Even though I’m not broke, I’m feeling very broke today. Perhaps it’s because my husband bought a new laptop last night and I am jealous. It makes me reflect once again on my financial situation. Netscape news has an article about average family savings. It wasn’t very informative, but it did make the point that many people, particularly poor people, do not have savings for emergencies. I remember being that poor. I am proud of having learned to manage my money independent of my husband, who helped me out financially when we first got married. I owe my independence to Wende Anthony, who used to be my financial advisor. Everyone should have a financial advisor. Anyway, objectively, I am not broke, but I feel deprived today. bell hooks once wrote (I think it was in Yearning) that she was never able to escape feeling deprived because of a childhood of deprivation. I identify with that statement.
Social comparison theory tells us that we judge ourselves my measuring ourselves against others. So I surfed around the net to find a picture of the mythical average family’s financial situation. This is what I found:
- The average family has under $4,000.00 in the bank. (I have more.)
- The median income of women in 2005 was $31.858 (77% of men). (I make more.)
- The average cost of a wedding in the US is $25,000.00 (we eloped to Vegas).
- The average American carries $10,000 in credit card debt, spread out among as many as four cards. (I have no consumer debt, though I do have my school loan and car payment)
- An average credit score for Americans is around 600, which means that the average American pays too much for borrowed money because the loan percentage rates are based on this number. The best total would be 800 and the worst would be 350. (I don’t know what my credit score is, which I should rectify, but I was able to qualify for a personal line of credit with my banks — which I got to put overdraft protection on Willow’s account, the brat).
- The typical American household has a net worth of $465,970, up 83 percent from 1965, 60 percent from 1985 and 35 percent from 1995. I have no idea what our net worth is, but it is no where near that high, I believe. That’s because we didn’t start accumulating right after college the way most families do. We went the poor graduate student route.
The moral of this story: I have no right at all to feel deprived anymore.
