Ownership & Assets

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 financial services, credit and debt, jobs and unemployment, housing and homelessness, education, and tax issues.

Updated 3/4/13: The deadline for proposals to present at NCTC's annual conference in September is coming up this Friday March 8th. See the details below and contact NCTC with any questions.

The National Community Tax Coalition (NCTC) is holding its 9th national conference in New Orleans September 10-13, 2013. This year’s conference centers on advancing, sustaining and growing the community tax preparation and asset building field. In particular, the conference will focus on the role the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) field and asset building community more broadly can play in shaping best practices, research priorities, and policy implementation.

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 and homeownership, savings and debt, consumer protection, and inequality.

Anne Kim, Senior Policy Strategist at CFED, has a piece today in the Washington Monthly that looks at the flaws in our current retirement savings landscape. In short, our current system just isn't meeting the needs of many Americans, who have a variety of short, medium and long term savings needs. Our current "toolbox" of retirement savings options simply isn't meeting this diverse range of needs, as evidenced by recent reports that over a quarter of Americans have made withdrawals from their work-based retirement accounts for non-retirement needs. As Kim explains, "For many people, employer-sponsored retirement plans are the only mechanism “forcing” them to save. Yet the retirement-only focus of the current system isn’t versatile enough to meet people’s real needs—especially to cope with emergencies such as a job loss or a horrifically expensive car repair."

The Center for American Progress hosted an event last Friday to look at the potential for low down-payment mortgages to create safe(r) homeownership opportunities for lower and middle-income Americans. While homeownership has been a primary asset building tool for many American families over the years, the need for a sizable down-payment has presented an obstacle for many lower-income, lower net worth families. In the post-Recession era especially, many Americans are struggling to finance a first home purchase. A panel of mortgage and housing experts took a look at the potential for low down-payments to facilitate homeownership for more people in the coming years. Joe Valenti, director of asset building for Center for American Progress, moderated.

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 jobs and unemployment, homelessness, education, and payday lending.

Yesterday, the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) released its annual Assets and Opportunity Scorecard, a key resource for asset building researchers and policymakers that documents data points that indicate the financial health of Americans, including asset poverty rates, household net worth, and the number of unbanked/underbanked households. One of the Scorecard’s most frequently quoted figures is the liquid asset poverty rate, which represents the the number of families who lack the savings needed in order to live at the poverty line for three months in the absence of income. We know that asset limits in safety net programs discourage saving, and that families who lack savings are subject to increased hardship in the event of an income loss. So what’s the relationship between liquid asset poverty and asset limits? Are administrative rules mandating that families subject themselves to liquid asset poverty and potentially increased hardship in order to maintain eligibility for safety net assistance? Let’s compare this year’s asset poverty data to what we know about the asset limits in safety net programs.

Today is a big day for the asset building community. Our friends at CFED have released their newly updated 2013 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard which evaluates household financial security across the U.S. and grades states on how well or poorly they support asset development and promote opportunity. 

As has been true in recent years, the key finding is that huge swaths of the population are living in a precarious state of "asset poverty." As our Justin King told the Huffington Post: “These are households and individuals that are living paycheck-to-paycheck. And without savings, you’re one misstep away from financial disaster.”

New America's Education Policy Program has a new report out today that presents a comprehensive package of reforms to the existing federal student aid system for higher education. The Education team makes a compelling case for the need for reform:

In short, the present federal financial aid system is no lon­ger up to the demands of the times. It was built in a differ­ent era and has evolved haphazardly over the decades, in response to fiscal exigency and interest group pressures. It has become unwieldy, inefficient, and overly complicated, in a way that wastes taxpayer dollars and fails to provide institutions and students with the resources and incentives they need to complete high-quality college degrees....Taxpayers and students need an aid system that is simpler, more understandable, more effective, and fairer.

In particular, they propose reforms that dramatically strengthen the Pell Grant program, simplify the federal student loan program, eliminate education tax breaks which currently favor higher-income families, boost programs that support disadvantaged middle and high school students, and make institutions of higher education more accountable to both students and taxpayers.

We were pleased to host an event on January 25th with the Washington Monthly to commemorate the release of their January/February issue which focuses on race throughout American history and particularly in light of Obama’s second term. Paul Glastris, the panel’s moderator and the editor-in-chief of the Washington Monthly, explained the purpose of the event as breaking the “politically-imposed code of silence” on talking about race in the Obama administration. Few in the administration or even in the wider public are willing to speak openly about race in America, a fact which this event and the accompanying Washington Monthly issue seek to address.