The average American will have to work about two or three months a year just to make the payments on a new car with insurance, says Mr. Bach, co-founder of AE Wealth Management and author of several books on personal finance. It’s a huge, unnecessary expense, he says, at a time when many Americans have little if any savings and aren’t putting anything away for retirement.
But he is particularly scornful of a much smaller purchase: coffee.
“I do not start my day without coffee,” Mr. Bach says, “but I make it at home every morning for 20 cents instead of spending $5” at a cafe.
Everyone has a different take on the biggest ways Americans waste money. We asked a group of experts about where they see the biggest financial waste—and what can be done about it.
Below are edited excerpts of conversations The Wall Street Journal had with Mr. Bach; Robert Shiller, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and Yale University professor; Danika Waddell, a certified financial planner at Goddard Financial Planning in Seattle; Soo Kim, an assistant professor of marketing at Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management; Ellen Weber, a certified financial planner in Seattle, and Jonathan Bricker, a psychologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
