Now this is some encouraging news … if you enjoy financial distress.
If we’re to believe CareerBuilder’s survey of 4,500 U.S. workers — and I don’t really have a great reason not to — then roughly 77 percent of us describe ourselves as living paycheck to paycheck:
CareerBuilder: Nearly 8 in 10 Living Paycheck to Paycheck
From the article:
Ouch. Earlier this year, I mentioned that more and more $100k workers were living paycheck to paycheck, too.
For those of you who like charts, here’s one with a bit more data from the CareerBuilder survey:
Pretty great, ain’t it, that more people were willing to dip into savings and retirement accounts than were willing to cancel their cable TV and other subscriptions. What the hell are people thinking?
And since I’ve already got Excel open, I might as well update this running chart while I’m at it:
If you’re interested in comparisons, I covered last year’s CareerBuilder survey here.
Nathan wrote:
The difference between the cable/subscription number and the 401k/savings number could also be accounted for by people who didn’t have cable or other subscriptions in the first place. The changes surveyed are all since the beginning of the recession, so the more frugal folks probably just didn’t have those things to cut in the first place.
Compare with the public transportation number. I’m sure a lot more than 5% typically use public transportation, but the stat is saying that 5% of those surveyed are now using public transportation when they weren’t before.
Steve Dee wrote:
But that can’t be right. The government says the recession ended months ago!
[/sarc]