衡量紧急节省的芳香健康影响的3种方法
This research was produced by the Financial Health Network in collaboration with BlackRock’s Emergency Savings Initiative (ESI). ESI is a cross-sector program with a mission to help people living on low to moderate incomes gain access to and increase usage of proven savings strategies and tools – ultimately helping them establish an important safety net.
测量紧急储蓄解决方案的投资回报率
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, companies, financial institutions, and policymakers have recognized the importance of helping customers and employees build emergency savings. These solutions help people build a buffer of money during good times, so that they can dip into savings during hard times, rather than take on costly debt or experience hardship.
As a growing number of organizations invest in emergency savings solutions, many are searching for the right ways to evaluate their return on this investment. With traditional savings instruments, institutions have measured success based on continuing contributions and growing balances. With emergency savings solutions, however, dynamic balances, ease of access, and trends of accumulation and spending are part of the design.
Companies seeking to measure the impact of new emergency savings solutions, therefore, will need to assess new and different metrics. This brief offers three lenses for viewing the positive impact of savings holistically for individuals.
1. Financial Benefit Lens: Access to Savings Reduces the Financial Costs of Weathering an Emergency
Emergency savings enable people to avoid costly credit and hardship, but savings balances alone don’t indicate success. In fact, during an emergency, individuals who can access savings to avoid taking on expensive credit or experiencing hardship typically have declining balances, making this an indicator of successful emergency saving.
Having analyzed three years of longitudinal Financial Health Pulse™ data, we find that when people start saving for emergencies, they see benefits within 12 months – both in how they think about planning for emergencies and how they manage their finances.
Notes: Results are percentage-point changes in the likelihood of different ways people would pay for a $400 emergency expense, as observed in their responses to this survey question, adapted from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking: “Suppose now that you have an emergency expense that costs $400. Based on your current financial situation, how would you pay for this expense? If you would use more than one method, please select all that apply.” We used a fixed effects model including household income as a time-variant control factor.
对突发事件也让人开始节约slightly less likely to access costly credit and financial services – with a small but significant reduction in the likelihood of accessing payday loans, refund anticipation loans, or pawn shop loans. This effect is doubled for women, suggesting that helping women build emergency savings may be an important strategy for reducing financial health disparities by gender.
财务福利镜头：组织的下一步
Financial institutions and organizations could use credit reporting or fee occurrence to observe correlations between emergency savings and the short- and long-term financial health benefits for customers. If customers using emergency savings solutions are seeing an improvement in credit scores or a decline in fee occurrence, this may signal that the added buffer is allowing them to avoid additional costs or derogatory marks.
对于雇主而言，看工资扣除的变化可能会有所帮助。如果使用紧急储蓄解决方案的员工会看到减少的工资装饰，这可能表明他们避免使用高成本信用产品，例如发薪日贷款。在此详细信息级别或没有大量客户钱包中没有大量数据的组织可能能够通过调查捕获影响。
2. Overall Well-Being Lens: Emergency Savings Can Reduce the Likelihood of Financial Hardship After an Unexpected Expense
A second lens through which to view the success of emergency savings programs is outcomes following an emergency. Savings improve financial health and resilience through a crisis, which in turn allows people to avoid financial hardship. We find that starting to save for an emergency in the prior 12 months is correlated with a 6 percentage-point lower likelihood (23% vs. 29%) of experiencing hardship (e.g., food or housing insecurity) in the prior 12 months.
We also analyzed the likelihood of experiencing hardship while facing a major medical expense. Among people who faced major medical expenses, those without emergency savings were 12 percentage points more likely (36% vs. 24%) to face hardship in the prior 12 months than those who had started to save for emergencies. The biggest difference was in the likelihood of experiencing food insecurity – worrying about how to get more food before one’s next paycheck. This likelihood is 17 percentage points lower (25% vs. 42%) when people have started saving for emergencies in the prior 12 months than when they have not saved for emergencies while facing a major medical expense.
注意：通过四个不同的调查问题观察到了不同类型的艰辛：1）“在过去的12个月中，我担心我们的食物是否会在我赚钱购买更多之前用完。”2）“在过去的12个月中，我们很难支付租金或抵押贷款。”3）“在过去的12个月中，我或家中的某个人没有得到我们需要的医疗保健，因为我们负担不起。”4）“在过去的12个月中，我或家庭中的某人停止服药或由于费用而服用的时间少于指导。”如果对这些问题的回答“经常”，“有时”或“很少”，则认为该人经历了艰辛。通过这个问题观察到了主要的医疗费用：“在过去的12个月中，您或家庭中的任何人是否经历过以下生活事件？[选项：主要医疗费用]。”我们使用包括家庭收入在内的固定效应模型作为时间变化的控制因素，并通过经历主要的医疗费用来为紧急情况提供互动。
In this analysis, we focus on identifying correlatory links, but dedicated work could improve our understanding of the causal relationships between savings and hardship. For example, using surveys to analyze either experiences or hypothetical situations could provide evidence of the trade-offs people make with and without emergency savings and their resulting effects on hardship. Alternatively, using transactional data to examine spending changes during an emergency – such as a decline in spending on food or changing regularity of rent or mortgage payments – could serve as proxies for experiences of hardship.
3. Equity Lens: Different Populations Feel the Impact of Savings in Different Ways
A final and vitally important lens through which to measure the success of savings solutions is equity. Aggregated metrics are valuable, but splitting them by important socioeconomic factors, such as income, race and ethnicity, and gender, allows us to explore where the benefits of emergency savings are strongest.Our early analysis finds that emergency savings can improve financial health in different ways for different groups.
Looking at the same Financial Health Pulse™ dataset over three years, for example, we saw that while emergency savings improve financial health generally, results differ based on gender. For women, starting to save for emergencies correlates with a 9 percentage-point increase in the likelihood of paying all bills on time, compared with a 5 percentage-point increase for men.
Further, new savings behaviors correlated with different improvements in financial health across races and ethnicities. Among Latinx participants and Asian American participants who start saving, there is a significant increase in the proportion of people with prime credit scores. Among Black participants, the most notable effect of starting to save is reduced experience of financial hardship. These differences are partially rooted in decades of systemic discrimination, which have reduced the ability of people of color, particularly Black Americans, to build and maintain financial health over generations. To address the wider question of金融服务和金融健康方面的公平性，重要的是要了解紧急储蓄在何处可以最大的差异。
股权镜头：组织的下一步
了解为什么存在这些差异并建立支持更公平成果的紧急储蓄干预措施对于希望改善客户财务状况或开始提供紧急储蓄解决方案的公司而言。对于希望讲述细微损害影响故事的组织而言，将社会经济因素分解调查和交易数据是一个重要的责任。尽管访问数据的组织限制（例如客户的种族和种族）可能会构成挑战，但使用可用的数据来照亮不平等是一个很强的起点。
评估储蓄余额不仅仅是增加
量化和衡量紧急储蓄解决方案的影响不仅仅是简单地评估余额是否在增加。三个镜头 - 经济利益，整体福祉和股权 - 为组织提供了一个起点，以塑造他们如何期望紧急储蓄产品来支持未来的储蓄者。使用这些镜头，组织可以开始计划其数据收集，取得成功的指标，并进行持续的测试，以提供对其有效性的更丰富的了解。
BlackRock’s Emergency Savings Initiative, in partnership with the Aspen Institute, has a working group of research, advocacy, and industry experts who are creating a list of metrics that organizations can use to begin the exploratory process. These metrics, which offer alternatives depending on time horizon, data availability, and priority effects, can further improve our understanding of the impact of emergency savings for customers, employees, and communities. The working group will share the metrics in future publications.
Our Supporter
2019年，贝莱德（Blackrock）宣布了一项多年，5000万美元的慈善承诺，以帮助数百万居住在低至中等收入的人获得访问权限，并增加对验证的储蓄策略和工具的使用，最终帮助他们建立重要的安全网。紧急储蓄计划（ESI）是贝莱克基金会（BlackRock Foundation）使命的关键部分，该使命是帮助公司超越核心业务的人们建立财务安全。储蓄问题的规模和规模需要既定的行业专家的知识和专业知识，这些专家是公认的领导者，这些领导者在个人和公司一级的储蓄研究和干预措施中。在其社会影响团队的领导下，BlackRock与创新行业专家合作普通美分实验室,Commonwealth, and the万博电竞怎么玩to give ESI a comprehensive and multilayered approach to addressing the savings crisis.
