Enjoy Christmas with Santa Claus at the North Pole, an award-winning Christmas website. Send a letter to Santa Claus or a Christmas card to a friend. Find yummy Christmas recipes, Christmas stories, Christmas entertainment and. Many Middle- Class Americans Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck. Since 2. 01. 3,the Federal Reserve Board has conducted a survey to . But the answer to one question was astonishing. The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $4. The answer: 4. 7 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $4. Who knew? Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 4. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5. OFFICIAL WEBSITE - Films, books, audio titles including The Secret, The Power of Henry's Imagination, Hero, The Magic, The Power, The Secret to Teen Power. PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard. Your secrets, posted here, every Sunday. They call it 'Ball's Pyramid.' It's what's left of an old volcano that emerged from the sea about 7 million years ago. A British naval officer named Ball was the first European to see it in 1788. Channel 4's award-winning investigative current affairs programme. Breaking news, reviews, interviews, audio, and videos. Your hub for metal music. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil. You wouldn. I like to think I appear reasonably prosperous. Nor would you know it to look at my r. I have had a passably good career as a writer. I am nowhere near rich, but I have typically made a solid middle- or even, at times, upper- middle- class income, which is about all a writer can expect, even a writer who also teaches and lectures and writes television scripts, as I do. And you certainly wouldn. In truth, it may be more embarrassing than sexual impotence. To struggle financially is a source of shame, a daily humiliation. Silence is the only protection. I know what it. It was, according to that Fed survey and other surveys, happening to middle- class professionals and even to those in the upper class. It was happening to the soon- to- retire as well as the soon- to- begin. It was happening to college grads as well as high- school dropouts. It was happening all across the country, including places where you might least expect to see such problems. My friend and local butcher, Brian, who is one of the only men I know who talks openly about his financial struggles, once told me, . They had unemployment statistics and income differentials and data on net worth, but none of these captured what was happening in households trying to make a go of it week to week, paycheck to paycheck, expense to expense. David Johnson, an economist who studies income and wealth inequality at the University of Michigan, says, . But this concept that people aren. According to Johnson, economists have long theorized that people smooth their consumption over their lifetime, offsetting bad years with good ones. But recent research indicates that when people get some money. Many of us, it turns out, are living in a more or less continual state of financial peril. So if you really want to know why there is such deep economic discontent in America today, even when many indicators say the country is heading in the right direction, ask a member of that 4. Ask me. Financial impotence goes by other names: financial fragility, financial insecurity, financial distress. But whatever you call it, the evidence strongly indicates that either a sizable minority or a slim majority of Americans are on thin ice financially. A 2. 01. 4 Bankrate survey, echoing the Fed. Two reports published last year by the Pew Charitable Trusts found, respectively, that 5. A similar study conducted by Annamaria Lusardi of George Washington University, Peter Tufano of Oxford, and Daniel Schneider, then of Princeton, asked individuals whether they could . They found that slightly more than one- quarter could not, and another 1. The conclusion: Nearly half of American adults are . In that case, you might reckon you. That is precisely what Edward Wolff, an economist at New York University and the author of a forthcoming book on the history of wealth in America, did. Median net worth has declined steeply in the past generation. According to research funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, the inflation- adjusted net worth of the typical household, one at the median point of wealth distribution, was $8. By 2. 01. 3, it had declined to $5. And though the bursting of the housing bubble in 2. He found that in 2. A family in the middle quintile, with an average income of roughly $5. Even in the second- highest quintile, a family could maintain its normal consumption for only 5. Granted, those numbers do not include home equity. In his assessment, the typical American family is in . But just so the point isn. ![]() The Bankrate survey reported that nearly half of college graduates would not cover that car repair or emergency- room visit through savings, and the study by Lusardi, Tufano, and Schneider found that nearly one- quarter of households making $1. A documentary drawing on Lusardi. Lusardi, who was quick to point out that a small number of passerby interviews should not be mistaken for social science, was nonetheless struck by the disjuncture between the appearance of the interviewees and their answers. In the 2. 01. 0s, we have managed to democratize financial insecurity. If you ask economists to explain this state of affairs, they are likely to finger credit- card debt as a main culprit. Long before the Great Recession, many say, Americans got themselves into credit trouble. According to an analysis of Federal Reserve and Trans. Union data by the personal- finance site Value. Penguin, credit- card debt stood at about $5,7. Of course, this figure factors in all the households with a balance of zero. About 3. 8 percent of households carried some debt, according to the analysis, and among those, the average was more than $1. In recent years, while the number of people holding credit- card debt has been decreasing, the average debt for those households carrying a balance has been on the rise. Part of the reason credit began to surge in the . Emmons, an assistant vice president and economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, traces the surge to a 1. Supreme Court decision, Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp. The Court ruled that state usury laws, which put limits on credit- card interest, did not apply to nationally chartered banks doing business in those states. That effectively let big national banks issue credit cards everywhere at whatever interest rates they wanted to charge, and it gave the banks a huge incentive to target vulnerable consumers just the way, Emmons believes, vulnerable homeowners were targeted by subprime- mortgage lenders years later. What followed was the so- called Great Moderation, a generation- long period during which recessions were rare and mild, and the risks of carrying all that debt seemed low. Financial impotence has many of the characteristics of sexual impotence, not least of which is the desperate need to mask it. Both developments affected savings. With the rise of credit, in particular, many Americans didn. And put simply, when debt goes up, savings go down. As Bruce Mc. Clary, the vice president of communications for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, says, . They were using credit as a life raft. The personal savings rate peaked at 1. As of last year, the figure stood at 5. Mc. Clary, nearly 3. American adults don. When you combine high debt with low savings, what you get is a large swath of the population that can? Some economists say that although banks may have been pushing credit, people nonetheless chose to run up debt; to save too little; to leave no cushion for emergencies, much less retirement. Indeed, Annamaria Lusardi and her colleagues found that, in general, the more sophisticated a country. Lusardi argues that as the financial world has grown more complex, our knowledge of finances has not kept pace. Basically, a good many Americans are . A 2. 01. 1 study she and a colleague conducted measuring knowledge of fundamental financial principles (compound interest, risk diversification, and the effects of inflation) found that 6. Americans ages 2. Choice, often in the face of ignorance, is certainly part of the story. I am a financial illiterate, or worse. I made choices without thinking through the financial implications. I chose to become a writer, which is a financially perilous profession, rather than do something more lucrative. I chose to live in New York rather than in a place with a lower cost of living. I chose to have two children. I chose to write long books that required years of work, even though my advances would be stretched to the breaking point and, it turned out, beyond. We all make those sorts of choices, and they obviously affect, even determine, our bottom line. But, without getting too metaphysical about it, these are the choices that define who we are. We make them with our lives in mind. The alternative is to be another person. But even having made those choices, which involved revolving credit, for the better part of my life I was not drowning in debt (maybe treading in it . Until about five years ago, when I stopped using my credit cards altogether and started paying them off little by little with the help of a financial counselor, I. In retrospect, of course, my problem was simple: too little income, too many expenses. Credit enabled me to forestall this problem for a time. In the 2. 01. 0s, we have democratized financial insecurity. I never figured that I wouldn. I went to college; got a graduate degree; taught for a while; got a book contract; moved to a small, inexpensive, rent- controlled apartment in Little Italy to write; got married; and bumped along until I landed a job on television (those of you with elephant memories may remember that for three years, I was one of the replacements for Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on the PBS movie- review show Sneak Previews). Then my wife and I bought a small co. My wife continued to work, and we managed to scrape by, though child care and then private schools crimped our finances. We could have sent them to the public school in our neighborhood, except that it wasn.
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