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Are affluent Americans to blame for high interest rates?

Are affluent Americans to blame for high interest rates
Older Americans are benefiting from outsize gains in the stock and housing markets over the past several years, and much of their spending is going toward higher-priced services like travel and health care, putting upward pressure on those prices — and

WASHINGTON — Since retiring two years ago, Joan Harris has upped her travel game.

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Once or twice a year, she visits her two adult children in different states. She's planning multiple other trips, including to a science fiction convention in Scotland and a Disney cruise soon after that, along with a trip next year to neolithic sites in Great Britain.

“I really have more money to spend now than when I was working,” said Harris, 64, an engineer who worked 29 years for the federal government and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Back then, she and her now-ex-husband were paying for their children's college educations and piling money into savings accounts. Now, she's splurging a bit and, for the first time, is willing to pay for first-class plane tickets. She plans to fly business class to Scotland and has arranged for a higher-level suite on the cruise.

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“I suddenly realized, with my dad getting old and my mom dying, it’s like, ‘No, you can’t take it with you,’ ” she said. “I could become incapacitated to the point where I couldn’t enjoy something like going to Scotland or going on a cruise. So I better do it, right?”

Older Americans like Harris are fueling a sustained boost to the U.S. economy. Benefiting from outsize gains in the stock and housing markets over the past several years, they are accounting for a larger share of consumer spending — the principal driver of economic growth — than ever before.

As the Federal Reserve signals a moderate pace of rate cuts, with expectations of five or fewer adjustments within a year, investors are looki…

And much of their spending is going toward higher-priced services like travel, health care and entertainment, putting further upward pressure on those prices — and on inflation. Such spending is relatively immune to the Federal Reserve's push to slow growth and tame inflation through higher borrowing rates, because it rarely requires borrowing.

Affluent older Americans, if they own government bonds, may even be benefiting from the Fed's rate hikes. Those hikes have led to higher bond yields, generating more income for those who own such bonds.

The so-called “wealth effect," whereby rising home and stock values give people confidence to increase their spending, is a big reason the economy has defied expectations of a sharp slowdown. Its unexpected strength, which is contributing to stickier inflation, has forced a shift in the Fed's plans.

Retirement planning today means more than simply leaving your full-time job. It means achieving the financial freedom to pursue your passions and purpose—whether part-time work, teaching, consulting, volunteering, etc. How will you spend your time when your career comes to a close?

It's essential to take the time to consider exactly what you want from your retirement. What does it look like for you? Do you want a more "traditional" retirement, or do you have other plans in mind? Beyond that, how do you expect to see those plans through?

Wealth Enhancement Group has three tips for successfully reimagining your retirement.

1. Time your retirement transition

For years, retirement has been about simply reaching an age. You work until you turn 65, and then you retire. This antiquated mentality can put you into retirement before or after you're ready. Instead of adhering to old traditions, start by thinking about when you'd like to transition into retirement.

Maybe you like your job or your line of work and are quick to quit. If so, try to "go AWOL" instead. Regarding retirement, AWOL stands for "Achieving a Work-Optional Lifestyle." By "going AWOL," you can take the reins and determine how and when you transition away from working. Retirement nowadays means different things to different people, so having the ability to continue working if you want, with the flexibility to finish and fully retire when you're ready, can help you make the retirement transition at an optimal time.

How to retire on your terms

Timing your retirement transition will put you on track to having a happy retirement. Here, we've highlighted three key principles to focus on as you consider how to retire on your terms:

  • Aim for Voluntary Retirement: Being encouraged to retire before you're ready can lower your satisfaction. Adequate retirement planning means defining when you want to finish working, even if that's later than others expect you to.
  • Don't Focus on a Number: If you adopt the idea that you need a specific dollar amount in your retirement accounts to be able to retire, you may end up doing so much later than you actually could. By defining your goals for retirement, you can avoid the pitfall of staying at your job for too long and instead spend time doing what brings you joy.
  • Lower Your Stress with Accurate Risk Balances: It can be tempting to check your retirement accounts often to see if you're "on track," which can lead to unnecessary stress in times of market volatility. By structuring your portfolio to reflect your risk tolerance and your time horizon, you can rest easy knowing that your investments are working as best as they can.

Learn the fundamentals of Social Security

Social Security will no doubt play a huge part in your retirement plans. It's a major milestone in your retirement, so make sure you plan for when you want to start receiving this benefit and how it will be used as part of your retirement income strategy.

Remember: Timing is everything when it comes to Social Security. You can start taking your benefit any time between the ages of 62 and 70, but how old you are when you start drawing Social Security will permanently affect how much you receive. It's not a decision that should be taken lightly, so plan thoughtfully.

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As recently as March, the Fed's policymakers had projected that they would cut their benchmark rate three times this year. Since then, though, inflation measures have remained uncomfortably high, partly a consequence of brisk consumer spending. Chair Jerome Powell made clear recently that the Fed isn't confident enough that inflation is sustainably easing to cut rates.

When the Fed meets this week, it is sure to keep its benchmark rate unchanged at a 23-year high, the result of 11 rate hikes. The Fed's hikes have forced up borrowing costs across the economy — for everything from home and auto loans to credit cards and business loans.

Even as the Fed has jacked up borrowing costs, stock and home values have kept rising, enlarging the net worth of affluent households. Consider that household wealth grew by an average of 5.5% a year in the decade after the 2008-2009 Great Recession but that since 2018, it's accelerated to nearly 9%.

Stock prices, as measured by the S&P 500 index, are about 72% higher than they were five years ago. Home values soared 58% from the end of 2018 through 2023, according to the Federal Reserve.

All told, Americans’ wealth has ballooned from $98 trillion at the end of 2018 to $147 trillion five years later. Adjusting for inflation, the gains are less dramatic, but still substantial.

“People have had significant wealth gains in stocks, significant wealth gains in fixed income, significant wealth gains in home prices, significant wealth gains even in crypto,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at the Apollo Group, an asset manager. “All that adds up to still a very significant tailwind.”

The gains are hardly universal. The wealthiest one-tenth of Americans own two-thirds of all household wealth. Still, wealth for the median household — the midpoint between the richest and poorest — rose 37% from 2019 to 2022, the sharpest rise on record since the 1980s according to the Fed, to $193,000.

Wealth is also disproportionately held by older Americans. People ages 55 and over now own nearly three-quarters of all household wealth, up from 68% in 2010, according to the Fed. In percentage terms since the pandemic, household net worth has also surged for younger households. But because younger adults started from a much lower level, their gains haven't been anywhere near enough to keep pace with older Americans.

“The baby boomers are the richest retiring generation we’ve ever had,” said Edward Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research. “Not everybody is well-off, but we've never had a retiring generation with this much wealth. That’s one of the major reasons why the economy is strong."

That said, many older Americans face significant financial challenges. One-quarter of Americans over age 50 have no retirement savings, according to a survey by the AARP.

Even so, as the huge baby boom generation has aged and, on average, has accumulated more assets, they have accounted for a rising share of consumer spending. Americans ages 65 or over supplied nearly 22% of consumer spending in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. That's the highest such figure on records dating to 1989, up from about 16% in 2010.

One result of the Fed's higher rates has been a kind of bifurcated economy, by age. Older, wealthier Americans who already own homes and cars have been much less affected by the Fed's rate hikes. By contrast, younger Americans are enduring a combination of expensive home prices and high mortgage rates, making it much harder to buy a first home.

Harris, for one, sees this divide in her own family: Her home and car are paid off, and higher interest rates have had little effect on her finances. She recently saw a home for sale in her neighborhood for $500,000. She bought hers for $162,000 in 1991.

How has US wealth evolved since the 1980s?

How has US wealth evolved since the 1980s?

America's economy has exploded since 1989.

Gross domestic product, which measures all of the goods and services produced in a year, grew from $9.9 trillion to $22.5 trillion from 1989 to 2023 (after accounting for inflation), according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. This figure represents a massive increase in economic output.

This increased productivity has fed into a similarly significant increase in wealth. The Wealth Enhancement Group used data from the Federal Reserve to look at how the assets held by U.S. households has evolved over time.

Data shows that American households owned a combined $161 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2023, up from $24 trillion in 1989. That makes for a roughly 570% increase, or 170% after adjusting for inflation.

After accounting for debt, such as mortgages, America's total household net worth grew to $142 trillion, up from $20 trillion. Although the number is down by about 1% from its peak in the second quarter of 2022, it still reflects a dramatic increase over time.

The most valuable asset class the typical American family holds is real estate. Besides a significant drop during the 2000s subprime mortgage crisis and a brief dip following interest rate hikes in 2022, housing has been a reliable generator of wealth for the middle class.

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Household assets have skyrocketed since 1989

For Americans in the bottom half of the wealth distribution, housing made up 51% of their assets. Wealthier households, in contrast, tend to have higher shares of their savings in equities.

Households in the top 0.1% held 60% of their assets in shares of public and private companies in 2023. Meanwhile, households in the bottom half of wealth in the United States held only around 6% of assets in equities.

Yet, despite how much housing has grown in value, its ascent pales compared to the fastest-growing asset class: public equities.

Between 1989 and 2023, the value of public stocks held by American households grew by nearly 1,700%, rising from $2 trillion in value to $37 trillion. This trend, coupled with the fact that shares in companies are held disproportionately by the rich, has caused the share of American household assets held by the top 0.1% to increase from 8% to 12%.

Wealth Enhancement Group

The wealthy tend to own shares in companies

Some economists argue that, in theory, the ratio of a country's wealth to its economy, as measured by GDP, should be constant over time.

Yet, data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Federal Reserve data shows that the ratio of the net worth of American households and nonprofit organizations to GDP rose from around 3.6 in the 1980s to 5.5 in the third quarter of 2023.

In 2022, YiLi Chien and Ashley Stewart, two researchers at the St. Louis Federal Reserve, offered a few theories to explain how this ratio has increased over time. They suggest that American companies might now have greater market power, allowing them to charge more. The authors also note that since the internet era, many of America's biggest companies, such as Meta and Google, offer their services to consumers for free—while investors may value their economic contributions, they do not count for much in the GDP numbers.

However, assets are not net worth. The rich are more likely to own their homes outright. In the third quarter of 2023, households from the top 0.1% owned $1.83 trillion worth of real estate while owing just $70 billion in mortgages. In contrast, households in the bottom 50% of wealth owned $4.87 billion of real estate against $3 billion of housing debt.

Story editing by Ashleigh Graf. Copy editing by Kristen Wegrzyn.

This story originally appeared on Wealth Enhancement Group and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.

Wealth Enhancement Group

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