And consumers remain frustrated about inflation as the price of many goods remains significantly higher than a few years ago.
Ibby Hussain, who works in marketing for a financial communications firm, says the Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment he and his fiancée rent for $3,000 a month would cost a million dollars to buy. At current rates, that means around $5,000 a month after a $200,000 down payment, not including property taxes. “And it’s not even that nice of an apartment.”
So, instead of saving for a down payment like he expected to after turning 30 and getting engaged in the past year, he splurged.
First, he bought a $1,600 Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket and then he spent $3,500 on a bachelor party trip to Ibiza, Spain.
“I might as well just enjoy what I have now,” he says.
A travel boom
Ally Bank, whose online platform started allowing customers to create savings buckets for different goals in 2020, says users create about one-and-a-half times more experience-oriented buckets such as travel and “fun funds” versus those associated with longer-term planning.
Lindsey and Darrell Bradshaw went into credit-card debt to finance a vacation to Maui this past spring. The couple booked the trip only a few weeks after Lindsey, 37, quit her job to be a full-time caregiver to their 8-year-old son, who has special needs.
“We did not have the money and we were like, ‘Let’s just do this anyway,’ ” says Darrell Bradshaw, a 39-year-old general contractor in Seattle.
The trip cost about $10,000, including three, $1,000 last-minute plane tickets, 10 nights at a $385-a-night 4-star resort and several elaborate meals.
Even though the family decided to cancel subscriptions and cut back on dining out to help offset the bill, they say they have no regrets — especially since they got to see Lahaina just a few months before it was decimated by deadly wildfires.
Fears about a changing climate are driving some people to try to see places before they’re gone. In a monthly Deloitte survey of 19,000 global consumers, climate change was the only topic among 19 different concerns that respondents reported feeling significantly more worried about over the past year.
Josh Richner says he greatly lowered his retirement contribution to afford a cross-country trip that included a $7,000 Alaskan cruise so his family could see the ice caps, which have been melting at a rapid clip.
“I’ve never spent that much on a trip before,” says the 35-year-old, who says the splurge was also motivated by the pandemic and a health scare.
About six months ago, Richner and his wife decided to sell their Columbus, Ohio, home to travel the country with their two young children. Working for National Legal Center, a law firm that helps consumers resolve debt, he knows the potential consequences of living in a way that gives priority to the present. But he isn’t worried.
“I just hit a point where the thing that we had been talking about maybe hopefully doing some day, we’re going to do it now,” he says. “I’m not going to worry about money anymore. I don’t have it in me.”
Splurge purchases
Consumers might not be able to keep splurging forever. Labor strikes and student loan repayments could both lead people to pull back. Rising gas prices could also deter travel.
For those who study spending, however, the robustness up to this point has been a surprise.
In the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s August SCE Household Spending Survey, households reported spending 5.5% more than last year. The share of households that said they made at least one large purchase in the previous four months increased to 64% from 57%, its highest reading since August 2015.
“Normally at a time when you have higher inflation, but also higher interest rates, you don’t expect spending to hold up so well,” says Wilbert van der Klaauw, an economic research adviser on household and public policy at the Fed.
Rather than funnel all their spare change into a house or retirement account, Candice and Jasmine Kelly started a bucket-list fund after attending back-to-back funerals a few months ago. The couple adds a few hundred dollars from their paychecks each month into the fund, which they have used to try fancy restaurant tasting menus and buy Jasmine her dream designer handbag.
Instead of waiting to have fun when they retire, Candice, a 26-year-old management analyst in Charlotte, N.C., says the couple is trying to do the opposite. They want to enjoy their money while they’re young — even if it means working longer.
“All the rules that exist around money and lifestyle are just things people made up, so we’re playing a different game, and honestly I think we’re having more fun,” says Candice.
Source:
https://wsj-article-webview-generator-prod.sc.onservo.com/webview/WP-WSJ-0001246558
