European households are increasingly reporting that they do not have savings, according to a survey released by ING Consumer Research. The study, which sampled respondents in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Spain, found a fall in the share of households answering "yes" to whether they hold savings compared with a year earlier.
Across the six countries, five recorded declines in affirmative responses to the savings question. At the same time, half of the countries surveyed reported a rise in the share of respondents saying "no" when asked if they had savings, relative to the prior year.
Another notable trend in the survey was a rise in non-response. In every country included in the research, the proportion of people who chose not to answer the question about savings increased by between one and four percentage points. The report highlighted this growing refusal to disclose financial status, observing that higher rates of non-response were present in each economy surveyed.
Country-level results show significant variation. The Netherlands remains the country with the largest share of households reporting savings, with 85% of respondents saying they have savings, although that figure is down by one percentage point from the previous year. Belgium stands out as the only country in the sample to record an increase in the share of households reporting savings.
Germany presents a mixed picture - it is among the countries with the highest share of households without savings, yet it also holds the largest amount of money in savings accounts. Romania sits near the bottom of the sample on reported savings, recording the highest share of respondents without savings.
On the reasons behind not saving, income constraints dominate. Across all six countries, roughly half of those who said they do not save cited insufficient earnings as the main reason. When expressed as a share of all respondents, the proportion who said they do not earn enough to save ranged from under 4% in the Netherlands to 21% in Romania. Overall, between 4% and 21% of respondents across the six countries reported that they do not earn enough to be able to save.
Other explanations were reported less frequently. Around 20% of non-savers indicated they were drawing down existing savings to manage higher living costs. Discretionary spending accounted for just over 10% among non-savers in the Netherlands and Poland, but discretionary spending represented less than 3% of all respondents in any country surveyed.
Structural differences between the economies are also evident in the responses. The report notes that Romania, identified in the survey as the country with the lowest per-capita GDP among the six, also shows the highest share of respondents without savings. It adds that some Romanian households may hold wealth in property - supported by high home-ownership rates and a relatively low number of mortgage payers - rather than in liquid savings accounts.
The survey findings point to a broad-based decline in reported savings across the sampled countries, accompanied by rising non-response rates and persistent income constraints. These patterns were consistent across the six economies included in the ING Consumer Research note.