Savings

This presentation was made at the RESULTS International Conference in Washington, D.C. RESULTS is a grassroots advocacy organization focusing on federal policies that create long-term solutions to poverty by supporting programs that address its root causes and has selected The Saver's Bonus as a component of their 2011 domestic legislative campaign. Click here to view the presentation.

Jamie Holmes sat down with Richard Just of The New Republic to discuss his article "Why Can't More Poor People Escape Poverty?" Their conversation is a very interesting 17-minutes. I recommend watching the whole thing:

The gap in wealth accumulation between Blacks and Whites is a familiar statistic. Recently, researchers at Brandeis University announced that the racial wealth gap quadrupled from $20,000 to $95,000 between 1984 and 2007. There are a number of historic causes that one could point to for creating and exacerbating the gap, but the increase in recent years is disturbing. It's important to keep in mind the ways that the tax code benefits those that are already wealthy more so than those who are striving toward wealth.

Our friends at CFED hosted an excellent webinar on Employer Engagement yesterday.  The webinar discussed the potential of moving to a paperless payday.  CFED Innovator-in-Residence, Eugénie FitzGerald, and Manager of the San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment, Leigh Phillips, built a case justifying the CurrenC SF program and talked about some of the challenges faced in the initial design phase of the program.  CurrenC SF is a city-wide effort to work with employers to have all employees in San Francisco paid by direct deposit.  Those who do not have a bank accoun

Co-sponsored by the New America Foundation and Innovations for Poverty Action

CFSI held their 6^th Annual Underbanked Financial Service Forum last week, bringing together about 600 financial services providers, government regulators and program managers, and consumer advocacy organizations together in New Orleans. The forum highlighted a wealth of financial services innovations, primarily technological, that have potential to improve access and financial-capability building in underbanked communities.

Examining decision-making is a critical aspect of the work that we do here in the Asset Building Program. How do people make decisions? How can we best set up systems that put people in position to succeed? Our understanding of those processes has come a long way in recent years, but there are still miles to go.

Our social policy system is riddled with inequities. I often focus on the disparities between how we incentivize savings and encourage families to build wealth. While those on the upper half of the income ladder are able to access tax incentives as homeowners and when they contribute to a range of designated accounts, families with lower incomes and fewer resources are largely shut out. This critique was the impetus for creating a new type of account that could incentivize savings for those currently excluded, the Individual Development Account (IDA).

IDAs are designed to support savings for the purchase of specific assets, such as buying a home, pursuing post-secondary education, or capitalizing a small business, by matching the deposits of program participants. Over the last 15 years, community groups across the country made IDAs available to their constituents. One of the features of this experience that has been so remarkable is the commitment of IDA proponents to learning from the experience. From the beginning, a thorough research agenda was developed and has produced a growing body of knowledge. In many ways, this is a model for how social policymaking should work. New ideas can be put into action, their impacts assessed, and subsequent approaches can be refined or abandoned. The process is often iterative and takes time, but the nature of social science requires openness to acquiring new information and an ability to place it in context.

A new study by a team of researchers from Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, University of North Carolina, and the Brookings Institution offers a new learning opportunity.

In May 2010, the YouthSave Consortium launched a 5-year Project that would develop, deliver and test savings accounts accessible to low-income youth.

College doesn't have to be for the elite

Recent news suggests that colleges and universities, especially the elite, may not be as good as they could be or ought to be because they cater to students whose families are able to pay. This means that college is largely a ‘pay to play’ game, not necessarily admitting the best and the brightest but rather admitting students whose families can afford college tuition. Students whose families have few financial resources are at a disadvantage and are therefore not equally represented in colleges and universities across the U.S.