Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Want a Steady Income? There’s an App for That - NYTimes.com

Want a Steady Income? There’s an App for That - NYTimes.com: "Income volatility has been called America’s “hidden inequality.” The economists Karen Dynan, Douglas Elmendorf and Daniel Sichel estimated in a Brookings Institution paper that American household incomes became 30 percent more volatile between the early 1970s and the late 2000s, and that in recent years, more than one in 10 American households took in half the annual income that they did the previous year. The Federal Reserve found in 2014 that nearly a third of American households experienced significant income swings. The volatility is hardest, of course, on the poor, who don’t just earn less than the better-­off but also earn their lower incomes more choppily, the money coming in irregular bursts, surging in some weeks, vanishing in others, always making a mockery of plans. Many poor people earn more each year than they spend, but on a given day, they don’t have the cash to handle the expenses due. Payday loans, pawn shops, credit cards, overdraft fees and such fill the vacuum and make things worse, levying a vast toll in interest, fees and stress."



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