Savings

The Great Recession continues to spread hardship far and wide. Poverty rates are increasing, and once stable households are falling behind and increasingly vulnerable to economic uncertainty. The longer economic insecurity persists, the harder it will be for families to move forward in their lives. The breadth of households turning to existing safety net programs for assistance is exposing the limits of the prevailing policy framework designed to prevent families from falling deep into poverty, mitigating hardship, and providing a pathway toward financial stability.

My car is 14 years old and has upwards of 150,000 miles on it. It's missing paint on the hood where I chipped away at ice that had frozen into a sheet after I didn't clean off the snow that had fallen days before. It was missing the fuel door for a couple of years (the black void was very prominent against the white, sort of, paint) until my husband replaced it for my birthday. It is not what we call, our "people" car: the one that we take on social occasions when we will be observed by people in proximity to the car. No, for that we take his car.

We've been very pleased recently to have occasion to note that our field is growing. There have been recent policy successes, and in many cases a growing acceptance of the assets framework. One area in which we've seen steady growth of interest and output related to asset building is in the academy. As evidence of that, we've just received notice that the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) Fall Research Conference will contain a special asset building track called, "Building Wealth Over the Lifetime."

APPAM is a premiere convening of social science researchers and the conference has been very supportive of assets researchers over the years. This year there are about 20 different panels that are asset building-focused or asset building related.

From "Asset Accounts in Early Childhood: Findings from the Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment (SEED) Initiative" to "Improving Irrational Decision-Making: Applying Behavioral Economics to Asset Building" there are some truly fascinating panels and papers this year, and it's a great measure of the progress being made in academia around asset building to have these policy focused researchers dedicating their time, effort, space and attention to these issues.

To see the full list of "Building Wealth Over the Lifetime" track and associated asset building panels, click here.

The Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) Fall Research Conference will include a special asset building track titled "Building Wealth over a Lifetime." In addition to the other asset-related panels at the conference, the track will include 7 panels that highlight new asset-based research that can directly inform policy and practice.

As a member of the Global Assets Project, I’m always on the lookout for important news and initiatives taking shape on the youth savings front around the world, sometimes overlooking what is happening in our own backyard.

"If you were spending $400 billion a year on social programs, would you give half of that to the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans? We didn't think so. But that is the perverse result of the stealthy spending conducted through the federal tax code."

A bright and unseasonably warm morning at Sanchez Elementary in the Mission District brought uncommon excitement to the urban school. At eleven o'clock this morning, Mayor Gavin Newsom, Treasurer Jose Cisneros, two of the city's supervisors, and a crush of news cameras crowded into a small library for the formal launch of the Kindergarten to College initiative. 

Prepared remarks of Justin King, from the Congressional Out-of-Poverty Caucus' September 30 event, "An Emergency Response to the Crisis of Poverty in America."

In response to the recent release of the Census Bureau's most recent poverty data, Congresswoman Barbara Lee has organized a discussion of the poverty crisis and policy options to make progress against poverty. The event will begin with a discussion of the data, provided by the Census Bureau. Then a discussion will follow focusing on these two questions:

This panel, moderated by Maria Sotero, focused on bringing local-level perspectives to the larger policy process. Vanessa Muniz, Director of the United Way of the Bay Area's successful free tax filing program Earn It! Keep It! Save It! along with Sarah Brennan with Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon's office, Abigail Marquez with Los Angeles' Community Development Department, and Olivia Calderon of New America provided their experiences to the discussion about strategies and best practices for best connecting tax time to larger opportunities to save and build wealth.