More Americans are tapping investments to pay for spending, analysis finds

A lot of people are focused on affordability and how they're paying for everything and your report has an increasing number of households that are supporting their spending by drawing on their investments. Tell me a little bit about that. >> That's right. Um, I think a lot of people have this sense that with the stock market going up so much, it must have something to do with consumer spending. Um, but a lot of people don't have a sense of exactly what households are doing, families like yours, families like mine. And that's one of the really distinctive features of our data is it lets us really see in a granular what's happening with everyday households. And so, what we did was we looked at uh, investment accounts um, to see how much money was coming out of those investment accounts going into checking accounts where people can spend that money as a way to get a lens on this question. We found two really interesting things. One, the frequency in which people are pulling money out and the amount of money coming out of those accounts to fund that spending has gone up uh, nearly doubled really since 2019 to 2026. Um, and then two, we found there are some really important differences in terms of like who's getting that money, who's using that money. Uh, this is a phenomenon that's most pronounced for older families uh, and people with higher incomes.