Financial Inclusion

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include housing, health and wealth, financial services, and unemployment.

The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) hosted an event today to release “Latino Financial Access and Inclusion," a new report that examines the relationship between comprehensive immigration reform and household financial stability for U.S. Latinos. At the event, experts from NCLR, Citi, the American Bankers Association, and a Chicago-based organization, The Resurrection Project, explored the report's findings on financial inclusion within the Latino immigrant community. The report analyzes data from a survey of roughly 1,000 low-income Latino-identified individuals across California during 2012.

Janet Murguía, President of NCLR, began the event by discussing the historical exclusion Latino immigrants have faced in the mainstream financial services marketplace. Despite myriad barriers to accessing financial services and some significant economic challenges, this report found that Latino consumers were actively prioritizing saving, utilizing a range of financial products to meet their needs, and displaying savvy engagement with financial service providers.

The report also builds the case for comprehensive immigration reform and ensuring a path to citizenship by demonstrating the variance in financial stability and engagement by citizenship status. For example, among immigrants who had been in the U.S. the same amount of time, naturalized citizens were more likely to be engaged in the mainstream financial services sector than their non-citizen counterparts. As Murguía put it, U.S. citizenship opens the doors to not only better job opportunities and education, but also greater financial inclusion. When combined, these resources create a path to upward economic and social mobility. Thus, the report explicitly frames citizenship status as an asset and calls for the current immigration reform conversation to better reflect the economic needs and opportunities of the Latino immigrant community.

Americans have rebuilt only 45 percent of the wealth they lost in the Great Recession, according to the Washington Post and a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

That's the title and subject of a new report from the Heritage Foundation, written by Stuart Butler, David John, and Sean Rust. The report takes a look at the status of savings in the US, impediments to savings, the international track record of prize-linked savings programs (where in addition to or in place of interest, savers earn the opportunity for prizes, mostly cash) and the possibilities of and obstacles to such a program in the US.

"An Assets Agenda for the States" examines current state asset building efforts with an eye toward examining those policies and priorities that are emerging as trends in this challenging economic environment. This appendix serves as a resource accompanying the paper, which can be viewed here.

Editor's Note: This blog post is written by Matt Unrath, Director of National Projects at Wider Opportunities for Women. Matt oversees WOW’s national projects—The Family Economic Security Project, the Basic Economic Security Tables™ Initiative (BEST), the Women and Work project and the Economic Security for Survivors project. He serves as the principal contact for WOW’s state and local partners across the country and represents WOW in national advocacy efforts.

Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and a “hard work” ethic are the hallmarks of America’s definition of success. To achieve success and the economic mobility of the American Dream, however, requires not only the ability to generate income, but also the ability to translate such income into assets. While income may measure whether or not a person has enough to get by, assets measure whether or not a person has enough to get ahead.

As any parent will tell you, mobility is a game-changer. Once junior can crawl, gone are the days of leaving him on his playmat while you step away, however briefly, and expect him to be in the same spot playing with the safe and developmentally appropriate toys you left him with. No, he'd rather be exploring the shoes you left in the corner of room with his mouth or in pursuit of the family cat. What worked before has to be reexamined to be successful once mobility enters the picture. 

What if I told you that very poor people, living in the most expensive city in America in the aftermath of a massive economic collapse, were challenged to save $500 and not touch it for a year with the promise of a 50 percent bonus if they succeeded? Do you think that some of them would be able to do it? A few?

What would you think the impact of that small amount of money would be? Equally small? Would you think that sequestering those resources would make families more likely to go into debt? More likely to skip paying their bills?

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include inequality, retirement, the workforce, and financial services.