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Some Americans don’t think twice about how often they’ll get paid, or how much their paychecks will be, because the differences are negligible—a day here, a few dollars there. Others find it much harder to predict money coming in and even going out of the household. People who live at lower incomes, the group the U.S. Financial Diaries focused on, tend to put themselves in this second group of Americans.
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One topic we were interested in when we designed the U.S. Financial Diaries was household attitudes towards both short and long-term saving. So not only did we track their cash flows into and out of savings vehicles (formal or informal), but we also asked them about their savings goals, plans, successes, and struggles.
When asked about emergency savings, the USFD families expressed a resounding desire build more of a financial cushion than they currently had in savings.
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The U.S. Financial Diaries provide data on an often overlooked piece of the cash flow puzzle: loans between family and friends. Our methodology allowed us to build trust with respondents and follow nearly all of their cash flows, even those outside of formal arrangements. Informal loans are a significant piece of many households’ financial pictures.
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The International Business Times featured USFD data as part of a larger piece on new wireless plans for customers with poor credit history. Earlier this week, launched a new service that allows users with bad credit to sign up for a 2-year contract if they've paid their bills on time for 12 consecutive months.
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When we began the US Financial Diaries we had no idea whether the issue of income volatility would be a major issue for low- and moderate-income households in the United States.
It turns out it is.
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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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Today researchers and national experts will share early findings from the U.S. Financial Diaries (USFD) project, which tracked every dollar earned, spent, borrowed, saved, and shared by 235 low- and moderate-income households in five states over the course of a year—thus providing a powerful picture of how millions of Americans work to make ends meet. At the event, you will have first access to USFD findings, which highlight:
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The latest household profile from the U.S. Financial Diaries project presents the story of Mateo Valencia, 31, and Lucia Benitez, 30. Mateo and Lucia are an unmarried couple currently living in Queens, New York after moving to the U.S. from Ecuador in 2005.
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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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Earlier this week, The New York Times published a feature on new initiatives aimed at bringing informal savings groups into the formal financial sector:
While informal lending circles among families, acquaintances, co-workers and neighbors are familiar to hundreds of millions of people all over the globe, they are rarely recognized by mainstream financial institutions.
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Boston College's Center for Retirement Research, one of the nation’s leading center on retirement studies, recently reported on the findings of USFD's work on informal finance. CRR highlighted the various types of informal financial arrangements (money guards, savings groups, saving at home, and interpersonal loans) and dug deeper into the inner workings of savings groups in particular:
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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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The U.S. Financial Diaries project, a joint initiative of NYU Wagner’s Financial Access Initiative (FAI) and The Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), reveals hard-to-see aspects of the financial lives of working Americans, providing new insight for the design of financial services policies, programs and products for a broad range of Americans...
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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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Think back on the past year in your financial life: the money you received from work, loans or gifts, the purchases large and small, the bank deposits and withdrawals. Now imagine keeping track of every one of those transactions - regardless of your income level, it would be a mind-boggling endeavor...
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