Ownership & Assets

In February, we reported that Hawai’i was on the verge of eliminating its TANF asset test. Yesterday, Governor Neil Abercrombie signed the bill, HB 868, and made it official.

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, unemployment, financial products, taxes, and inequality.

After our event on "prize-linked savings" yesterday, I sat down with Joanna Smith-Ramani of D2D and recorded a short podcast focused on the basics. What are prize-linked savings? Where did the idea come from? Can giving people prizes really help to induce more savings? What's happening with this idea now? You can listen to our conversation here:

Yesterday we hosted an event along with our partners at the Doorways to Dreams Fund (D2DFund) to examine the potential of lottery-style programs and products to promote personal savings. The idea of “prize-linked savings” (PLS) emerged out of the observation that while many Americans enjoy playing the lottery or gambling, large numbers of us do not have the personal savings necessary to cope with an emergency. Researchers, advocates, and others in the field noted the existence of PLS programs in other countries and thought that a similar motivational tool could work in the U.S.--if saving was as much fun as playing the lottery, more people would participate. Pilot programs and legislative proposals have emerged to take this concept to scale in several U.S. states. You can watch a recording of the event here or read on for the key takeaways.

The House Ways and Means Committee created a series of working groups to investigate problems with the tax code and solicit suggestions for reform. The Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation is dedicated to incubating and promoting innovative public policies to enable low- and middle-income families in the United States to accumulate savings, access wealth-building financial services, develop financial capability, and build and protect productive assets across the life course.

This post is co-authored by Krista Holub, a program manager for the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis and works primarily on the Refund to Savings initiative, focusing on development, implementation, and research; and David Rothstein, a research fellow in the Asset Building Program, as well as a researcher at Policy Matters Ohio.

Following in the footsteps of rap mogul Russell Simmons and being-famous moguls the Kardashian sisters, being-adorable mogul Justin Bieber has endorsed a pre-paid debit card.

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 personal finance and retirement saving, inequality, government assistance, and financial services.

Today is April 15th, which means it is Tax Day! Remember to be extra nice today, as some people are more stressed out than usual because it's the last day to file taxes. Studies show a marked increase in car accidents on April 15th likely due to stress or rushing to a tax preparer. As the lead researcher on one study put it, "That's what makes tax day so special from my perspective. It's a widespread stress quite onerous throughout a large community that is synchronized and repeated on a yearly basis."

Research shows that most Americans are not thrilled with the tax filing process: in a recent Pew report, 56 percent of Americans do not like or even hate doing their taxes. Meanwhile, only a third of Americans expressed positive feelings about doing their taxes (29 percent said they liked it, while 5 percent said they loved it. If you fall into that very intriguging and unusual 5 percent, be sure to check out IHeartTaxes.org for a warm-hearted chuckle). 

In the asset building community, April 15th marks the end of tax season, a time of year when Americans of all income levels reflect on their financial lives and often seek out assistance (both paid and free) with preparing their returns. For families and individuals with low incomes, tax filing may produce the largest single influx of funds all year. Therefore, the timing can be perfect for asset building practitioners to work with families on a variety of savings goals, address concerns about debt, and make sure families are claiming any credits (such as the Earned Income Tax Credit) that they qualify for.