If 63% Of Americans Are Paycheck-To-Paycheck, What Happens With Less Paychecks?

Are we headed towards a cliff of sorts? Or is that overly dire?

First off, it is nearly impossible to get reputable data on what percentage of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Some claim it’s 25–30%, which seems reasonable. Some say it’s as high as 80%, which seems preposterous. Over the last year, CNBC has done a bunch of videos that all seem to get over 1M views on YouTube about the decline of American savings, and they peg it at 63%, although I am not sure what that means or how exactly it’s defined. So, up front, if you want to quibble with that, I realize the number could be as low as 25%. It’s higher than zero, though.

Here is one of those videos, by the way. You can find more:

This whole paycheck-to-paycheck and “future of work” thing is a very complicated discussion, and you could argue that right this second it’s a very contextual discussion, just because we came out of a free money era (low interest rates), had COVID, printed a bunch of money…