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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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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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People run their financial lives with a variety of tools. The first tools that come to mind are likely to be formal, like checking accounts and credit cards. But households often use informal tools that are harder to see from outside, like short-term loans from friends or relatives. Some people use informal financial services because they lack access—or believe they lack access—to quality products or because they do not trust formal options...
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What does it mean to live between poverty and the middle class? In a multi-media report released last week, Al Jazeera America digs into the lives of 5 Californian families that "earn too much to receive most government benefits yet too little to reliably make ends meet."
The piece profiles families with income below the self-sufficiency standard, a measure developed by the University of Washington in the 1990s. The self-sufficiency standard . . .
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The Taylors overdraft their checking account every two weeks, on purpose.
As described in a recent issue brief published by the U.S. Financial Diaries, the Taylor family’s income level varies significantly from month to month. Sometimes it’s not enough to cover all of their expenses. So, they opened an account at a bank with a simple overdraft fee structure: One $35 charge per overdraft, no daily fees, and an allowance of up to $500 at a time. Since the Taylors typically make only one large cash withdrawal per paycheck – the entire amount of pay – this bank would charge them at most one $35 overdraft fee each cycle, if they happen to need more cash than the amount of that week’s direct deposit...
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