Comment by gthtjtkt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gthtjtkt | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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 :)

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%.

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.

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