Consumer attitudes to savings has been saved
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Consumer attitudes to savings
Savings since the start of COVID-19
In our latest Q2 2021 Deloitte Consumer Tracker survey we saw overall consumer confidence bounce back to pre-covid levels. This was due to increased confidence in the job market and improved health and welfare sentiments.
However, optimism around debt and disposable income dropped compared with Q1 2021. The trend of increasing confidence in personal finance since the start of the pandemic, lost momentum. This is as a result of the reopening of the economy which saw consumers returning to spending in the more discretionary categories such as hospitality and leisure.
To understand consumers’ attitudes to saving and their spending intentions, we asked them if they have saved since the start of the pandemic.
Can you guess what percentage of consumers have saved money and are willing to spend it?
Spending intentions
We also asked savers whether they were planning to spend the money they saved in the next twelve months. The data shows that half of savers are intending to spend their savings on holidays and hotels (49%) and a third on eating out (31%) and going out (30%).
Do spending intentions vary for different age groups?
For example, we can see that the 55-64 age group is expecting to spend twice as much on holidays and hotels (60%) compared with the 18-24 group (35%). We see the opposite when it comes to spending on housing, where only 1in 10 of the 55-64 age group (9%) intend to spend their savings on anything to do with their property compared with 1 in 3 of the 18-24 age group (28%).
Use the drop-down filter below to explore the data and see how spending intention differs by age within each category:
Risk averse?
While spending intention looks positive, our data also shows that consumers have not been as confident about spending in the past few months.
The chart below shows that consumer confidence measures about health and debt are negative for most age groups. Only the over 65s are feeling positive about their levels of debt, which might explains why the over 65s record the highest level of intentions to spend on holidays and hotels.
However, when considering spending intentions on socialising and eating out, the 18-24 group showed the highest level of intention to spend on categories such as going out, using transport, dining out at restaurants and drinking in pubs. By contrast, the over 65s are being much more cautious and record much lower levels of spending intentions in those categories.
Could the over 65s cautious attitude to spending on socialising be related to health concerns? According to official vaccination data, we can see that as of April 2021 the majority of this age group had not been fully vaccinated with only 5% of the 65-69 year olds in England having had their second vaccine.
The future looks bright
When looking at spending intentions for Q3 2021, consumers across all age groups were optimistic, with confidence and spending intentions positive across all age groups and the gap between the different age groups narrowing. The question remains whether these spending intentions materialise in actual spending in the next quarter?
Use the slider below to explore consumers’ Q3 2021 sentiment predictions and their spending intentions for Q3 2021 versus their actual Q2 responses and try selecting an age group to see how these vary for different age groups:
For more analysis on consumer confidence and attitudes to spending over the years
visit the Deloitte Consumer Tracker series.
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