From CFED: Preserve Consumer Protections for Buyers of Manufactured Homes

Act Now to Preserve Consumer Protections for Buyers of Manufactured Homes!

A bill recently introduced in Congress would roll back some basic consumer protections for buyers of manufactured homes. That's right: the Preserving Access to Manufactured Housing Act, H.R. 1699, has been resurrected once again—putting vulnerable homebuyers at risk.
 

Take action now!

Tell your Representative to oppose the Preserving Access to Manufactured Housing Act. Here's how:

• Call 202.224.3121 and ask to be connected to your Representative's office. If you don't know who your Representative is, find out here.
• Once you're connected, here's what to say:

My name is [your name] from [your city and state], and I’m calling to request that you oppose H.R. 1699, the Preserving Access to Manufactured Housing Act. This bill would roll back critical consumer protections for buyers of manufactured homes and would once again expose vulnerable homebuyers to predatory, high-cost loans that put them at risk of losing their homes. 
 

Why does H.R. 1699 matter? Before the Dodd-Frank Act, chattel lending—which is used to finance most manufactured homes—was largely unregulated. Interest rates on chattel loans were high, as were default rates. Dodd-Frank gave the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) authority to regulate chattel loans; now, many of the same laws and regulations that govern mortgage lending also apply to chattel lending. The law already provides a few exemptions for manufactured home dealers and lenders, but H.R. 1699 would harm vulnerable individuals and families by stripping away needed protections.

Find out more about this bill and read the letter that CFED and consumers groups signed in opposition to the 2015 version.

Policy Brief: CFED: Earned Income Tax Credit

Today, CFED is releasing a new policy brief on the Earned Income Tax Credit: Enhancing and Expanding the EITC for Low-Wage Workers. Depending who you talk to in Washington, tax reform is either charging full steam ahead or it’s completely dead. Either way, if Congress and the Trump Administration want to make the tax code work for working people – and not just for corporations and the wealthy – they will focus on turning our upside-down tax code right-side up. 
 
You already know that the Earned Income Tax Credit is a right-side up feature of the tax code that is also the most effective anti-poverty tool we have. It has a proven track record, the positive effects of which for children of recipients last well into adulthood, including improved test scores, boosted college enrollment, increased earnings as adults and higher Social Security benefits in retirement. Recently, it was also linked to improved health outcomes.
 
Congress should build on the success of this critical tool for supporting the opportunity economy. Our brief highlights the opportunities policymakers have to expand the credit: increasing benefits for workers not raising children and creating a Rainy Day EITC program to empower workers to save. It also underscores the EITC is not the main driver of the tax gap, and proposals that make the credit harder to claim or less generous in the name of “fraud reduction” should be rejected. Instead, Congress should simplify the complicated rules to qualify, further study measures to reduce improper payments that are already in place and establish minimum competency standards for paid tax preparers.
 
Please use this brief as a tool for your advocacy as you meet with federal policymakers. It’s difficult to predict when exactly tax reform might come up on Congress’s agenda, and even harder to predict whether EITC will be in the cross-hairs if it does, but this brief serves as a strong defense for preserving and expanding the EITC.
 
If you have any questions, please contact Chad Bolt. Thank you for your work to build an opportunity economy for all.

Sincerely,
CFED

CFED: The Marriage of Health and Wealth: A Union to Last a Lifetime

Kate Griffin and Parker Cohen on 11/03/2016 @ 11:00 AM

Tags: Economic Inclusion, News

“If you want to lower my blood pressure, help me pay my electricity bill.” These words that frame Jason Purnell’s essay in What It’s Worth capture it perfectly: the connection between health and wealth is inextricable. At CFED’s 2016 Assets Learning Conference, we held a lively concurrent session and an invitation-only discussion with 50 leaders from the health care, public health, community development and asset-building sectors to gain a deeper understanding of this intersection. Judging by both attendance and the enthusiasm of the conversation, we’ve tapped into something important—and we’re excited to share three promising avenues for us to explore as a field.

Prolonged financial stress can cause “toxic stress,” which affects the immune, cardiovascular and nervous systems, and can lead to conditions like high blood pressure and heart disease. Financial stress also forces some households to forgo doctor visits or skip prescriptions. For children, the stakes are even higher—their brains develop differently when they grow up carrying the stressors of poverty.

The “social determinants of health”—which the World Health Organization defines as “the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age”—are “shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources.” While the social determinants of health may be shaped by systems, they impact us as individuals. We must address financial health as a foundational issue to the social determinants of physical health. Based on what we heard at the ALC, we see three opportunities emerging for our field.

Opportunity 1: Expand Service Delivery

How can we build fruitful partnerships with health care providers to jointly deliver services? Just like asset-builders, many in the health care field provide financially vulnerable people with established, trusted community services. For example, Federally Qualified Community Health Centers serve 24 million low-income people annually. Broadly speaking, their mandate is to serve the community’s health needs, and they accomplish this in part by being true community hubs: their staff and boards are composed predominately of community members, and they provide wraparound services and host community events. More about how we might integrate financial capability services into CHCs can be found in our recent policy brief.

Opportunity 2: Broaden Our Coalitions

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently released a new definition of public health. “Public Health 3.0” is the idea that a community public health officer sits at the intersection of each of the systems impacting social determinants of health: business, economic development, housing or criminal justice, to name a few. As such, health policy should be embedded into each sector to ensure equal access to health, not just health care. Public Health 3.0 is a call to expand coalitions, which presents an opportunity for the many asset-building coalitions around the country. Expanding and joining coalitions can help us work together to answer many of these critical questions and forge a path forward.

Opportunity 3: Build Better Systems Together

When people are healthy, our economy benefits. In his What It’s Worth essay, Jason Purnell explains that the most powerful interventions to make people and society healthier involve changing the ways our systems are configured. The Affordable Care Act is a great example of this configuration shift in that it focuses on remunerating health care outcomes, rather than individual services. For instance, if a patient is seen for the same illness multiple times in a month, the health care provider may only be reimbursed once for that expense, thus incentivizing a holistic, preventive approach to health care. These seemingly small intervention can have big effects, as it orients our thinking toward measuring progress in terms of progress toward our ultimate goal: healthier people and healthier communities.

Participants in our ALC sessions dove into these topics by thinking about the other systems-based changes we can leverage to make people healthier. Among the many opportunities raised, they pointed to advocating for systemic change to build a more equitable society and reduce financial stress by bridging the racial wealth divide and turning the tax code right-side up. Although these are no small undertakings, they would go far to improve not only people’s financial health, but also their physical well-being.

The potential for collaboration between the physical and financial well-being sectors is vast. If you’re interested in staying informed on our work in this area, sign up to receive updates here.

Official CFED Statement on Newly-Released Census Poverty Data

From The Corporation for Enterprise Development

By Kasey Wiedrich

Nearly 47 million of us—14.8% of Americans—live in poverty. Staggering as this number is, it’s a conservative estimate, and one that doesn’t account for the millions more living in “liquid asset poverty,” just one emergency away from financial ruin.

Perhaps more troubling about this data—released today by the U.S. Census Bureau—is that it remains virtually unchanged, marking the fourth year in a row in which the rate of poverty in the US hasn’t budged.

Although these data don’t provide much reason to rejoice, there is some good news. This year marks the first time the Census Bureau has also released updated data on the Supplemental Poverty Measure simultaneously with the official poverty figures. This is a victory for advocates because it offers an alternative to measuring poverty, which experts and researchers have argued for years fails to reflect the full amount of income a family needs to live in our current economy. By this measure, 15.3% of Americans are living in poverty—1.4 million more households than are accounted for by the federal poverty guideline measure. While that number is far too high, having a more accurate estimate of who lives in poverty is critical for organizations like CFED who are working to create an economy built on opportunity and inclusion.

Yet even the supplemental poverty rate still only captures one aspect of a family’s financial life: its income. While income helps families get by, we know that assets help families get ahead. Assets are crucial to a family’s financial well-being and matter economically, socially and psychologically. By not capturing families’ assets, federal poverty measures fail to take into account the financial fragility of a wide segment of our population.

At CFED, we use the concept of asset poverty and liquid asset poverty to broaden our understanding of financial instability. These measures take into consideration the assets a family has to weather a financial storm such as a job loss or medical emergency, defined by their ability to live for three months at the poverty level.

 

By these measures, far more Americans are living in a state of financial vulnerability. According to CFED’s latest Assets & Opportunity Scorecard data, 25.4% of households in the US are asset poor, meaning that they lack the net financial resources—money in the bank, assets in a home or car—to weather a job loss or other emergency for three months. Still more troubling, 43.5% of households are liquid asset poor, meaning they lack the liquid assets (i.e., cash or assets easily converted to cash) needed to make it through an income disruption.

Our partners agree that true economic security means much more than having an income just above the federal poverty threshold. In the coming weeks, CFED’s team of expert researchers will join the national conversation about poverty and financial security through a series of blog posts that dig deeper into the new poverty data, as well as the data on health insurance coverage also released today and the results of the latest American Community Survey coming out tomorrow. We believe these analyses are critical as they inform the strategies CFED and our partners will advance as we work toward building the opportunity economy we all envision.

To look up estimates of asset poverty and liquid asset poverty in your community, visit the A&O Local Data Center.