Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Well, first a little background. What we're looking at here is the savings that people do out of their paychecks, so essentially what we're saying is, What percent of take home pay are people putting into some kind of savings account? And that percentage has been declining for a number of years. In fact, it reached 0 percent in 2006. Now this doesn't mean that people weren't saving in other ways. Their stocks were going up. Their home equity was going up. But the point here is that out of their paychecks people in 2006 essentially weren't saving anything. Well, we have seen a turnaround in that, in fact, I think directly due to the fact that the housing market has sputtered. The stock market has gone down. What we're seeing now this year for the first time really since 2006 is an upward trend in savings rates. We're actually seeing people saving more out of their paychecks. It reached 3 percent in a recent month. That's certainly nothing to write home about, but it is moving in the right direction, and it is actually expected that that will continue because, again, if people can't see their housing and their stocks generating savings for them, the only way they're going to save is to do it out of their paycheck. So I think this will come back in vogue, saving out of your paycheck will be back in style."