[gshdg]

And yet more than half of Americans don’t have $400 to cover an emergency. I wonder how the US would stack up in 25th percentile wealth against European countries?

Also, there are measures like food insecurity that I suspect would be very telling.

[jandrewrogers]

Per the government, the median American household has >$1000 remaining every month after all ordinary expenses, far more than enough to cover a $400 emergency. The "can't cover $400" trope doesn't imply what you think it does, it is pulled out of context from a survey about how people would cover an emergency, not whether they could. Many popular financial stats used in the media are misleading in service of a narrative.

As another example, you'll see many articles stating some large percentage of Americans don't have any savings, which is only true because they define "savings" as having a savings account, which many Americans with plenty of money don't even have (myself included). And then there is the one about Americans having no retirement savings, where "retirement savings" excludes any real estate investments, taxable brokerage accounts, etc which is where many Americans have the majority of their retirement savings.

The "food insecurity" surveys are a similar story. Same with "food deserts". If you dig into the underlying studies none of them imply what the media tries to imply with them. It is a hazard to uncritically accept statistics from the media. They have an incentive to paint the most dire story possible.

[ianleeclark]

> Per the government, the median American household has >$1000 remaining every month after all ordinary expenses

Could you link the source? I'd like to see what is included in "ordinary expenses." Is it just CPI associated things?

[jandrewrogers]

The term of art for this is "discretionary income". I think it is a more informative than disposable income, but it is much harder to find for many countries. The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) publishes surprisingly detailed statistics on consumer expenditure at decile resolution which allows it to be easily computed.

Discretionary income is defined as disposable income after you subtract housing, utilities, food, clothing, healthcare, and transportation costs based on actual survey data. Roughly speaking, discretionary income is the amount of money available for saving or spending on fun. If you want to know the mean and distribution of how much a person spends on eggs or fresh vegetables in each decile, the BLS can tell you that. It also tracks a lot of non-essential expenditures. It is a great resource.

Here is the combined report from BLS for 2018:

https://www.bls.gov/cex/2018/combined/decile.pdf