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Why are Americans so angry about petrol prices?
Re: Why are Americans so angry about petrol prices?
by diemos » Sat 14 May 2011, 15:38:17
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Outcast_Searcher', 'F')or someone in their late 50's with a well paying 35 year career under their belt, acting like they were hit by lightning within 6 months after losing their job -- there is NO EXCUSE. (How were these people planning on funding their retirement)?
At the tender age of 35 I got my first real job after grad school. My retirement thinking went something like this:
"Ok, I'm going to be working for 30 years and retired for 30 years so I need to save half of what I make and live on the other half. If investments pay off then great, I'll retire early, but I'm not going to be dependent on the stock market returning 8%/year like clockwork."
Now, at 46, I've got 14 years worth of living expenses stored up and you could cut my salary in half with no impact to my lifestyle. I cannot fathom what goes on in the minds of people who are spending every penny that comes in and borrowing more! If I lost my job today I could buy a house outright in flyover country and hunker down for what's coming.
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diemos - Heavy Crude
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Re: Why are Americans so angry about petrol prices?
by Maddog78 » Sat 14 May 2011, 16:11:23
Canadians are the same.
Some astonishing figures from these surveys.
http://www.financialpost.com/personal-f ... story.html
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')s must be obvious to most financial advisors, Canadians are lousy savers. Four in 10 save nothing at all, while 61% of us save less than $100 a month, according to an Ipsos Reid survey released Tuesday by Toronto-Dominion Bank and ABC Life Literacy Canada. On average, Canadians put aside only $211 a month for long-term savings.
That seems pathetic but even that seemingly small amount works out to $2,532 a year. As a recent column showed, if you can save just $2,000 a year consistently over 50 years, get the 10% average return Canadian stocks have generated and grow it tax-free in a tax-free savings account, you could be a millionaire at retirement.
The new research is consistent with a TD Canada Trust poll last month that found 54% of Canadians found it a "real struggle" or "impossible" to save and 38% had no savings at all.
Clearly, saving even a little trumps saving nothing at all. To work, though, it must be consistent, practised year in and year out. It requires basic financial management skills such as the ability to budget. That in turn requires character skills like discipline and a willingness to delay instant gratification.
The Ipsos Reid poll of 1,022 adults conducted late in March found 38% of Canadian households don't follow a budget and of the 62% that do, only 12% always stick to it, 10% rarely do so and 1% never stick to it.
Little wonder author David Chilton continues to insist "it's our inability to save more than anything else that's putting us in a tough position. I meet so few savers and incredibly it's getting worse."
Chilton, who is writing a sequel to his best-selling The Wealthy Barber, says he's noticed an "optimism bias" in younger non-savers. This causes them to believe they can tackle saving and retirement later in life. But when life doesn't go according to plan — through unfortunate events like job loss or divorce — they get in trouble or find they've sabotaged their ability to save.
While Chilton counsels young people to put aside 10% or 15% of their pay, procrastinators who wait till their forties or fifties will get a rude awakening: For them, saving "just" 10% or 15% of pay is too little. They may have to save a much more painful 20% or 30% of pay later in life.
"We have to save more and earlier," Chilton says, adding it's not just lowincome people who are failing to save. "I see many people who made big money in their career who didn't save much, if anything. It's wacky: people making $90,000 to $150,000 a year and their savings are almost nothing."
Just as depressing as these abysmal savings levels are Ipsos Reid's finding that half (49.8%) of Canadians struggle to perform tasks involving math and numbers. The survey found 72% do not strongly agree they are confident about their math and money-management skills when it comes to planning for a secure financial future. Seventy-nine per cent are not fully confident about their ability to teach other people (such as children or other family members) about money, saving and budgeting.
"Most acknowledge room for improvement in many areas of their financial skills," says Sean Simpson, associate vice-president of Ipsos Reid. And the less education a person has, the more there's room for improvement, he said.
Clearly the federal Task Force on Financial Literacy has its work cut out for it, but it's not acting alone. In Tuesday's online briefing, TD and ABC Life Literacy jointly announced a Financial Literacy Week to be held from Oct. 30 to Nov. 5, 2011.
The good news is the basic message isn't that complicated. Before you even start to worry about complicated investing and tax-optimization strategies, you need to save money first. And that's a simple process of spending less than you earn, a philosophy I call "guerrilla frugality."
The big banks seem to "get" this: TD launched its Simply Save program after clients told it how hard it was to save after the financial crisis. Scotiabank's Let the Saving Begin program takes a similarly groundfloor approach to the problem, supplemented by extensive distribution of Gordon Pape's book, Tax-Free Savings Accounts.
Let the saving begin indeed, preferably in TFSAs.
Some astonishing figures from these surveys.
http://www.financialpost.com/personal-f ... story.html
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')s must be obvious to most financial advisors, Canadians are lousy savers. Four in 10 save nothing at all, while 61% of us save less than $100 a month, according to an Ipsos Reid survey released Tuesday by Toronto-Dominion Bank and ABC Life Literacy Canada. On average, Canadians put aside only $211 a month for long-term savings.
That seems pathetic but even that seemingly small amount works out to $2,532 a year. As a recent column showed, if you can save just $2,000 a year consistently over 50 years, get the 10% average return Canadian stocks have generated and grow it tax-free in a tax-free savings account, you could be a millionaire at retirement.
The new research is consistent with a TD Canada Trust poll last month that found 54% of Canadians found it a "real struggle" or "impossible" to save and 38% had no savings at all.
Clearly, saving even a little trumps saving nothing at all. To work, though, it must be consistent, practised year in and year out. It requires basic financial management skills such as the ability to budget. That in turn requires character skills like discipline and a willingness to delay instant gratification.
The Ipsos Reid poll of 1,022 adults conducted late in March found 38% of Canadian households don't follow a budget and of the 62% that do, only 12% always stick to it, 10% rarely do so and 1% never stick to it.
Little wonder author David Chilton continues to insist "it's our inability to save more than anything else that's putting us in a tough position. I meet so few savers and incredibly it's getting worse."
Chilton, who is writing a sequel to his best-selling The Wealthy Barber, says he's noticed an "optimism bias" in younger non-savers. This causes them to believe they can tackle saving and retirement later in life. But when life doesn't go according to plan — through unfortunate events like job loss or divorce — they get in trouble or find they've sabotaged their ability to save.
While Chilton counsels young people to put aside 10% or 15% of their pay, procrastinators who wait till their forties or fifties will get a rude awakening: For them, saving "just" 10% or 15% of pay is too little. They may have to save a much more painful 20% or 30% of pay later in life.
"We have to save more and earlier," Chilton says, adding it's not just lowincome people who are failing to save. "I see many people who made big money in their career who didn't save much, if anything. It's wacky: people making $90,000 to $150,000 a year and their savings are almost nothing."
Just as depressing as these abysmal savings levels are Ipsos Reid's finding that half (49.8%) of Canadians struggle to perform tasks involving math and numbers. The survey found 72% do not strongly agree they are confident about their math and money-management skills when it comes to planning for a secure financial future. Seventy-nine per cent are not fully confident about their ability to teach other people (such as children or other family members) about money, saving and budgeting.
"Most acknowledge room for improvement in many areas of their financial skills," says Sean Simpson, associate vice-president of Ipsos Reid. And the less education a person has, the more there's room for improvement, he said.
Clearly the federal Task Force on Financial Literacy has its work cut out for it, but it's not acting alone. In Tuesday's online briefing, TD and ABC Life Literacy jointly announced a Financial Literacy Week to be held from Oct. 30 to Nov. 5, 2011.
The good news is the basic message isn't that complicated. Before you even start to worry about complicated investing and tax-optimization strategies, you need to save money first. And that's a simple process of spending less than you earn, a philosophy I call "guerrilla frugality."
The big banks seem to "get" this: TD launched its Simply Save program after clients told it how hard it was to save after the financial crisis. Scotiabank's Let the Saving Begin program takes a similarly groundfloor approach to the problem, supplemented by extensive distribution of Gordon Pape's book, Tax-Free Savings Accounts.
Let the saving begin indeed, preferably in TFSAs.
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Maddog78 - Heavy Crude
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Re: Why are Americans so angry about petrol prices?
by Sixstrings » Sat 14 May 2011, 16:41:26
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JohnRM', 'T')here are several important points to make.
(1) Americans drive longer distances to work and other places they need to go.
(2) We're very used to low gasoline prices.
(3) Rising gasoline prices are doing real economic damage to our personal economy, despite how low they are when compared to the rest of the world.
(4) If any politician supports an increase in the taxation of gasoline, he will be a politician no more.
(1) Americans drive longer distances to work and other places they need to go.
(2) We're very used to low gasoline prices.
(3) Rising gasoline prices are doing real economic damage to our personal economy, despite how low they are when compared to the rest of the world.
(4) If any politician supports an increase in the taxation of gasoline, he will be a politician no more.
Also something not much talked about or widely known is that the working poor in America are very poor by first world industrialized standards. If it gets to the point where a tank of gas costs a day's wages, that's just too much.
So when gas prices start shooting up it disrupts this massive poverty "service economy" we have -- the folks working at the gas stations, all the restaurants, grocery and every other kind of retail store, office clerks, lower end health care like CNAs and LPNs; these are all essential services that the working poor provide. If they can't afford gas to get to work, it's a problem.
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Re: Why are Americans so angry about petrol prices?
by Cloud9 » Sat 14 May 2011, 17:39:17
As to savings, a goodly portion of the population has worked for government. On the state level and we may come to find out on the national level that many of those government employees were duped by their employer into thinking that they had a solvent pension plan only to find out that it is under funded and in many cases squandered on risky investments made by the MBA’s in silk suits.
Get out of the big cities and there is no mass transit infrastructure. Businesses are located along major highways designed to fit the needs of a motoring public. Without cheap gasoline those businesses die on the vine.
McDonalds just hired some fifty thousand souls out of about a million applicants. The vast majority of those restaurants depend on the motoring public. I live in a subdivision of three or four hundred. The closest McDonalds is easily a four mile walk
Get out of the big cities and there is no mass transit infrastructure. Businesses are located along major highways designed to fit the needs of a motoring public. Without cheap gasoline those businesses die on the vine.
McDonalds just hired some fifty thousand souls out of about a million applicants. The vast majority of those restaurants depend on the motoring public. I live in a subdivision of three or four hundred. The closest McDonalds is easily a four mile walk
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Re: Why are Americans so angry about petrol prices?
by Pretorian » Sat 14 May 2011, 19:02:25
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('diemos', '
')At the tender age of 35 I got my first real job after grad school. My retirement thinking went something like this:
"Ok, I'm going to be working for 30 years and retired for 30 years so I need to save half of what I make and live on the other half. If investments pay off then great, I'll retire early, but I'm not going to be dependent on the stock market returning 8%/year like clockwork."
Now, at 46, I've got 14 years worth of living expenses stored up and you could cut my salary in half with no impact to my lifestyle.
')At the tender age of 35 I got my first real job after grad school. My retirement thinking went something like this:
"Ok, I'm going to be working for 30 years and retired for 30 years so I need to save half of what I make and live on the other half. If investments pay off then great, I'll retire early, but I'm not going to be dependent on the stock market returning 8%/year like clockwork."
Now, at 46, I've got 14 years worth of living expenses stored up and you could cut my salary in half with no impact to my lifestyle.
That is great, but you really should have thrown in a cancer or something at the age of 81 or around, so you can live a little now. What are your chances to live till 95 ? Also i would suspect that you are single with no kids.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('diemos', 'I') cannot fathom what goes on in the minds of people who are spending every penny that comes in and borrowing more!
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