Sunday, December 09, 2007

Can I afford it?

No, I probably can't. Lolol. I'm watching a rerun of the Suze Orman show where she does the "Can I afford it" segment. Basically you call in, tell her your finances and she tells you whether you can buy the item you want or not.

It's a real eye-opener seeing how much money people have and what they want to buy. One family called in with almost 8k monthly take home income. But they only have 7k in savings. Savings include cash, cds, mutual funds and stock. They have no retirement savings right now and they're in their early 30's. They make a ton of money and hardly have any savings. I have more in savings than they do and I make way less than them. They wanted to buy 1/2 share of a lake house. They were denied because they didn't have enough in savings.

I'm floored that they don't even have 1 month of their salary in savings. That's living on the edge in my opinion. Of course their expenses could be really low but even if their expenses are half of their income, they still have less than 2 months worth of expenses.

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