ASPIRE Act/KIDS Accounts

In March of 2010, Ray Boshara traveled to Israel and delivered this presentation to the Israeli Minister of Social Welfare.

Click here to view the PowerPoint presentation.

This paper argues that public policies to promote savings and asset building should be conceptualized and advanced with a “life course” perspective. The paper demonstrates a growing consensus towards this approach and presents relevant data as well as “asset effects” research in support of this perspective. The paper also presents a series of principles and two policy frameworks—behavioral economics and institutional models—to guide policy design over the life course.

A bright and unseasonably warm morning at Sanchez Elementary in the Mission District brought uncommon excitement to the urban school. At eleven o'clock this morning, Mayor Gavin Newsom, Treasurer Jose Cisneros, two of the city's supervisors, and a crush of news cameras crowded into a small library for the formal launch of the Kindergarten to College initiative. 

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Mayor Gavin Newsom and Treasurer José Cisneros today announced the launch of Kindergarten to College (K2C), the nation's first universal children's savings account program. K2C will open and seed college savings accounts for every kindergartner entering public school in San Francisco. The goal is to put all school children on the path to college.

Every now and then, it's a good idea to stop and take stock of where you are, where you've been and try and figure out as best you can where you're headed. For the Asset Building Program, our opportunity to do that is The Assets Agenda.

As mentioned earlier, this morning we held an event releasing a new report, "Lessons from SEED" which examined the learnings from the nation's largest, longest running demonstration of the potential of children's savings accounts.

Video of the event, featuring Michael Sherraden, Jose Cisneros, Ray Boshara, Bob Friedman and Lisa Mensah will be available in the near future on the event page.

However, the burning question, what are the lessons of SEED? I recommend reading the whole report, but there are some significant highlights:

In an April 2009 speech at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama said:

We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock. We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity: a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest.

That's the question that the Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment Initiative, or SEED Initiative set out to answer. SEED is a 10-year research project which tested matched savings accounts and financial education for children and youth. The project opened Child Development Accounts (CDAs) for 1,171 children at 12 nonprofit, community-based organizations across the country, at-birth, in order to provide more stable and productive lives for those children and their families.

Fidelity Investments is out with a new report on trends in retirement savings, and it's worth paying attention for a couple of reasons:

1. Fidelity is HUGE, the biggest supplier of retirement plans to American workers, they hold something like 20% of the market for 401(k)'s, and;
2. Their size makes their data sets a good proxy for the market as a whole.

So, what's going on out there? Well here are the highlights from Andrew Schreiner, Senior Director of Government Relations and Public Policy for Fidelity: