529 plans

Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and a “hard work” ethic are the hallmarks of America’s definition of success. To achieve success and the economic mobility of the American Dream, however, requires not only the ability to generate income, but also the ability to translate such income into assets. While income may measure whether or not a person has enough to get by, assets measure whether or not a person has enough to get ahead.

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.

As I mentioned in a blog post a couple of weeks ago, families are facing a double-whammy to college affordability: costs are up and savings are down. The good news? As Rachel Fishman with the Education Policy Program and I discuss, there are a lot of things that the federal and state governments, educational institutions, and families can do to maintain access to higher education. To have a listen, click below.

Fresh off the presses are two reports highlighting the dismal state of college affordability: the first was released Wednesday by the State Higher Education Executive Officer's Association showing that college costs rose 8.3 percent last year and the second from Sallie Mae released last Tuesday (slightly less fresh) showing that less families are savings for college and thos

After spending a few hours on the Hill this morning, we have both good news and bad news. The bad: No one in Congress appears to be working to avert the so-called "sequester." The good: key tax writing committees of both the House and Senate are hard at work evaluating proposals and developing plans to reform the tax code. Those reforms could make it easier for Americans to save money, and become more financially secure – if they’re done correctly. How do we help ensure that the reforms will help – not hurt – average Americans? CFED (an organization dedicated to promoting economic opportunity) hosted a forum today called "Can America Save Itself?" to highlight a range of promising (and often bipartisan) strategies to leverage the tax reform process to promote asset building, thereby making it easier for Americans to cope with emergencies, save up for a big purchase like a home, or live comfortably in retirement. As CFED President Andrea Levere noted, Americans of all income levels struggle to save and remain financially stable. Roughly 44 percent of all Americans are living in liquid asset poverty, meaning they do not have enough funds on hand to survive at the poverty level for three months in the absence of income. While concentrations of liquid asset poverty are higher at low-income levels, the challenge of living "paycheck to paycheck" is still present well up the income ladder.

New America's Education Policy Program has a new report out today that presents a comprehensive package of reforms to the existing federal student aid system for higher education. The Education team makes a compelling case for the need for reform:

In short, the present federal financial aid system is no lon­ger up to the demands of the times. It was built in a differ­ent era and has evolved haphazardly over the decades, in response to fiscal exigency and interest group pressures. It has become unwieldy, inefficient, and overly complicated, in a way that wastes taxpayer dollars and fails to provide institutions and students with the resources and incentives they need to complete high-quality college degrees....Taxpayers and students need an aid system that is simpler, more understandable, more effective, and fairer.

In particular, they propose reforms that dramatically strengthen the Pell Grant program, simplify the federal student loan program, eliminate education tax breaks which currently favor higher-income families, boost programs that support disadvantaged middle and high school students, and make institutions of higher education more accountable to both students and taxpayers.

Here at the Asset Building Program we write regularly about the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of asset limits in public benefits programs. Recent research conducted by our own Aleta Sprague and Rachel Black documents the substantial burden asset limits place on benefits administrators and participants alike, examines trends with asset limit policies at the state level, and identifies ways to reform these policies to better promote long-term financial stability.

In particular, Sprague and Black found that asset limits for benefits like SNAP (food stamps) and TANF (cash welfare) run counter to purported program goals of efficiency and financial independence. As guest blogger Jessica Bartholow recently put it: "remember what more than a decade of research on asset poverty and economic security for low-income households has taught us: that families are less likely to find their way back to financial solvency when they’ve lost everything they have." Forcing families to spend down any small savings they have before they qualify for benefits thwarts their efforts to get back on their feet.  

Sprague and Black have a new piece of commentary up on the Spotlight on Poverty site that delves into some of the recent policy conversations states are having about asset limits.

The link between household wealth and youth’s educational outcomes has been confirmed by numerous research studies, finding that youth tend to do better educationally when their households have more wealth (click here and here for more information). A new paper from the Assets and Education Initiative at the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare confirms the relationship between household wealth and math achievement for youth from the U.S. and Ghana. The paper adds a unique contribution to existing research.

Thursday, May 31, the Asset Building Program hosted an event Financing College Success: Innovations to Promote Readiness, Access, and Completion. We were particularly excited to host Martha Kanter, Under Secretary at the U.S.

The topic of student loans is being debated in the Senate this week, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle hoping to pass legislation that would curb rising interest rates. Without legislation, interest rates on federal student loans will double from their current rate of 3.4% to 6.8% beginning on July 1st. A recent article in the New York Times provides a good summary of this debate.