Having wealth, or a family’s assets minus their debts, is important not just for the rich— everyone needs wealth to thrive. Yet building the amount of wealth needed to thrive is a major challenge. Nearly 13 million U.S. households have negative net worth. Millions more are low wealth; they do...

Open, honest conversations about money are one of the keys to building a healthy relationship with your family, across the generations. With a little preparation, talking about financial matters can help build trust, deepen connections, relieve stress and lead to greater peace of mind. Yet for...

Canadians were more asset resilient just prior to the pandemic than they were at the turn of the millennium. That resilience continues to be tested as we enter the second year of the pandemic. For the purposes of this article, a household is asset resilient when it has liquid assets that are at...

Canada ranks consistently as one of the best places to live in the world and one of the wealthiest. When it comes to looking at the financial health of Canadian households, however, we are often forced to rely on incomplete measures, like income alone, or aggregate national statistics that tell...

This brief explores three existing unmet needs that contribute to survivors’ inability to build wealth: money, tailored asset-building support, and safe and responsive banking and credit services. Within each identified need, specific issues facing survivors, strategic actions in response to...

Aspen Financial Security Program’s the Expanding Prosperity Impact Collaborative (EPIC) has identified seven specific consumer debt problems that result in decreased financial insecurity and well-being. Four of the identified problems are general to consumer debt: households’ lack of savings...

The Dimensions of Poverty Hub, sponsored by Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), enables Canadians to track progress on poverty reduction. The updates as of September 2020 include poverty statistics based upon the new 2018-base Market Basket Measure...

The ability to build assets allows an individual or family to meet long-term financial goals and create economic stability for the future. This toolkit contains resources on goal setting, action planning and information on financial products and government supports that can help with building...

Despite the well-documented connection between health and wealth, investing in this intersection is still a new approach for many grantmakers. With the goal of inspiring increased philanthropic attention, exploration, and replication, this new spotlight elevates responsive philanthropic strategies...

This report examines the financial health and vulnerability of households in Canada’s 35 largest cities, using a new composite index of household financial health at the neighbourhood level, the Neighbourhood Financial Health Index or NFHI. The NFHI is designed to shine a light on the dynamics...

This article in the Economic Insights series from Statistics Canada examines the economic well-being of millennials by comparing their household balance sheets to those of previous generations of young Canadians. Measured at the same point in their life course, millennials were relatively better...

These results are from the new study "Debt and assets among senior Canadian families." released in April 2018. The study examines changes in debt, assets and net worth among Canadian families whose major income earner was 65 years of age or older. In recent years, household debt has increased....

Economic well-being has both a present component and a future component. In the present, economic well-being is characterized by the ability of individuals and small groups, such as families or households, to consistently meet their basic needs, including food, clothing, housing, utilities, health...

This is a one-hour webinar on increasing take up of Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs) among people on low incomes. Our panelists share challenges and success stories in their work to help clients save for their children’s post-secondary education. Learn successful outreach strategies,...

This brief explains the asset-building approach to poverty reduction.  While many families who live on low incomes struggle to meet basic needs, they miss out on opportunities to save and invest - opportunities that are critical in overcoming poverty. Without income, people are unable to get by...

Canada ranks consistently as one of the best places to live in the world and one of the wealthiest. When it comes to looking at the financial health of Canadian households, however, we are often forced to rely on incomplete measures, like income alone, or aggregate national statistics that tell us...

In this video presentation Katherine Scott from the Canadian Council on Social Development (CCSD) shares the new Neighbourhood Financial Health Index, a mapping tool which uses composite data about income, assets, debt, and poverty to show levels of financial health at the neighbourhood...

This article examines changes in the wealth of Canadian families (i.e. total family assets minus total family debt) over the period from 1999 to 2012, with a particular focus on changes across income quintiles. The paper also examines changes in the concentration of wealth across income quintiles,...

The JPMorgan Chase Institute has assembled data assets and perspectives on income and spending volatility over the last three years and examined the impacts of extraordinary income changes from job loss and extraordinary expense changes, notably from medical payments. Here we take a holistic view...

A registered disability savings plan (RDSP) is a savings plan that is intended to help parents and others save for the long-term financial security of a person who is eligible for the disability tax credit...

This reports on research results from an experiment in Malawi that varied the timing of workers' income receipt in two ways. First, payments were made either in weekly installments or as a monthly lump sum, in order to vary the extent to which workers had to save up to make pro table investments....

Spending responses to income are typically explained by households’ capital structures. Households that hold little or no liquid wealth have to consume hand-to-mouth. However, we find that few individuals hold little or no liquidity, and we document that liquidity holdings are much larger than...

This is a Presentation showing several different frameworks for assets and financial capability, collected by the CFED. This includes the Household Financial Security framework, the Financial Capability Lifecycle, Road to Economic Security, and...

This report focuses on the role that policy design can have on closing the country’s unrelenting and unacceptable racial wealth divide. We utilize a new framework—The Racial Wealth Audit—launched jointly by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University (IASP) and Demos to...

This is an infographic on the Adaptive Prosperity framework developed by the Indiana Association for Community Economic Development. This is a collaborative vision of empowerment and assets focused on all parts of a...