Tax time as an asset building opportunity: assessing the potential

Financial literacy ; Saving and investment

Mind the Gap - Issues in Overcoming the Information, Income, Wealth, and Supply Gaps Facing Potential Buyers of Affordable Homes

While the overall homeownership rate in the United States is at an all-time high, the gap between the ownership rates of low-income and higher-income households remains wide. In addition, homeownership rates in urban, low-income and minority communities lag behind. Lower-income families are constrained a lack of information about how to buy a home, by their inability to provide sufficient, stable income streams for debt service, by their lack of initial equity, and by their inability to find an home of adequate quality in a desirable location. This paper explores each of these constraints, or gaps, and potential solutions for each. We find addressing each of these gaps involves trade-offs, yet targeting the appropriate strategy for particular markets and populations may be able to help families become home owners. Information gaps are best addressed by programs that provide home buyer counseling and education. Federal funding and incentives for such programs have been declining throughout the last decade, however. Unless new homebuyers are well-prepared and supported, none of the sophisticated development and financial strategies will be successful. Income and wealth gaps are closely linked; bridging a wealth gap for a buyer, for example, may increase the buyer's income gap. While there are several strategies that seek to bridge these twin barriers, the most promising among them is the second mortgage. The supply gap is most pressing in faster-growing coastal cities, but is becoming a more significant constraint to homeownership nationally. Unfortunately, reliance on filtering and other traditional mechanisms for creating affordable homeownership opportunities has not proven effective in recent years. Serious consideration should be paid to new production programs and policies that can enhance the supply of affordable owner-occupied units in targeted areas. Overall, a menu of strategies exists, each being appropriate for targeted households in a given housing market context. More attention needs to be focused on this menu, rather than a one-size fits all strategy

Who receives a mortgage modification? Race and income differentials in loan workouts

Loan modifications offer one strategy to prevent mortgage foreclosures by lowering interest rates, extending loan terms and/or reducing principal balance owed. Yet we know very little about who receives loan modifications and/or the terms of the modification. This paper uses data from a sample of subprime loans made in 2005 to examine the incidence of loan modifications among borrowers in California, Oregon and Washington. The results suggest although loan modifications remain a rarely used option among the servicers in these data, there is no evidence that minority borrowers are less likely to receive a modification or less aggressive modification than white borrowers. Most modifications involve reductions in the loan’s interest rate, and an increase in principal balance. We also find that modifications reduce the likelihood of subsequent default, particularly for minority borrowers.Mortgage loans

Financial Coaching: A New Approach for Asset Building?

Through a literature review and interviews with nonprofit financial coaches, examines the concepts, training, and capacity building involved in financial coaching for low-income families, as well as critiques of existing models and their implications

Lattice energy sum rules and the trace anomaly

We show that the additional contribution to the Michael lattice energy sum rule for the static quark-antiquark potential, pointed out recently, can be identified with the contribution to the field energy arising from the trace anomaly of the energy momentum tensor. We also exlicitely exhibit the anomalous contribution to the field energy in the sum rule for the glueball mass obtained recently by Michael.Comment: 8 pages, plain TeX, no figures; text & abstract extended. Includes glueball energy sum rul

Improving Financial Literacy: The Role of Nonprofit Providers

Nonprofit organizations are one of the primary channels through which financial literacy services are delivered to lower-income adults in the US. There are several reasons why the nonprofit sector is involved in promoting financial literacy, including perceptions that nonprofit organizations are objective sources of information and that they are accessible to lower-income individuals. Using tax records, we identified over 2,100 nonprofit entities with programs related to financial literacy. The nonprofit financial literacy field is heterogeneous, which hinders our ability to make generalizations about this field as a whole. Nonetheless, nonprofit entities focused solely on financial counseling and money management appear to be smaller than organizations for which financial literacy services are secondary activities. Despite the breadth of financial literacy programming within the nonprofit sector, few studies have analyzed the impact of financial literacy services provided by nonprofit organizations