Although many Americans are disgruntled with the state of the economy and the less-than-stellar efforts by the current administration to make a swift and sustained recovery, it's important to remember that there are still thousands of Americans who are working hard to get back on their feet against all odds. This is reflected in the latest jobs report from payroll processor ADP, which indicates that the private sector of the United States added many more jobs than most analysts had anticipated during the month of December.
Roughly 238,000 more Americans got paid last month, the source indicates, while economists who had participated in a consensus forecast had only expected the figure to be roughly 200,000. While this surprising jump in activity is naturally welcome, there are several factors to consider that show it may be too soon for Americans to get their hopes up about the future of the economy.
For starters, the ADP report is known to diverge from the more hotly monitored and reliable Labor Department jobs numbers, which analysts still predict will show only 195,000 new positions filled in December. This is especially true when comparing figures for December, when there are not only misleading figures representing holiday employees, but errors because of holiday absences and the tendency of employers to purge their payrolls of employees who have left the company.
Not only that, but the kinds of jobs that have been filled of late aren't offering the salaries that they were before the Great Recession. The average paycheck is still significantly low, which is making the middle class smaller and smaller and prospects like retirement an increasingly distant pipe dream for many.
This means that now more than ever, individuals who are rightly concerned about the future of their finances need to take appropriate steps toward wealth preservation so that they don't have to push retirement off into an unforeseeable future.