My suspicion is that it may be due to the inflation adjusted real wage effects, which hit the bottom 25th percentile the hardest, as that is generally their only source of income, and their resulting margin for wealth storage is so much closer. [1] Honestly, real wage income has been flat since about 1965, and for many has been going down since the great recession. [2] And if you only got high school or less, well, you're just boned. [3] (Note, take sources with a grain of salt, as they're 5 minute Google searches)
Not necessarily. Everybody has a burn rate for money, as a natural feature of living in a market economy where we do work for pay. At its minima, its the cost to meet Maslow's needs. In the worst version, if our pay goes below the absolute minima, then we'll likely be eating our wealth, looking for other support, going homeless, or dying.
Unfortunately, we also tend to be habit creatures, and our burn rate often stabilizes to our pay and our social class (keeping up with the Jones'). If our real wage starts to go down, then we often have trouble adapting, and keep burning as if we were still at the prior equilibrium (credit card debt, eating into savings, taking out loans).
This is made even worse when the source of real wage reduction is the subtle erosion of our buying power through inflation. We complain about how much things cost, but we still see our paychecks slightly increasing so it seems good, and the burn gets worse.
