Personal-finance guru Suze Orman thinks most consumers are, or soon will be, in dire straits, facing an environment of higher interest rates, higher inflation, and elevated volatility in stocks and bonds.
“ ‘Most of America today has absolutely no money, if you look at it.’”
— Suze Orman
Orman’s comments, made on CNBC on Wednesday afternoon, came as SecureSave, an emergency-savings-account company that she co-founded, has published a survey finding that 67% of workers cannot afford an emergency $400 expense and that 74% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
Robert Powell’s Retirement Portfolio: Who gives the best retirement advice? Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey or economists? Kristi Rodriguez, senior vice president of the Nationwide Retirement Institute, said last fall that Americans’ monthly expenses have outpaced the growth of their personal incomes. “Households are spending more, not as much because they want to, but because they have to, with increased costs for essential items,” she was quoted as saying by MarketWatch’s Quentin Fottrell. See: U.S. consumer mood improving, according to final University of Michigan sentiment reading for January Indeed, the personal savings rate has plunged to around 2.4% from a pandemic peak of 33%, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
Orman explained the fall in savings this way on the CNBC program “Fast Money”: They were so flush with cash ’cause during the pandemic they had no place to spend the money that unemployment was giving them, extra unemployment, all kinds of stimulus checks. They didn’t have to pay their mortgage, their rent, their student-loan payment. And here we are now, a year or two later, interest rates are through the roof, for most of them…rent they can’t afford, they can’t buy a house, they can’t buy eggs, they can’t buy a car. She speculated that “soon they’ll be using their credit cards, not being able to pay it,” she said. Orman also noted that the repossession of cars, where borrowers have defaulted on automobile loans, are surging to levels not seen in four years. Opinion: House …