Household Finance and Consumption Survey 2013

Report from the CSO here with this press release.  This is a valuable piece of information that fills an important gap.

3 replies on “Household Finance and Consumption Survey 2013”

I’m surprised that the median value of cash savings is just 4,500. I realise that the median would be much lower than the mean, but I didn’t expect it to be this low. “Households in the top fifth of household income bracket had median savings of €15,000, considerably higher than the national median of €4,500.”. Even the cash savings of the top fifth earners is lower than I expected.

Irish private sector household deposits are 91.451bn as of Nov 2014, according to the CBI. Assuming 1.6m households, that’s a mean of 56,875 per household.

I can’t reconcile these data?

Maybe under-reporting of savings?

The report itself highlights that it is difficult to get accurate data from very wealthy households partly because it is difficult to locate and contact them them. I suspect that it is also difficult to get them to provide accurate information on their savings. Who is going to take the security risk of telling anyone that they have €10m in the bank, and would it not strain the limits of politeness to the interviewer to do so anyway?

That said, if mean savings within each 20th percentile group were five times the median that would make the data in the report approximately consistent with the Central Bank data. My wild guess would be that, even in the data behind the report, median savings in each percentile group are at least three times the mean.

Oops. That should be more like: “… if mean savings within each 20th percentile group were ten times the median …”

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