July 18, 2019

Why Americans Can’t Come Up with $400

In Beavercreek, Ohio, the cleanup from a recent tornado has begun. But debris is still piled high on many residents’ lawns.

“What we’re seeing following this tornado is people not having enough cash to pay upfront for house debris removal even though insurance companies will reimburse them,” former mayor Brian Jarvis said on Twitter. The debris cleanup comes on top of other costs like temporary housing in this city east of Dayton.

Much was made recently of a survey in which four of every 10 American families said they could not cover an unexpected $400 expense. But no one explained why. New research has some answers.

Even when people have $400 in their checking or savings accounts, they don’t always feel like they have the money to spend. That’s because they may have already committed the funds to paying off their credit cards, according to an analysis by Anqi Chen at the Center for Retirement Research.

This problem isn’t confined to low- and middle-income people either: 17 percent of households earning more than $100,000 would have to scramble to find the extra $400.

The study uncovered what cash-strapped families have in common. …Learn More

July 31, 2018

Financial Data Brokers Have You Pegged

In the world of Big Data, do you fall into the industry’s Extra Needy category, or are you viewed as American Royalty? Perhaps Ethnic Second City Struggler or Small Town Shallow Pockets is a more apt description of you? Or how about Eager Senior Buyer or Tough Start: Young Single Parent?

While the media are focused on Facebook’s privacy breaches, a growing multibillion-dollar industry of data brokers is mining personal information online in order to sell our data dossiers to financial and other companies – sometimes to the detriment of our personal finances.

Big Data collection also can be innocuous, when it is used for marketing. In this form, it’s just the high-tech version of snail mail solicitations for credit cards, retail catalogs, or the services of a neighborhood real estate agent.

But Pam Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum, said evidence is growing that some consumers are being exploited by the unfettered sharing of personal data. Further, individuals generally do not have a legal right to see their dossiers, which are proprietary – “and we don’t know what they’re being used for,” she said.

In one egregious case, brokers sold data on an elderly veteran, who was then victimized by a scam that stripped him of his life savings. Some brokers compile lists of people living in trailer parks to sell to companies making “predatory offers to those in financial trouble,” Dixon testified before the Senate. …Learn More