ipad怎么下载千寻影视:改善储蓄习惯 越南经验值得借鉴

越南，从最小的村庄到胡志明市这样的大都市，都能见到这样一幅再寻常不过的场景：每一天都有人聚在一起，玩一个外人看来有点像扑克、又有点像宾戈的游戏。这游戏在一杯咖啡50美分的街边咖啡馆有人玩，在一碗鱼翅汤50美元的豪华中餐馆也有人玩。玩家们在纸条上写下投标价，然后把纸条交给主持游戏的“头人”。稍事停顿后，主持人会宣布投标价最高的玩家获得当月奖金。一般来说，赢钱的人会眉开眼笑，然后请其他所有玩家吃饭或喝咖啡。

这一套约定俗成的程式叫作“会”(hui)，在不了解门道的人眼中与赌博像极了。不过，虽然“会”引起了一些争议（我们稍后会详细解释），但据许多入“会”的本地人说，“会”其实创造了一种建立在复杂规则、互信和严格自律基础之上的储蓄机制。“会”的运作方式五花八门，但一般是这样的：会众同意定期──比方说每月一次──向一个共同资金池缴纳定额会金，这些会金在每次聚会结束时当场授予一名会员（当天投标价最高的人）。之后，其他玩家需要缴纳的会金会相应减少（减除的金额相当于赢家投标价），因此赢家本质上是在为他赢得的会金向其他会员支付利息。这时候自律和互信等因素的作用就体现出来了。在每一轮“会”中，所有人都必须预先付款，即使在他们赢得会金后也不例外，此外，每个会员一年只能领取一次会金。

这一切似乎显得很怪，但这类交换行为产生的最终结果与世界银行(World Bank)所说的“轮转储蓄和信贷体系”(rotating savings and credit system)是差不多的，类似储贷协会，但没有庄严的大理石柱，没有积极营销，也没有动物公仔赠品。研究公司Cimigo称，尽管这种体系不正规，技术含量低，也完全不受监管，但估计每十个越南家庭就有六个参与了某种形式的“会”。专家表示，“会”让每天生活费平均不到4美元的越南人产生了强烈的储蓄意识。住在海滨城市岘港(Da Nang)的53岁的退休职工肖氏清华(Tieu Thi Thanh Hoa)最近用她赢的钱买了台新冰箱。她说，过去她曾用自己攒的钱买了辆摩托车，还为孩子们的婚礼买了礼物。她说，“对我而言，‘会’就是存钱。”

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众所周知，美国是全球富国中个人储蓄率最低的国家之一。美国联邦经济分析局(U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis)数据显示，美国双职工夫妇年平均收入为7.5万美元左右，但存款仅为3,750美元，储蓄率约为5%。没错，历史上还有比这更低的时候──在住房泡沫最严重的时期，美国人储蓄率仅为1%──但经济学家说目前的储蓄率仍然低得让人汗颜。储蓄过低的影响是巨大的：看看那么多说自己没钱退休的“婴儿潮一代”吧，看看为上大学背负六位数债务的本科生，再看看大批过度负债、吹大房地产泡沫的购房者。芝加哥大学布斯商学院(University of Chicago Booth School of Business)经济学教授埃里克?赫斯特(Erik Hurst)称，“我们借了很多钱，也许不应该借那么多。”即便用国民储蓄在国内生产总值(GDP)中占比这个世界银行和其他国际组织惯用的指标来衡量，美国的储蓄率依然偏低，仅为10%。

按照上述指标，越南的储蓄率大约是美国的三倍。其他发展中国家储蓄率也普遍处于与此相当的高水平。印度和中国的储蓄率分别为28%和51%，虽然中印新兴中产阶级热衷于购买美国风格奢侈品，但两国储蓄率仍然很高。有时候，一个国家储蓄率高缘于文化传统，比如说要准备大笔嫁妆，或者极端气候会促使人们存钱以备不时之需。但经济学家们发现，在高储蓄国家通常存在某种社会习俗，其形式或为赌局，或为储金会，甚至可能是宗教组织结构。咨询公司Bankable Frontier Associates的主管达里尔?柯林斯(Daryl Collins)说，“这些非正规组织吸纳额外积蓄的力量真的很强。”该咨询公司专门在较贫穷的国家从事金融服务业务。

当然，像越南这样的储蓄文化也许不会传入美国，其原因并不难找。许多国家没有美国这样的医疗和财产保险，所以人们不得不多多存钱。此外，“会”这类组织的非正规性──通常不记账，成员须依靠相互信任──决定了它们很难说服懂行的客户加入。不过，尽管当今世界金融创新的顺序应该是从曼哈顿排到马拉维，而不是从马拉维排到曼哈顿，但经济学家称，储户从这类组织获得的社会支持可以给西方人很大启发。

一群学者和金融专家在2000年前后进行了一项研究，他们试图了解，全球五分之二的人是如何靠一天2美元的生活费过日子的。研究者对孟加拉、南非和印度近300个贫困家庭展开调查，了解他们在一年中进行的几乎每一次金融活动。结论很惊人：差不多每个家庭都采用了某种储蓄策略。财务日志显示出，这些人很穷，却有着非常丰富的金融活动，他们与朋友、家人、雇主、客户、房东和店主之间经常互相借钱。储金会提供了一种相对正式的借贷途径；研究者在这三个国家都发现了形式各异的储金会。柯林斯说，利用储金会的穷人往往会比不用的人积蓄更多。柯林斯是该项目相关著作《穷人的投资组合》(Portfolios of the Poor)一书的作者之一。

储蓄不仅仅能在困难时期或者退休时提供安全保障。一些研究者发现，储蓄还能提高生产力。国际金融公司(International Finance Corp)的研究显示，当马拉维的农民获得“承诺储蓄账户”（用于存钱，账户内资金要到某一日期才能动用）后，他们对农田的投资增加了26%，使销售增加22%。

如今，有更多穷国建立了西方式的银行体系，但许多人仍然是储金会的忠实成员；甚至有许多亚洲和非洲移民在美国定居后开办了储金会。在越南，许多人有意选择“会”而不是银行，或者在开立银行账户的同时也参加“会”（尽管“会”的操作攻略差别很大，但简言之，存得最多的是那些比别人更晚领取会金的人──他们每月从其他参加者那儿赚取利息）。在胡志明市一个公寓做清洁工的阮川(Nguyen Xuyen)每月只能挣125美元，但她说自己通过“会”能存近50美元。她存的钱几乎全部用来支付她女儿的学费，她女儿在一个收费昂贵的学校上四年级。当被问及为何不把余钱放在家里时，她解释称，“如果钱放在家里，你往往就会把它花掉。”柯林斯说，储金会的实践说明，要想成功地存钱，“有助于我们储蓄的机制”比毅力或是做正式预算更加重要。

这类机制中也许没有实体银行，但仍然是存在成本的。比方说，不是所有储金会贷款都要支付利息，但如果要的话，利息会很高。想一想越南“会”的典型流程：人们写下的那些投标价代表他们愿意支付多少利息来赢取会金。在一轮“会”刚开始时，竞标者会比较多，想赢取会金可能需要较高的报价，赢家要为到手的会金向其他成员实际支付25%的利息。许多“会”的组织者或“头人”还会从每笔会金中抽取10%的手续费，这么高的手续费会让所有基金经理都羡慕不已。有一些“头人”曾利用自己作为资金托管人之便把钱据为己有；二十世纪八十年代，洛杉矶韩国人社区曾有一个类似“会”的组织发生过这种事情，该组织首领被控卷走多达300万美元款项。

不过，储金会成员还是说他们喜欢这种相互的承诺，经济学家称，这种社会支持──从反面说是同伴压力──能有效促使消费者做他们应该去做、但有时却不愿做的事情。在美国社会，慧俪轻体(Weight Watchers)和戒酒无名会(Alcoholics Anonymous)的成功都是依靠上述原理；慧俪轻体会组织成员集体称体重，戒酒无名会则组织集体忏悔。但大多数人不会把这项原理用在存钱上，因为存钱是件私事，是件不为人知的事。我们的支出情况会清清楚楚地暴露在众人眼前：宽敞的住房，豪华的汽车，孩子上很贵的学校，校名贴在汽车保险杠上。但我们不存钱带来的后果则要隐蔽得多，贷款被拒，退休生活不保，讨债公司来信，这些东西别人都看不到。哈佛商学院(Harvard Business School)高级讲师鲍勃?波曾(Bob Pozen)说，正因为后果不为人知，所以很多人都会大谈自己的经济负担，在行动中却又大打折扣。他说，“人们说他们想要存钱，但他们其实并没有存钱。”

为抵消隐私观念带来的影响，行为经济学家建议雇主“推”雇员加入自动储蓄或投资计划，希望这样能使习惯成自然。不过反推一把也很简单。客户让银行每月在个人退休账户(IRA)自动存入1,000美元是很容易的，但有了互联网，改变主意也一样容易──一天24小时都可以。咨询公司怡安翰威特(Aon Hewitt)近期一项研究显示，在自动加入401(k)计划的做法广泛采用的同时，账户持有者提存的收入的金额也出现大幅下降。

几年前，旧金山的金融企业家克里斯?拉尔森(Chris Larsen)和他夫人、越南裔美国人利纳?林(Lyna Lam)谈到如何将贷款和社会传媒新趋势结合起来。林描述的“会”让拉尔森茅塞顿开。于是他创立了Prosper，这是一个在没有银行干预的情况下帮助个人互相借钱──通常是向多人借钱──的组织。作为最大的“点对点”(peer-to-peer)贷款机构之一，Prosper在过去六年中促成了价值2.5亿美元左右的贷款。许多借款人主要是用Prosper利率较低的定期贷款来偿还高息信用卡欠款；Prosper称，目前Prosper的贷款利率比信用卡欠款平均利率大约低三个百分点。但拉尔森也认为，该公司引入了“会”中的同伴压力成分。他说，“人们知道这些钱是普通人借给自己的，这个事实（应该能够促使借款人）更加努力地还钱。”Prosper借款人的总体违约率与传统银行客户相当，但拉尔森说，当借款人的朋友当众为他担保，并亲自借给他钱（哪怕只占贷款的一小部分）时，借款人违约的几率会降低20到40个百分点。

还有其他一些组织让朋友和家人来监督人们实现财务目标。比如说，StickK这个网站要求注册用户具体说明他们的财务目标和时间表；然后他们可以指定一个人或一个慈善组织在没能实现目标时须向其付款，他们还可以选择网上支持者。网上支持者可以获知他们的进展情况，还能发送鼓励信息。这个网站是由耶鲁大学(Yale)经济学家迪恩?卡尔兰(Dean Karlan)创建的。卡尔兰对菲律宾的储蓄和戒烟相关承诺合约做过研究，他把StickK称为一种“更加正式，基于网络形态”的储金会。

不过，对同伴的依赖有利也有弊。如果有一两个成员因手头吃紧而无法继续支付会金，整个“会”就有可能土崩瓦解。不过“会”员们并不怕这个。在岘港的一家咖啡馆里，有一群中年朋友多年来一直聚在这里进行每月的投标。45岁的会计陈氏安(Tran Thi Yen)说，“我们只在这里聚聚，或者开会决定邀请谁来参加新一轮‘会’。”我们问陈，如果有成员因某种原因而无法支付每月的会金该怎么办。她的反应就像她从没考虑过这种可能性一样。她回答说，“欺骗吗？不能骗人的，任何事情都是有因果报应的。”

2011年 11月 30日 07:49 Global Lessons for Better Savings Habits

RICHARD SINE

It is a scene that's stunningly common in Vietnam, from the tiniest villages to the sprawling metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City. Each day, people gather to play a game that looks to an outsider like one part poker, one part bingo. Over 50-cent coffees at dusty sidewalk cafes or over $50 bowls of shark-fin soup at lavish Chinese eateries, players scribble bids onto slips of paper and hand them over to the game's so-called master. After a moment of suspense, the host declares the highest bidder as the winner of that month's pot. Typically, the winner breaks out into a broad smile and then treats the group to dinner or a round of coffee.

The ritual is called hui, and to the uninitiated, it can look an awful lot like gambling. But while it has created its share of controversy (more on that later), many of the locals who participate in it say it actually creates a savings regime, built around complicated rules, communal trust and no small degree of personal discipline. Though practices vary widely, a hui generally works like this: A group of people agree to make regular fixed payments -- say, once a month -- into a common pool, which is promptly awarded at the end of each meeting to one of the group's members (the one with the highest bid that day). The other players' donations are reduced by the amount of the winner's bid, so the winner winds up, in essence, paying interest to the group for the pot he wins. And here's where the discipline and trust factors come in. Everyone has to ante up in every round, even after they've won -- and each hui member can claim the pot only once a year.

Strange as all this may seem, the end result of these exchanges is nothing less than what the World Bank called a 'rotating savings and credit system' -- something akin to a savings-and-loan but without the marble columns, aggressive marketing and stuffed-animal giveaways. And even though this system is informal, low-tech and utterly unregulated, an estimated six of every 10 Vietnamese households participate in some form of hui, according to research firm Cimigo -- and it generates what experts say is a strong saving mentality for citizens who, on average, live on less than $4 a day. Retiree Tieu Thi Thanh Hoa, who lives in the coastal city of Da Nang, recently used her winnings to buy a new refrigerator. In the past, she says, she's put enough money away to pay for a motorbike and buy gifts for her children's weddings. 'The hui, to me, means saving,' said Tieu, 53.

It's no secret that among the world's wealthy nations, America has one of the worst personal savings rates. The average two-income American couple takes home about $75,000 a year but saves only $3,750, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis -- about a 5 percent savings rate. True, it could be worse -- at the height of the housing bubble, we were saving only 1 percent -- but economists say it's still embarrassingly low. And its ramifications are enormous: Witness the legions of baby boomers who say they can't afford to retire and of undergrads who run up six-figure debts to go to college, to say nothing, of course, of the armies of overleveraged home buyers who helped inflate the housing bubble. 'We've borrowed a lot, maybe more than we should,' says Erik Hurst, an economics professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Even when one measures the national savings rate as a percentage of GDP, the metric preferred by the World Bank and other international organizations, the U.S. comes up well short, at 10 percent.

In Vietnam, by this measure, the savings rate is some three times ours. And across the developing world, other countries boast similarly impressive rates. India and China clock in at 28 and 51 percent, respectively, even though each nation has an emerging middle class that aspires to spend on American-style luxuries. Sometimes a country's high savings rate stems from cultural traditions -- the need to bring a hefty dowry to a marriage, for example, or a severe climate that leads people to sock money away for lean times. But economists are finding that in high-saving countries, there's often a social ritual involved, whether it's a game, a savings club or even the structure of a religious group. 'These informal groups are really powerhouses in terms of sucking up extra savings,' says Daryl Collins, a director of the consulting firm Bankable Frontier Associates, which specializes in financial services in poorer countries.

To be sure, there's no shortage of reasons why a savings culture like Vietnam's might not translate stateside. In many countries, people have to save more because health and property insurance as we know it don't exist. And the informality of clubs like those for playing hui -- where record keeping is often nonexistent and members have to rely on mutual trust -- can make them a tough sell for a savvy consumer. Still, in a world where financial innovation is supposed to move from Manhattan to Malawi, and not the other way around, economists say the kind of social support savers get in groups like these could go a long way toward helping Westerners.

Around the turn of the millennium, a group of academics and financial experts tried to figure out just how it was that two-fifths of the world's population could get by on $2 a day. The group conducted a survey with almost 300 impoverished households in Bangladesh, South Africa and India, and asked them about virtually every financial transaction for a year. Their shocking conclusion: Almost every family had incorporated some strategy for saving. The financial diaries revealed that these very poor people led very rich financial lives, frequently borrowing from and lending to friends, family, employers, customers, landlords and shopkeepers. Savings clubs offered a relatively formalized way of doing this; the researchers found variations on the clubs in all three countries. And the poor who used the clubs tended to save more than those who didn't, says Collins, a coauthor of the book that emerged from the project, Portfolios of the Poor.

And saving doesn't just provide a cushion for hard times or retirement. Some researchers have found that it can lead to increased productivity as well. When farmers in Malawi were given 'commitment savings accounts' to hold funds that could not be touched until a certain date, they actually poured 26 percent more money into their farms, increasing sales by 22 percent, according to a study by the International Finance Corp.

These days, more of these nations have Western-style banking systems. But many people stay loyal to their savings clubs; indeed, many Asian and African immigrants have started clubs after settling in the U.S. And in Vietnam, many people purposely choose the hui over a bank, or play hui in addition to having a bank account. (While the strategies for playing can vary widely, in short, those who hold out the longest before claiming a pot will save the most -- earning interest from fellow participants each month.) Nguyen Xuyen, a housekeeper at a Ho Chi Minh City apartment complex, for instance, earns only $125 a month, but she says she manages to save nearly $50 of it through her hui. Virtually all of her savings goes to pay for tuition for an expensive school for her fourth-grade daughter. Why not just leave extra cash at home? It's a matter of self-discipline, she explains: 'If it's in your house, you just tend to spend it.' Savings clubs suggest that successful saving is less about willpower or formal budgeting than 'mechanisms that help us save,' says Collins.

Those mechanisms may not involve a brick-and-mortar bank, but they still come at a cost. Not all clubs loan money at interest, for example, but when they do, it can be high. Consider the typical Vietnamese hui session: Those bids that people are scribbling represent the amount of interest they're willing to pay to win the pot. Early on in a cycle, when there are more bidders, the winners are likely to have to bid higher -- and wind up effectively paying 25 percent interest to the other group members on their take-home stake. In many hui, the organizer, or 'master,' also takes 10 percent of each pot -- a fee that any mutual fund manager would envy. And a few masters have taken advantage of their role as custodian of the pooled money to steal it; in the late 1980s, one leader of a hui-like club in Los Angeles's Korean community was alleged to have run off with as much as $3 million.

Still, savings-club members say they like the mutual commitment, and economists say that this kind of social support -- or its flip side, peer pressure -- is a great way to get consumers to do things they should do but don't always want to do. In the U.S. this principle lies behind the success of Weight Watchers, with its group weigh-ins, and Alcoholics Anonymous, with its group confessions. But it's not a principle that most of us apply to our money: Saving is a private matter, and one that gets neglected. The consequences of our spending are firmly in the public view: a spacious home, a luxury car with the name of the kids' fancy school plastered on the bumper. But the consequences of our failure to save -- a loan rejection, an uncertain retirement, letters from a debt collector -- are much more discreet. This behind-closed-doors effect lets many people talk a good game about their financial responsibilities, while shirking them in practice, says Bob Pozen, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School: 'People say they want to save, but they don't.'

To counter the effects of the privacy ethos, behavioral economists have encouraged employers to 'nudge' us into automatic savings or investment plans, hoping that inertia will take over. But it's easy to nudge right back. A consumer can easily ask her bank to push $1,000 into her IRA each month. But thanks to the Internet, she can just as easily reverse that decision -- 24 hours a day. Indeed, one recent study by consulting group Aon Hewitt showed that the widespread adoption of auto enrollment in 401(k) plans has coincided with a drop-off in how much of their income account holders save.

Some years back, San Francisco-based financial entrepreneur Chris Larsen was chatting with his wife, Lyna Lam, about how to combine lending with the new trend of social media. Lam, who is Vietnamese-American, described the hui, and Larsen had a lightbulb moment. The result was Prosper, an organization through which individuals borrow from each other -- often from multiple others -- without a bank's intervention. One of the biggest of the so-called peer-to-peer lending organizations, it has funded some $250 million worth of loans in the past six years. Most Prosper borrowers aim to pay off high-interest credit cards with Prosper's lower-interest fixed-term loans; right now, according to the company, the interest on the average Prosper loan is about three percentage points lower than that on the average credit card balance. But Larsen also thinks the company channels the community peer pressure aspect of the hui: 'Just the fact that a person knows these are regular people lending to me [should spur the borrower] to go the extra mile.' Overall, Prosper borrowers default at about the same rate as traditional-bank customers, but Larsen says that when a borrower's friend publicly vouches for him and personally lends even a small fraction of the loan, the borrower is 20 to 40 percent less likely to default.

Other organizations enlist friends and family to hold people accountable for reaching their financial goals. At the website StickK, those who sign up specify their goal and their timeline; they can then designate a person or a charity they must pay if they fail to reach the goal and choose online supporters who are notified of their progress and can send encouraging messages. The site was conceived by Dean Karlan, a Yale economics professor who has studied commitment contracts for savings and quitting smoking in the Philippines. Karlan calls StickK a 'more formalized, Web-based manifestation' of a savings club.

Still, relying on peers can be a double-edged sword. If one or two members playing the hui get too cash-strapped to keep contributing to the fund, the whole enterprise can fall apart. Not that that deters savers. In a coffee shop in Da Nang, a group of middle-aged friends have been meeting for years to put in their bids for the month. 'We just hang out, or we meet to decide who to invite to our new hui cycle,' says accountant Tran Thi Yen, 45. Tran was asked what would happen if a hui member, due to circumstance, couldn't pay their monthly contribution. She acts as if she's never considered the possibility. 'Cheat?' she responds. 'You can't cheat. There's karma in everything.'