Justin King: All Related Content

After our event on "prize-linked savings" yesterday, I sat down with Joanna Smith-Ramani of D2D and recorded a short podcast focused on the basics. What are prize-linked savings? Where did the idea come from? Can giving people prizes really help to induce more savings? What's happening with this idea now? You can listen to our conversation here:

Following in the footsteps of rap mogul Russell Simmons and being-famous moguls the Kardashian sisters, being-adorable mogul Justin Bieber has endorsed a pre-paid debit card.

Editor's note: A version of this post originally appeared on New America's In the Tank blog.

In her new book, Pound Foolish, journalist and author Helaine Olen takes a deep dive into the world of America's personal finance industry and emerges with a wake-up call for anyone who has ever taken advice from self-described personal finance gurus like Suze Orman. According to Olen, American people have too often been given bad advice on their finances, offered by salesmen with conflicts of interest. We've been sold a series of myths that enrich the purveyors and leave the rest of us struggling to make ends meet amidst the surging costs of housing, health and education --  and income stagnation. Olen's book ends with a call for Americans to open up about their financial difficulties. She says a more honest conversation can help to pave the path for positive change in the financial service marketplace. What would a candid conversation look like – and how do we begin to change a culture that treats personal finance as a taboo topic? Following the public event we had with her earlier this week, I sat down with Olen to explore how to start that new conversation, and what it looks like today, on this In the Tank podcast. Have a listen here.

Also be sure to check out Olen's piece from earlier this week for the Guardian in which she looks at the retirement security crisis and the failings of the 401(k) in greater depth.

I first saw this video on the Facebook page of a friend I consider to be wildly apolitical. Now it's been seen 3.5 million times, and been written up by Ezra Klein, Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic...that's right, a video about wealth inequality has gone viral.

We've been talking about wealth inequality for years, so it's really exciting to see someone else reframe information that's been out there and use new methods to drive the attention of the public to a critical issue.

David Dayen has a nicely written piece up on Pacific Standard ("Signed, Sealed, Delivered") arguing that  a "two birds, one stone" solution exists within the current struggles of the United States Postal Service. He argues that we could improve the USPS' bottom line and strike at the heart of the challenges faced by unbanked and underbanked Americans by allowing the USPS to offer basic financial services.

“These are households and individuals that are living paycheck-to-paycheck. And without savings, you’re one misstep away from financial disaster,” Justin King, federal policy liaison for the New America Foundation, told The Huffington Post.

Original article

For years we've occasionally published a compendium of policy ideas from the asset building field. We call it The Assets Agenda, and that link will take you to the 2011 version, which includes more than 60 discrete policy ideas. One of those ideas calls for the creation of a "Financial Services Corps," a resource of non-biased experts to assist low- and moderate-income families in managing the complexities and stresses of modern financial life.

Maurice Lim Miller, founder and CEO of the Family Independence Initiative is one of 23 winners of the MacArthur Fellowship, or the "Genius Awards," for 2012.

Maurice is a friend and colleague of ours and this is richly deserved recognition. It took some of us here time to wrap our heads around the work that FII does, and it doesn't fit into one sentence well, but Maurice's characteristic humility and a bit of that genius slips through in the statement released by FII when he says,

It seems fairly certain that the country is due for a long, hard talk about our system of taxation. If that was in doubt before, the political events of this week seem to guarantee that such a conversation has to happen. Who pays what? Who benefits how? What do we want our tax system to accomplish?