The increased prices for energy and food, for example, are eating up an increasing part of income. The Savings Banks fear that in the foreseeable future more than half of households will have to spend their entire income just on living expenses.
According to the savings banks, the majority of Germans are increasingly reaching their financial limits due to high inflation. “We expect that because of the significant price increase, up to 60 percent of German households will have to use their entire disposable income – or more – monthly for pure living expenses,” said DSGV President Helmut Schleweis of the “Welt am Sonntag”. A year ago, according to the Sparkasse wealth barometer, only 15 percent were unable to put money away.
Volksbanks and Raiffeisenbanks are also observing that customers have less room to manoeuvre. “The high inflation robs consumers of purchasing power, which reduces their ability to save,” said the board member of the Association of German Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken (BVR), Andreas Martin, the newspaper. Many are still benefiting from savings that would have accumulated during the Corona period due to a lack of consumption options. “The peak of the savings rate was around 16 percent in 2020, for 2022 we expect a return to the pre-crisis level of 11 percent,” said Martin.
In the savings banks, the situation is expected to worsen significantly, especially in autumn and winter, especially for people with small and medium-sized incomes. According to the German Savings Banks and Giro Association (DSGV), the tense situation is already evident when the current account is overdrawn. Anyone who uses the so-called overdraft facility to bridge short-term bottlenecks is now “much more exploiting” the framework on average.
The Greens are calling for the amount of overdraft interest to be limited, which currently averages just under ten percent. “Basically, we Greens consider it necessary to legally cap overdraft interest,” said Green finance politician Stefan Schmidt of “Welt am Sonntag”. The interest cap is intended to protect people from escalating costs.
