Green is the new black

It seems the entire country is living by the ‘Grow Your Green’ mantra of saving. The Commerce Department reported last week that the personal savings rate hit a more than 15-year high of 6.9% in May.

And according to CNN Money, “even though the stock market has rallied since March on hopes that the worst is over, consumers have stepped up their penny-pinching ways. The savings rate was just 4.1% in February.” That’s a huge difference, compared to how we were stashing away (or not) from 2005-2008: most of us were just saving at a rate of between zero and 1%.

But are we saving enough?

Apparently, we still have a long way to go. Consumers were saving a lot more during recessions in the early 1990s, and savings rates grew to above 10% during tough economic times in the 1970s and 1980s.

While we may still have a ways to go, this new sense of “growing your green” is a good thing. Hopefully, it’ll keep us from overspending and going into debt–which is how we got into this mess in the first place, right?

How much are you saving compared to a few years ago?

Tell us about it and you could win money for that savings account!