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Recently, SSIRLive! featured The Hidden Financial Lives of America's Poor and Middle Class, a 2-part webinar and blog series, highlighting research based on the US Financial Diaries. The research illustrates how current programs and policies for helping poor and middle class households achieve financial stability are based on an outdated understanding of the reality of their financial practices.
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The Washington Post featured research from the US Financial Diaries project in a recent review of smartphone apps and tools designed to help individuals manage their money and build savings.
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This past July, the Aspen Initiative on Financial Security held its fourth annual Financial Security Summit. Participants convened for a session titled, “Income Volatility and Economic Shocks.”
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Most financial literacy programs are geared toward steady paycheck earners with long-term savings goals. But how can programs assist households that are struggling with volatile incomes and unpredictable expenses?
Recently Mediaplanet included a feature on the findings of the US Financial Diaries project and how they can relate to more effective financial literacy approaches.
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The Toronto-based Globe and Mail featured work from the US Financial Diaries on employment and income volatility in a piece on the economic realities of low-wage workers in the sharing economy.
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Today, USFD and Omidyar Network were featured on Techonomy.com. The piece describes the research project and also highlights recent early findings, focusing on income volatility.
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Rachel Schneider, senior vice president at the Center for Financial Services Innovation, discusses the finances of low- and moderate-income households with Bloomberg's Mark Crumpton on "Bottom Line."
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Today, The Huffington Post quoted USFD principal investigator Rachel Schneider and featured several publications in its exploration of seasonal, low-wage jobs. Rachel emphasized that in additional in lumpy incomes, low-wage workers experience unpredictability in their work schedules.
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Each of the U.S. Financial Diaries' Household Profiles presents the financial life of one family in the USFD study. While these families are not necessarily representative of the total sample, they illustrate recurring themes: households struggling with income volatility, unplanned expenses, and finding ways to save and invest, but also using creative–and sometimes counter intuitive–budget and money management strategies to help make ends meet...
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Many of the households included in the U.S. Financial Diaries project operated on a weekly or monthly budget, balancing income and expenses in relatively short-term periods. However, the subject of the latest household profile, provides an example of long-term, annual budgeting...
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Earlier this week Vox highlighted research from the U.S. Financial Diaries focused on income volatility.
Through detailed data collection over the course of a year, USFD reveals hard-to-see aspects of the financial lives of working, one of which is the high level of uncertainty and unpredictability that households face when income flows are irregular...
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Earlier this week, both The New York Times and Vox highlighted research from the U.S. Financial Diaries focused on informal finance.
Low-income households often do not have access to formal financial services and operate in the "invisible finance sector," leaving them with no credit history...
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More than 200 alumni, students, faculty, staff, donors, and friends of NYU Wagner celebrated the school's 75th anniversary on Thursday, June 12. The celebration began with faculty presenting their research highlights, or "WAGTalks." FAI's Jonathan Morduch kicked off the series with an overview of the US Financial Diaries (USFD) project and its relevance in today's current economic debates...
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There’s a nice post on payday loans by New School professor Lisa Servon on the New Yorker Currency blog this week. She tells the story of Azlinah Tambu, a single mother in Oakland, CA who took out a series of payday loans, knowing she wouldn’t be able to pay them back on time and will end up repaying far more than she borrows. There’s no question Tambu is as informed a consumer of these types of loans as you could find: she has worked as a teller for a payday lender. In relating Tambu’s struggle to repay, Servon makes two really important and related points...
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