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I'm so glad to welcome you here to the Clark Howard Show where it's about you and your wallet.

I want you to learn ideas for me so you can save more and spend less and don't let anyone ever

rip you off. Coming up in just a few minutes, do you know you could go to an ATM and it'll be out of

service from your financial institution? You go to the next location, it could be out of service,

go to another, it could be out of service. What's going on? I'm going to tell you about a new crime

that is forcing banks to just shut their machines down for hours or even a day or more at a time.

And coming up yet later, are you lying about money to your spouse or significant other?

How good an idea is that? We're going to talk. So I want to talk right now about a three-fer that

has me pretty concerned. Americans have pivoted from saving money, which we'd actually gotten

much better at at the beginning of this decade to spending full tilt and borrowing at record levels.

On top of that, Americans are facing with debt higher interest rates as the interest rates

that pass through the system from the increases in rates engineered by the Federal Reserve,

so much of the debt that you might carry is floating rate debt, like think credit cards,

where the interest rates reset almost instantly when the Federal Reserve changes the interest rates

it controls, or home equity lines of credit that adjust automatically with the rates that are

charged by the Federal Reserve. So think about this. Americans today are saving two cents of each dollar

they make on average. And then at the same time, overall debts have gone way way way way up.

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