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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

They really need to say in the article what they mean by savings, because otherwise it is useless. And if it means literal saving accounts, then who cares.

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In the Methodology section of the survey page, it says:

> The survey posed the question, “How much money do you have saved in your savings account?” and provided the following as possible answers: $0, “just the minimum balance requirement,” less than $1,000, $1,000-$4,999, $5,000-$9,999, $10,000 or more, and “I don’t have a savings account.”

Based on the wording of the question and answers, I'm guessing many people would have taken the question literally and answered the same way you did.

My answer would be the same. Even though I have plenty of money in my checking accounts, I have almost nothing in the "savings" account. I've never heard a good reason to move money from the former to the latter.

In the past you could get savings accounts paying significant interest...nowadays it doesn't matter so much. In 2006 I had an ING Direct account paying something like 4.5%.

Shameless plug, but this is why my company, Survata, reviews every single survey that goes out through us, to catch biases written into questions. They can seriously skew results. That said, even though I imagine there was some level of confusion about savings v. checking, my guess is that the overall conclusion wouldn't change substantially if you guaranteed the respondents all understood the question identically. The news that Americans don't have nearly enough savings isn't exactly new, and as others have pointed out, there are plenty of situations where living paycheck to paycheck is the only realistic option.

I can attest to this, I used Survata several years ago and I was very pleased with the service, very high quality results.

I'm glad to read you're still around and still maintaining that high quality of service. I look forward to being able to use your service in the future :)

Ah there it is. So I think it's safe to say that this article is indeed useless. It would be great to see a real survey of this nature, but asking about only savings accounts is a pretty lame.

They do say. It's in the first sentence, in big letters at the top of the first chart, and repeated several times after.

Edit: to make this more productive than just a "read the article!" comment, they are specifically talking about savings accounts, not any other kind of savings.

I think you're wrong. This website appears to consider CD, IRA, 401(k), and stocks/bonds as "savings accounts".

See https://www.gobankingrates.com/personal-finance/how-save-mil...

Well, the question was literally "How much money do you have saved in your savings account?" Regardless of what they think it means, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people will interpret "savings account" as actual savings accounts.

Yes totally agree, question was really bad.

Which is unfortunate, because the overall question of how much savings people have is really interesting!

but at the bottom of this article they say otherwise.

Not only that, but they should make sure their survey method has participants be very clear on the distinction to make sure they weren't confused.

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