St. Cloud Household Expenses Lower Than Most Cities

(KNSI) – Online bill pay manager doxo says St. Cloud residents spend nearly 20% less than the state average on household expenses.

It still equates to about 40% of personal income, however. St. Cloud State University Economics Professor King Banaian says that even as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, it will be tough to bring down the value of shelter, which is the largest expenditure. Banaian says the pandemic changed how we view owning a home and the value we place on it.

“Maybe as many as a fifth of the workforce is spending at least one day a week working from home and you can expect that the demand for housing is higher. Prices, therefore, go up and they’re unlikely to come back down.”

Banaian says housing may begin to look different as we have fewer kids. Location and amenities will become more important than the number of rooms and overall square footage.

Auto loans have their own set of challenges that are keeping prices elevated even in the face of record interest rates, says Banaian.

“I’m in the process of probably replacing my car and I went to look at a local car dealership, looking at a 2023 and a 2021. The ’21 had a few extra features on it, [but still] the ’23 was $3,000 less than the ’21.”

A shortage of semiconductor chips put a damper on production and rental fleets dropped a lot of their orders during the pandemic. The number of cars built in 2020 and 2021 is likely below the overall demand from consumers looking to buy a used car. The 2009 bankruptcies of Chrysler and General Motors caused a similar bottleneck during the last recession.

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