Credit cards induce indebtedness, Scientific proof

Survey: Americans most cash-strapped

The Kansas City Star
Published June 18, 2005

Americans are the most cash-strapped among consumers in 38 international markets, according to an online consumer confidence survey taken in May by ACNielsen.

The survey, which gathered 21,000 responses from North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, found that 28 percent of U.S. residents claimed to "have no spare cash" after covering their monthly living expenses.

After Americans, those most likely to say they lived from paycheck to paycheck were residents of Portugal (24 percent), Brazil (23 percent) and Chile (21 percent).

At the other end of the spectrum, responses that some might consider counterintuitive found that only 5 percent of Russians said they had no spare cash at the end of the month.

Also surprising were the other markets with the lowest percentages of consumers who said they lived from paycheck to paycheck: Indonesia, Spain, Mexico, Ireland, India, China, Taiwan and the Philippines.

It's important to note that the poll was taken online and thus reached only consumers who had access to the Internet, which probably means that people on the lower end of the economic scale were not proportionately represented.

But Matthew Bell, a spokesman for ACNielsen, said: "The other factor to consider is that high incomes do not necessarily correlate with high levels of spare cash. Americans have higher incomes than people from most other countries, but they also carry very high levels of debt."

Among Americans who said they had money left over after meeting basic monthly living expenses, the most likely use of that money was to pay off credit cards, loans and other debts, the survey found.