More Americans Worry About Paying Bills Than During the Great Recession
By Michael Snyder/Economic Collapse Blog July 24, 2024
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Do you remember how painful the Great Recession was? 2008 and the years immediately following were definitely a very dark chapter in our history, but a new study has actually found that the percentage of Americans that worry they won't be able to pay their bills is actually higher today than it was back then.
Slowly but surely, our economic strength has been fading and our standard of living has been falling. Unfortunately, now we have reached a point where a very large portion of the U.S. population is really struggling.
According to a CNN poll that was just released, almost 40 percent of all U.S. adults "say they worry most or all of the time that their family's income won't be enough to meet expenses"...
Many Americans regularly worry they won't be able to make ends meet.
Nearly four in ten (39%) of US adults say they worry most or all of the time that their family's income won't be enough to meet expenses, according to a new CNN poll. That's up from 28% who expressed those concerns in December 2021, and it's similar to the numbers seen during the Great Recession (37%).
To cope, significant shares of Americans said they are adding side jobs, cutting down on driving and putting more expenses on credit cards.
If you would have asked me before I saw the results, I would have been quite confident that the number during the Great Recession would have been higher than the number in 2024.
Just like everyone else, I remember the Great Recession as such a painful time.
Sadly, the economic pain that we are experiencing now is just beginning.
Ordinary Americans from coast to coast are being absolutely crushed by rising prices, and that isn't going to change any time soon.
In an article that CNN posted about this new survey, one woman that works for the CDC admitted that she was recently forced to move because costs have risen so aggressively...
"The grocery store is just outrageous right now. But it's not just that. Everything has gone up. Clothing. My insurance," said Angela Russell, an Ohio resident who works as a program analyst at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Russell, who has two adult children and three grandkids, said she recently moved out of her rental home in Cincinnati in favor of one in a rural area where the rent is cheaper.
Other recent surveys have come up with results that are even more alarming.
For example, one discovered that a whopping 71 percent of Americans are stressed out about their "ability to afford everyday expenses"...
71% of Americans say they're stressed by their ability to afford everyday expenses.
Americans most regularly spend money on groceries, phone bills, utilities, gasoline and rent/mortgage payments.
Grocery bills frustrate Americans more than any other regular expense. Utilities, rent/mortgage payments, gasoline and insurance payments round out the top five most annoying expenses.
That is most of the country.
Unsurprisingly, younger generations are being hit particularly hard by the pain of inflation...
Financial stress levels are highest among millennials (77%), followed by Generation Z (75%) and Generation X (74%). Baby boomers reported experiencing the least financial stress, although at 59% it was still more than half of those surveyed.
Those that follow my work regularly know that I tend to rant about rising prices at the grocery store.
Sometimes it is hard for me to believe that prices have gotten so high, and it appears that a lot of people out there agree with me.
Another recent survey found that 80 percent of Americans have observed a "notable increase" in grocery store prices...
According to a study by Qualtrics on behalf of Intuit Credit Karma, 80% of Americans say they have felt a "notable increase" in grocery costs in recent years. More than a quarter of respondents said the increased cost has led them to occasionally skip meals, while about one-third said they spend more than 60% of their monthly income on mandatory expenses such as food, utilities and rent.
Food has certainly become ridiculously expensive, but we actually spend far more money on housing.
Today, the typical household spends about 12 percent of total income on food and about 33 percent of total income on housing...
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the top three annual expenses for the average American household in 2022 (the most recent data available) were housing (33.3%), transportation (16.8%) and food (12.8%).
For most Americans, spending money in these areas is unavoidable.
Housing costs have been rising much faster than the overall rate of inflation, and we just learned that home prices reached yet another new all-time record high last month...
Home prices hit a new high in June for the second straight month, the latest sign that the housing market is unaffordable to millions of Americans.
The spring home-buying season, usually the busiest time of year for the housing market, was a dud this year. Home sales declined in June for the fourth straight time on a monthly basis. The combination of high prices and elevated mortgage rates has made homeownership less attractive to renters and deterred current homeowners from moving.
Meanwhile, homelessness in the United States is at the highest level ever recorded and it has been growing at the fastest pace ever recorded.
We just can't keep going on like this.
Something has to give.
It appears to be inevitable that all of this economic pain will have a dramatic impact on the upcoming election. At this point, approximately three out of every five Americans believe that we are already in a recession right now...
You don't need to be a financial genius to know that times are tough for plenty of Americans. With that in mind, a majority of people actually think the economy is doing even worse than the "experts" say it is. Three in five people believe that the U.S. is currently in a recession, even though we're not officially in one according to the financial definition.
The survey of 2,000 Americans explored what's driving this lack of consumer confidence in the economy. Inflation and the rising cost of living (68%) top the list of reasons why respondents believe the U.S. is in a recession, followed by friends and family members complaining about money (50%).
It is not an accident that this has happened.
For more than a decade, people like me have been relentlessly warning that the decisions that our leaders were making would have disastrous consequences, and that is exactly what has happened.
And if we stay on the path that we are on, it won't be too long before we witness a meltdown of absolutely epic proportions.
Originally published at The Economic Collapse Blog
