Household Pulse: Balances through October 2023

Introduction

Following the period of elevated liquid assets driven by the fiscal policy response and changes in household spending and saving during the COVID-19 pandemic, publicly available metrics still show $500 billion in excess savings in March 2023 relative to the level observed pre-pandemic (Abdelrahman and Oliveira 2023).¹ This release of the Household Finances Pulse aims not only to characterize the distribution of cash balances across different kinds of households, but also to provide additional context to describe the state of available cash liquidity for American households more accurately. We leverage de-identified administrative banking data to examine the path of household cash balances from January 2020 through October 2023 for 8.6 million Chase customers.²

To put balances into perspective, we first show that real cash balances—which better capture household purchasing power—are much closer to 2019 levels than nominal balances. Next, we show that balances relative to 2019 have begun to level off for low-income households and for all race groups but continue to decline for high-income households. Finally, we show that balances and cash buffers—balances scaled to spending—have been in-line with or below historical expectations since the second quarter of 2023.