Want to Save More? Lattes vs. Housing

It seems that almost all financial planning websites have essentially the same advice for saving money—cut out the $5 lattes, eating out, spending on entertainment, and a myriad of other non-essential activities that almost everyone enjoys.

However, when brokerage firm TD Ameritrade surveyed its clients who it deemed “Super Savers” for saving 20% or more of their incomes, they found something radically different. It turns out the single biggest difference between the spending of Super Savers and the rest of us…was spending on housing. Super Savers spend just 14% of their incomes on housing, while everyone else averaged about 23%.

They managed this mostly by simply living in smaller houses – a radical idea in the “bigger is better” real estate world. A recent American Enterprise Institute report showed how dramatically the size of the average house has grown at the very same time that the size of the family living in that average house has dramatically shrunk.

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Womack Weekly Commentary: September 18, 2017

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