Needs and wants, 2015 edition

Last updated on: April 17, 2015 at 7:59 am by Jane the Actuary

Needs and wants, 2015 edition 2015-04-17T07:59:15-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Yesterday I listened to a training session at work in which the presenter described the work being done in another part of the company on helping clients encourage their employees to save more for retirement; one interesting thing that more employers are doing, apparently, is moving beyond retirement savings to provide encouragement, online tools, and in-house sessions on money management more generally.

And I started thinking about this: whether wages have stagnated, regressed, or proceeded to climb depends on one’s interpretation of the data: how you slice and dice by education level or earnings percentile, what metric you use for inflation, and so on. But one thing is true: the government develops inflation metrics based on price changes for a “basket of goods” that’s supposed to represent typical spending. (One of these days I’ll look up the details and unpack them.) There are some very real ways, though, in which that “basket of goods” has not just changed over time, but gotten bigger: our expectations of what constitute “basic living expenses” and “spending needed to be middle class” have changed quite a bit over time, and this is a significant impediment in Americans saving for retirement, or savings at all.

So I thought I’d compile a list of these types of changes, and ask you to brainstorm with me on this, or collect comments anyway, until I have time to really dig through the available data.

You can get a cheap, “dumb” phone and a by-the-minutes plan for a fairly low price, and, if you’re single, replace your landline with it. But more and more, even the poor “need” a smartphone. And I don’t really know how likely poor families are to have a computer with internet service, but we’re told that this, too, is a need, not a want. Heck, my high schooler is expected to do his homework on his school-issued iPad, with the instruction to the substantial number of Mexican immigrants (the parent meeting at orientation was twice as long as it otherwise would have taken because everything was translated into Spanish) being to stay after school, then go to the library, and, after they close, or the McDonalds or Panera as needed after school closes down for the day.

Bottom line is that for most of us, internet service of various types has been transformed from a “want” into a “need” — and thinking about that left me wondering what other transformations have occurred. At the level of “what you need to be middle class,” many, probably. The size of one’s house, to be sure, but even the expectation that one lives in a single family house, and that to live in an apartment is a marker of failure. Air conditioning is now a need. The “need” to spend on activities for the kids — it happens fairly often that in stories of unemployment hardships, the parents struggle mightily to maintain the travel soccer expenses. The “need” for more clothes (at least, judging from the very small closets in our first house, built in 1946), for a health club membership. Heck, even in terms of food, more and more people feel they “need” out-of-season fresh produce (and more of it), organics, a better cut of meat than grandmother’s pot roast, and so on — not to mention the “need” to eat out more often than past generations.

Which all leaves me wondering: has this been quantified? Time to hit google, I suppose. But in the meantime: your thoughts?

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