Rachel Louise Ensign

speaker

574 appearances 12 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2018 last heard Jan 2024

Rachel Louise Ensign’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

WSJ Your Money Briefing · Inflation Pushes More Americans to Dip Into Savings · 6 Jul 2022 podcast

That pile of savings is about $2.7, $2.6 trillion.

So there's still a lot left, but they're starting to kind of dig into that extra money.

And the government assistance that helped contribute to this big pile of savings, you know, the child tax credit, monthly payments that were coming in for a lot of families, the stimulus checks that hit people's bank accounts three times, those are not coming anymore.

So that is contributing to this.

You know, what Moody's Analytics found is it is affecting most income groups, but not folks at the very bottom, which is pretty interesting.

So the bottom 20% of earners have actually fared better than everyone earning more.

I mean, you have to put this into the context of the fact that the highest group of earners, the wealthiest people, they saved far far more than other groups during the first few years of the pandemic, just because

They generally kept their jobs and didn't have the vacations and extra things to spend money on.

So that group did really well for the last two years, but they are starting to kind of eat into that savings cushion.

And the bottom 20%, which has saved some, but you know, not not as much is still, you know, holding on to their extra pandemic savings.

And that seems to be because a lot of those folks have jobs that have gotten really big wage increases, jobs in retail, hospitality, things like that, and therefore are able to kind of keep up with inflation and continue to save and

What J.P.

Morgan has said, for instance, that's the biggest bank in the U.S., is that checking account balances of families within the lowest income group are still 65% above pre-pandemic levels.

So, you know, folks keep citing the same costs that are really hitting everyone.

You know, they say the grocery bill is higher, obviously gas, you know, most Americans, that is something they are really concerned about.

It's hitting them hard, the rising price of gas.

And, you know, people are just cutting costs, you know, where they can.

I spoke to a 24 year old who said he plans to cancel his this like meat subscription service that costs about $150 a month.

He's going to buy fewer books.

So these are, you know, little extras that he had been able to cover before.

Showing 201–220 of 574 · page 11 of 29