We live in a pretty awesome country if you ask me. Home of the free, land of the brave, and boundless opportunities everywhere you look to make your dreams come true! When you look at the state of our personal finances as a whole though, things are looking so swell.
Here’s a few personal finance statistics I find worth sharing:
- 62% of Americans only have enough savings to pay for a $500 or $1,000 emergency.
- 56% of people have less than $1,000 in their checking and savings accounts combined.
- The average household with credit card debt carried a balance of $6,885 as of June 2016 and pays $1,292 a year in interest.
I don’t know about you, but when I read these and some others I was shocked!
Over half of the country barely has enough money to cover an emergency. If an emergency were to happen, then what would you do? Borrow money from friends or family? Put it on a credit card?
To me that’s really scary and I’m sure I’d start to lose some sleep over the worrying and stress of not having money. I barely get enough sleep as it is so I don’t want to leave any chance to getting less!
In recent years, I’ve seen more and more resources dedicated towards personal finance from blogs, books, apps, and others. Yet, somehow there’s still a huge gap between those who are “making it” and those who are falling behind.
This post is not to meant judge anyone, blame anyone, or present some solution to this problem. I’m just trying to raise more awareness towards the issue.
I’ve been studying wealth and how to build it for just a couple of years now. It’s something I find to be fascinating and with the wealth gap increasing more and more between the rich and the average American I think it’s a topic that should be looked into deeper by everybody.
I realize not everybody wants to be a millionaire, but I say, why not try to make and save as much money as possible in your life? Also, do you really want to keep feeling like you’re never getting ahead and stressing everyday on whether or not you have the money to pay bills or to have fun? You only have one life so you might as well give it your all, right? Who knows, you might surprise yourself!
One of the aims of having this blog in the first place is to provide you with useful information that can help you become better at personal finance by providing information and my own experiences/struggles that I’ve learned over the last five years as well as things that I’m continuing to learn.
I can’t say that I know everything, but I’ll continue reading and doing research so I can provide the best information possible for everybody. For example, I don’t have a credit card, but I’m really curious as to which ones are the “best” and how to properly use them and whatever else you might need to know. So I’ll do the research and hopefully the content I can provide you is enjoyable and will be useful!
Have an awesome day!