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The Government Adds Up What Americans Save Every Month. In September It Was 3.8 Cents on the Dollar.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes the personal saving rate once a month. My old roommate Anton finished paying off a loan in 2010 and never stopped making the payment.
In 2010 I shared the top floor of a house on Laurel Avenue in Knoxville, Tennessee, with a man named Anton, who made dental crowns in a lab near the hospital. He was thirty-one and kept a bowling ball in the hall closet that I never once saw him take out. We split the rent evenly and the groceries badly.
That March he made the last payment on a loan from a technical college. It had been $185 a month for nine years, and I knew the amount because he paid it at the kitchen table out of a booklet of coupons until the booklet was empty. I said we should go out for steak. He said he had work in the morning.
In April, on his first payday without the loan, he went to his credit union at lunch and arranged for $185 of every check to go into a savings account. I asked him why. “I already don’t have that money,” he said, and he did not look up from the television.
I thought it was the dullest thing I had ever watched a grown man do. My own loan, $240 a month, ended in the summer of 2012, a few weeks before I moved out, and I remember…
