As you almost certainly know by now — unless you’re running late for work — Daylight Saving Time (DST) started last weekend. Like most Americans, you probably scrambled around Sunday morning, adjusting digital clocks and controls or scrounging around for the directions that tell you how.
If you’re really conscientious, you might also have changed smoke detector batteries.
Benjamin Franklin is credited with suggesting an earlier start to the day to maximize summer sunlight hours and decrease the number of candles burned after dark. Remember “early to bed, early to rise”? It wasn’t until 1918, though, that clocks were turned back in the U.S. as a wartime measure.1
But as Sunday wore on and your biological clock creaked and groaned, you might have grumbled, “An extra hour of daylight, how much could that help?” Consider this: When Congress extended DST an extra month in 1986, the golf industry estimated an additional $200 million in revenue, while the barbeque industry netted an estimated extra $100 million.2 To quote Franklin again, “Time is money.”
DST and IRA? To learn more, click here.
Footnotes
- Source: History.com, “Eight Things You May Not Know About Daylight Saving Time,” March 9, 2012
- Source: NPR, “The Reasoning Behind Changing Daylight Saving,” March 8, 2007
Thomas Rowley is the Director of Retirement Business Strategy at Invesco.
Invesco Distributors, Inc. 03/15
