Chicago Bankruptcy Lawyer Blog

The savings rate in America has soared to an average of 4 percent - for every $100 we receive, four bucks are being tucked away for the future. Think $4 doesn't sound like much? Compared to the paltry 1 percent we were stashing just a couple years ago, we've quadrupled our savings.

We're starting to wake up and realize that we can't put savings on autopilot. I used to count my automatic 401K contribution as my monthly savings so I would have more of my paycheck to spend. I figured a retirement account was relatively safe. But I was forgetting the first lesson of investment 101: Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

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When the stock market took a dive last year, so did most retirement funds. But it's not just Wall Street doing damage to our savings - it's our own impatience. Since the recession began, people have been pulling the plug on their retirement money, cashing out to pay for present-day expenses like bills and groceries.

Even I'm not immune to stealing from my own piggy bank. When I changed jobs a while back, I cashed out the earnings from my profit-sharing plan with the full intention of re-investing them. That didn't exactly happen. I learned a valuable lesson: if you have money in your primary account, you will spend it. Gas prices were going up and it was pretty convenient to have that extra cash cushion. But the problem is that, now, it's gone for good.

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