2012 Assets and Opportunity scorecard

Posted by on February 13, 2012

Limited assets

The Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) has released its 2012 Assets and Opportunity scorecard, which finds that the number of asset-poor families — those lacking savings or other assets to cover basic expenses if income loss occurs — has increased by 21 percent since the last scorecard in 2009-2010. The asset-poverty rate is now nearly twice as high as the Census Bureau’s official income-poverty rate of 15.1 percent. The scorecard also includes a measure for “liquid-asset poverty,” which excludes assets that can’t easily be converted to cash, and provides a more realistic picture of the resources with which families can meet emergency needs. According to this measure, 43 percent of households nationwide are “liquid-asset poor,” with little or no savings to fall back on if emergency strikes. The scorecard assesses states across 100 outcome and policy measures in the areas of financial assets and income, businesses and jobs, housing and homeownership, health care, and education to project ability of residents to achieve financial security. The scorecard found sizable differences between states, with asset-poverty rates ranging from a high of more than 45 percent in Nevada to a low of 15.7 percent in Vermont; liquid-asset poverty rates ranged from 64.5 percent in Alabama to 22.8 percent in Hawaii.

Read more: http://assetsandopportunity.org/scorecard/