Individual Wealth Building

The Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Aspen Institute invited a number of leading practitioners to a one-day meeting centered on the question: “How can we expand the definition of employer engagement to include influencing businesses’ human resource and training practices in addition to responding to pipeline needs?” The question was meant to be provocative and to elicit lively discussion, not necessarily neat conclusions. 

EARN is a leading nonprofit provider of microsavings programs in the US. EARN commissioned a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) to measure the impacts of TripleBoost, a program designed to help working families save for their children’s education. The primary goal of the RCT was to understand how the first 6 months of TripleBoost participation influences the amount of money that families save for their children’s education.

To answer this question, the study randomly placed qualified TripleBoost applicants into Treatment and Control groups, where the Treatment group immediately began participation in TripleBoost, and the Control group was placed on a 6‐month waiting list. Families were asked a series of questions at the time of application and on a 6‐ month follow‐up survey. Actual deposit data from families in the Treatment group also was analyzed.

RCT findings reveal that during the 6‐month study period, TripleBoost families saved an average of $681 for their children’s education, more than 10 times the average amount saved by families in the Control group. A majority of families in the Control group saved $0 during the study period, while 90% of TripleBoost families saved $500 or more. The results are statistically significant. Thus, EARN’s TripleBoost program effectively drives families to set aside 10x more in savings for their children’s education than they would save without the program. 

This issue brief examines the extent to which family financial transfers occur among Boston residents of color. New data collected for the Boston metro area, as part of the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color (NASCC) survey, for the first time provide detailed information on financial assets that allow analysis to be broken down beyond the traditional black-and-white divide at the metropolitan-area level. Targeting U.S.-born blacks, Caribbean blacks, Cape Verdeans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans, findings show that households of color consistently receive fewer financial transfers than whites, while at the same time providing more financial assistance to their families and relatives. Particularly striking are differences in parental payments toward higher education expenses and financial support for the down payment of a home. Immigrant status further explains differences between white and nonwhite households as well as between households of color. 

Ideas42 has engaged with more than 70 domestic poverty experts over the past year, including academics, practitioners, and parents raising young children. We have studied academic liter- ature from multiple disciplines and directly observed 15 programs serving families with low incomes. This paper distills the lessons we’ve learned and the best practices we've observed in this process. We do not claim exhaustive knowledge of poverty; instead, we intend this document to serve as a well-researched conversation starter that will help catalyze the behav- ioral innovations our society desperately needs. In the pages that follow, we share behavioral insights that shed new light on the many challenges facing families with low incomes and those who seek to support them. We also put forward three design principles that follow from these insights and can be tailored to t the needs of a wide range of communities, organizations, policies and programs.