It's great to have you here on the Clark Howard show where it's all about your empowerment

with knowledge so that you can save more and spend less and don't let anyone ever rip

you off and you can follow me at facebook.com slash Clark Howard.

You're tuning into a continuing series that we call back to basics where I address ways

that you can empower yourself and take control of your wallet where we dig in depth to

topics that we talk about from time to time on the show and in prior episodes we talked

about the whole process of buying a house, how to invest, when you're an investor, when

you're a saver, how to buy a car, how to repair a car, all the facets with that and item

by item, episode by episode, we talk about how you can be empowered in an area where instead

of us just breezing through a topic or from a question with someone, I go deeper.

And today I want to deal with the concept of more month than money.

It is an American problem and although not uniquely American amplified heavily in our

culture, we in the United States are overwhelmingly a consumption oriented society.

It is for a number of reasons.

One, the tax code in the United States is not set up specifically to reward people for

spending less than what you make and we as a nation would benefit enormously.

If we went to what are known as consumption based taxes that would reward you for money

you hoarded, money you did not spend.

We in the United States have an extremely low savings rate.

We as Americans tend to be saving somewhere between 2 and 4% of each dollar or 4 cents

of each dollar of what we make.

Where in order to create real financial security in your life, it needs to be a minimum dime

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