"U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, speaking in Austin, bemoaned widening income differences between the country’s very rich and the rest of us. And in his remarks at a South Austin union hall, the Vermont independent mulling a run for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination also warned about American failures to save money. ""Here’s something not talked about, something that can make us all very, very nervous,"" Sanders said. ""Half of all Americans have less than $10,000 in their savings account. ""And you know what that means and you know why people are so stressed out? If you have less than $10,000,"" he said, ""that means an automobile accident, a divorce, a serious illness, a crisis of one kind or another can drive you into bankruptcy and financial disaster."" Is he right that half of us have less than $10K in savings? Sanders’ backup To our inquiry, a Sanders spokesman, Jeff Franks, said by email that Sanders relied on an April 2014 USA Today news story quoting a survey indicating 52 percent of U.S. workers had said they had less than $10,000 in total savings and investments, such as a 401(k) or IRA, that could be used for retirement. It did not include their homes or defined benefit plans, such as traditional pensions that could be used for retirement Specifically, the story said, 36 percent of workers said they had less than $1,000 in such savings and investments with another 16 percent of workers reporting $1,000 to $9,999 in such savings and investments. Those results came from a telephone survey of 1,000 workers and 501 retirees by the nonprofit Employee Benefit Research Institute and Greenwald and Associates. Next, we spotted a chart on the institute’s website drawn from the same 2014 Retirement Confidence Survey. The 52 percent of workers reporting less than $10,000 in savings and investments in 2014 is up from 39 percent in 2009, the chart shows. Of course, ""workers"" isn’t all of us. We called the Washington, D.C.-based institute, which says it was founded in 1978 to deliver unbiased information on employee benefit plans ""so that decisions affecting the system may be made based on verifiable facts."" By phone, researcher Craig Copeland told us that overall, 51 percent of survey respondents, meaning retirees and others, had less than $10,000 in financial savings. Also by phone, Ruth Helman of Greenwald and Associates, which helped do the survey, paused at the senator’s wording. ""Strictly speaking, ‘their savings account’ isn’t correct. It’s total savings wherever it may be, under the mattress or wherever,"" Helman said. Federal Reserve Bank We wondered if there were other ways of looking at savings. Several experts urged us to contact the Federal Reserve Bank, which conducts a survey focused on consumer finances every three years. Its latest survey, drawing on data collected in 2013, resulted in a chart pointed out by Copeland indicating that the median value of financial savings outside of a pension or home reported by the nearly 95 percent of families who had bank accounts or stocks, bonds and other financial assets that year was $21,200, down from $23,000 in the board’s 2010 survey."
Half of all Americans have less than $10,000 in their savings account.