Читать книгу Future Proofing You - Jay Samit - Страница 10

If you are reading this book and are broke, here are three comforting facts: you are not alone, it's not your fault, and a year from now you can be a millionaire. While the stock market is at an all‐time high, the sad truth is that the vast majority of people are drowning in debt. Americans owe more than $1 trillion in credit card debt and another $1.5 trillion in student loans. According to a recent Bankrate survey, the majority of Americans don't even have the funds to cover an unanticipated $1,000 emergency. As the Covid‐19 virus pandemic taught all of us, life can be full of expensive surprises. Your car needs a new transmission, your appendix bursts, or you suddenly lose your job. The smallest financial challenge and you could be just weeks away from being on the street homeless. The income inequality gap in the US has never been wider, with the poorest half of Americans owning just 1 percent of the nation's wealth. According to recent research by the Institute for Policy Studies, 140 million Americans are poor or low‐income, living below 200 percent of the Census's supplemental measure of poverty. For almost half the US population, life is a never‐ending balancing act of juggling bills and paying off debts.¹

Before you know it, retirement age creeps up, leaving one third of US households with nothing saved for their old age and the majority (56 percent) having managed to only stash away less than $10,000. Adding to these woes are the facts that younger people will be living longer and the Social Security trust in the US will run out of money by 2034!² For most people, the golden years aren't so golden, with financial independence and security completely out of their reach.