Americans Are Still Spending Like There’s No Tomorrow
Concerts, trips and designer handbags are taking priority over saving for a home or rainy day
4 min
Consumers should be spending less by now.
Interest rates are up. Inflation remains high. Pandemic savings have shrunk. And the labour market is cooling.
Yet household spending, the primary driver of the nation’s economic growth, remains robust. Americans spent 5.8% more in August than a year earlier, well outstripping less than 4% inflation. And the experience economy boomed this summer, with Delta Air Lines reporting record revenue in the second quarter and Ticketmaster selling over 295 million event tickets in the first six months of 2023, up nearly 18% year-over-year.
Economists and financial advisers say consumers putting short-term needs and goals above long-term ones is normal. Still, this moment is different, they say.
A tough housing market has more consumers writing off something they’d historically save for, while the pandemic showed the instability of any long-term plans related to health, work or day-to-day life. So, they are spending on once-in-a-lifetime experiences because they worry they may not be able to do them later.
“It’s not a regret-filled, spur-of-the-moment decision,” says Michael Liersch, who oversees a team of advisers as head of advice at Wells Fargo. “It’s the opposite of that, where I would regret not having done it.”
Liersch cautions that it’s too soon to say whether the spate of spending is a fleeting moment or a new normal. And consumers remain frustrated about inflation as the price of many goods remains significantly higher than a few years ago.
Ibby Hussain, who works in marketing for a financial communications firm, says the Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment he and his fiancée rent for $3,000 a month would cost a million dollars to buy. At current rates, that means around $5,000 a month after a $200,000 down payment, not including property taxes. “And it’s not even that nice of an apartment.”
So, instead of saving for a down payment like he expected to after turning 30 and getting engaged in the past year, he splurged.
First, he bought a $1,600 Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket and then he spent $3,500 on a bachelor party trip to Ibiza, Spain.
“I might as well just enjoy what I have now,” he says.
A travel boom
Ally Bank, whose online platform started allowing customers to create savings buckets for different goals in 2020, says users create about one-and-a-half times more experience-oriented buckets such as travel and “fun funds” versus those associated with longer-term planning.
Lindsey and Darrell Bradshaw went into credit-card debt to finance a vacation to Maui this past spring. The couple booked the trip only a few weeks after Lindsey, 37, quit her job to be a full-time caregiver to their 8-year-old son, who has special needs.
“We did not have the money and we were like, ‘Let’s just do this anyway,’ ” says Darrell Bradshaw, a 39-year-old general contractor in Seattle.
The trip cost about $10,000, including three, $1,000 last-minute plane tickets, 10 nights at a $385-a-night 4-star resort and several elaborate meals.
Even though the family decided to cancel subscriptions and cut back on dining out to help offset the bill, they say they have no regrets—especially since they got to see Lahaina just a few months before it was decimated by deadly wildfires.
Fears about a changing climate are driving some people to try to see places before they’re gone. In a monthly Deloitte survey of 19,000 global consumers, climate change was the only topic among 19 different concerns that respondents reported feeling significantly more worried about over the past year.
Josh Richner says he greatly lowered his retirement contribution to afford a cross-country trip that included a $7,000 Alaskan cruise so his family could see the ice caps, which have been melting at a rapid clip.
“I’ve never spent that much on a trip before,” says the 35-year-old, who says the splurge was also motivated by the pandemic and a health scare.
About six months ago, Richner and his wife decided to sell their Columbus, Ohio, home to travel the country with their two young children. Working for National Legal Center, a law firm that helps consumers resolve debt, he knows the potential consequences of living in a way that gives priority to the present. But he isn’t worried.
“I just hit a point where the thing that we had been talking about maybe hopefully doing some day, we’re going to do it now,” he says. “I’m not going to worry about money anymore. I don’t have it in me.”
Splurge purchases
Consumers might not be able to keep splurging forever. Labour strikes and student loan repayments could both lead people to pull back. Rising gas prices could also deter travel.
For those who study spending, however, the robustness up to this point has been a surprise.
In the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s August SCE Household Spending Survey, households reported spending 5.5% more than last year. The share of households that said they made at least one large purchase in the previous four months increased to 64% from 57%, its highest reading since August 2015.
“Normally at a time when you have higher inflation, but also higher interest rates, you don’t expect spending to hold up so well,” says Wilbert van der Klaauw, an economic research adviser on household and public policy at the Fed.
Rather than funnel all their spare change into a house or retirement account, Candice and Jasmine Kelly started a bucket-list fund after attending back-to-back funerals a few months ago. The couple adds a few hundred dollars from their paychecks each month into the fund, which they have used to try fancy restaurant tasting menus and buy Jasmine her dream designer handbag.
Instead of waiting to have fun when they retire, Candice, a 26-year-old management analyst in Charlotte, N.C., says the couple is trying to do the opposite. They want to enjoy their money while they’re young—even if it means working longer.
“All the rules that exist around money and lifestyle are just things people made up, so we’re playing a different game, and honestly I think we’re having more fun,” says Candice.
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From tax residency and superannuation to offshore investments and property, the financial implications of coming home can be more complex than leaving.
3 min
Every year, thousands of Australians make the decision to pack up life overseas and come home.
After years, sometimes decades, building careers, accumulating assets, and growing families in places like Dubai, London, Singapore, or Hong Kong, the pull back is understandable.
What most don’t appreciate until it’s too late is that the return journey is often far more financially complex than the departure.
Leaving Australia is, financially speaking, a relatively clean event.
You depart, you potentially become a non-resident for tax purposes, and a new set of rules applies.
Coming back, however, means reconciling everything you’ve accumulated offshore with an Australian tax system that hasn’t been standing still waiting for you.
The Tax Residency Trap
The first and most costly mistake is misunderstanding when Australian tax residency resumes.
Many returning expats assume residency only kicks in once they’ve formally re-established themselves, signed a lease, updated their address, started a job. The ATO doesn’t see it that way.
Under Australian tax law, residency can recommence the moment you land with the intention of remaining. That means any taxable events, investment income, asset disposals, foreign account distributions that occur after that point are potentially assessable in Australia, even if they’re sitting in offshore accounts you haven’t touched.
Superannuation: The Clock Doesn’t Stop
One of the most underappreciated issues for returning expats is what’s been happening inside their superannuation fund while they’ve been away.
Contributions may have paused, but fees, insurance premiums, and investment volatility haven’t. Some returning clients are genuinely shocked by how much ground their super has lost to fees during periods of lower balances or inappropriate investment settings.
The more strategic issue is what to do on the way back. If you hold foreign pension arrangements, a UK SIPP or QROPS, a 401(k), and international savings schemes, the question of whether and how to repatriate those funds requires careful planning before you return.
Once you’re a tax resident again, distributions from certain foreign structures can be assessable as ordinary income, and the window to manage that exposure closes.
Offshore Investments Don’t Disappear
Returning to Australia doesn’t sever your obligations in the countries where you’ve been living.
Foreign-held shares, managed funds, or investment accounts will be picked up by Australian tax reporting requirements from the moment residency resumes.
The Foreign Investment Fund rules, transferor trust provisions, and the reporting obligations under Australia’s tax information exchange agreements mean these holdings need to be declared and, in some cases, restructured.
Leaving investments sitting offshore in structures that made sense as a non-resident but create compliance headaches as a resident is one of the most common and expensive mistakes we see.
The restructuring cost, if it’s even possible post-return, typically dwarfs what it would have cost to plan properly in advance.
Property: Both Sides of the Balance Sheet
There are two distinct property problems for returning expats.
The first is what they’ve held while away, an Australian property rented out during the absence.
Depending on how long the property was the main residence and how it was treated during the rental period, the CGT calculation on eventual sale can be complex.
The six-year absence rule provides some relief, but it’s not automatic and has conditions that are frequently misunderstood.
The second is re-entry into the Australian property market.
After years of asset accumulation offshore, many returnees assume they’re well-positioned to buy.
The challenge is that their financial picture, including foreign income history, offshore assets and currency, doesn’t translate neatly into Australian mortgage serviceability.
Lenders read foreign income conservatively, and what looks like a strong balance sheet can create unexpected borrowing capacity issues.
The Fix: Plan Before You Land
The single most effective thing an expat can do is start planning the return 12 to 18 months before departure.
That timeline allows for managed asset disposals under non-resident rules where advantageous, superannuation catch-up strategies, foreign structure rationalisation, and property decisions that aren’t being made under time pressure.
The irony is that most Australians sought financial advice before they left on how to exit cleanly.
Far fewer seek the same rigour on the way back in. Given the complexity involved, that’s an expensive oversight.
Coming home should be a financial clean slate. With the right planning, it can be. Without it, you’ll spend the first few years back unwinding decisions that didn’t have to be problems at all.
Brett Evans is the founder of Atlas Wealth and the author of The Expat’s Handbook.
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