Consumers Shown How To Save $1 Million

Wachovia and America Saves Offer Savings Seminars to Major Corporations and Their Employees

CHARLOTTE, NC—If you believed you could amass a million dollars in your lifetime by starting early and watching your money grow, wouldn’t you want to start right away? That’s what Wachovia and America Saves expect today with the launch of a joint savings seminar, How to Save a Million Dollars.

How to Save a Million Dollars savings seminars are aimed at helping consumers jump start their savings and offer encouragement, savings strategies and tools to help consumers maximize their savings over a lifetime. Wachovia is offering the free How to Save a Million Dollars seminars to its corporate customers and their employees across the U.S.

The 30-minute and 60-minute seminars will feature . . .

* Profiles of regular people who have saved $1million.
* Examples of the miracle of compounding interest.
* The Top Ten savings tips.

Seminar attendees also receive a savings journal from Wachovia to help track their spending and find ways to save.

“Wachovia is committed to significantly increasing the number of Americans who are saving,” said Kathryn Black, Savings Director and SVP for Wachovia. “Our corporate customer relationships with businesses across the country will help us reach thousands of Americans with this message of savings education and encouragement.”

“I worked with Wachovia to develop these seminars to address the key learnings from our comprehensive savings study of more than 2,000 Americans, which was released in late 2007,” said Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America, which manages the America Saves campaign. “The study showed that people would be motivated to save if they understood how saving a little money adds up over time through the miracle of compounding interest.”

The study conducted by Wachovia and CFA suggested that more than half of Americans (52 percent) said that they cannot afford to save or are saving inadequately, but that knowledge of interest compounding greatly increased their optimism about saving successfully. The survey, based on 50-plus question interviews of more than 2,000 representative adult Americans, was conducted by Opinion Research Corporation in November 2007. The margin of error was plus or minus two percentage points.