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7 Financial Habits That Keep Black People From Economic Freedom

Posted byBy K. Abel | Published on: CommentsComments (10)

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Spending Habits – More Value on Liabilities and Less on Assets

Nielson’s “The State of African-American Consumers “report, projects that Blacks will have a collective buying power of $1.1 trillion by 2015.  A study by Target Market, a company that tracks Black consumer spending, found that many  Black consumers chose to use this power by spending money on luxury goods with no asset-building potential.

In 2002, Target Market reports that the Black community spent $22.9 billion on clothes, $3.2 billion on electronics and $11.6 billion on furniture. In addition, African-Americans account for 12 percent of the population, but make up 30 percent of all Scotch  whiskey sales.

The Ariel Mutual Funds/Charles Schwab 2003 Black Investor Survey comparing Blacks and whites making the same income showed that whites saved for retirement 20 percent more than Blacks. The survey also found that 30 percent of Black people earning $100,000 a year barely had $5,000 in retirement savings.

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We hope this story was worth your time. For over 14 years, Atlanta Black Star has stayed Black-owned and independently run. We didn't get here by waiting on ad budgets that were never built to prioritize us. Our readers did that.

Corporate support for Black media has always been thin. Outlets like ours get roughly 1% of the $170 billion spent on U.S. advertising each year, and that margin is shrinking further as advertisers walk back the DEI-linked commitments they made in 2020. That's the backdrop. It's not why we're asking.

The wider picture isn't any steadier. Newspaper ad revenue has fallen more than 80% since 2005, and local newsrooms are closing at a rate of roughly two a week nationwide. When outlets go under, it's rarely the ones built to center a Black perspective from the ground up that get to stick around.

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