Welcome to Industry Focus, the podcast that dives into a different sector of the stock market every day.

It's Monday, October 30th, and we thought we'd take a break from investing-centric things and talk a little bit about personal finance.

We're pulling out five big money stats.

They really highlight the state of personal finance in the United States.

Now the aggressive title for this episode is definitely five money stats that will knock

your socks off.

I don't know if we could quite deliver on that, but it's certainly

important as we head toward the end of the year to really talk about where we are with our money and what we're thinking about for 2018.

I'm your host Michael and I'm joined by Matt Frankel.

Hey Matt, welcome back to the show.

Hey, good to be here again.

All right, fantastic.

So before we get started, I think an important caveat applies here.

We're going to talk a little bit about these different stats and what they mean for Americans.

But here's the thing.

Everything we're talking about here is in a lot of ways window dressing for the one fundamental

rule of personal finance, which is spend less than you make, build an emergency fund, and invest

the rest. And I found a great article on fool.com that describes five great ways to save more money.

So if that's something you're really ready to commit to do either in the back two months of 2017 or

in 2018, shoot us an email at industry focus at fool.com.

It's by one of our best writers, and it's got a lot of really thoughtful ways

to think about budgeting and saving better, which

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