Fewer Americans Moving But More Making Repairs

Photos.com/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — “You gotta move” as the old blues song made famous by The Rolling Stones once advised, but Americans won’t be uprooting themselves as much in 2015.

An American Express survey says that while 27.8 million people in the U.S. will move to another location this year, that represents just 12 percent of the population compared to the 16 percent who found new digs in 2014.

Obviously, this would suggest the housing market, which has been revived lately, might be slowing down, but American Express says the recovery is still going strong.

Just because more people plan on staying where they are doesn’t mean they’ll be sitting on their hands. The survey says that 75 percent will perform home improvement projects, up slightly from the 73 percent who did so in 2014. The average project is expected to cost $4,100, up a hundred bucks from last year.

Another thing that bodes well, at least for professional contractors, is that twenty-one percent of consumers will use their services in 2015, way up from the 15 percent from a year ago.


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Verizon outage affecting thousands of customers

Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images (NEW YORK) — Some Verizon customers were experiencing a service outage on Wednesday afternoon, according to the company. Verizon said it was not immediately clear how long the service would be