CFED Scorecard Assesses State Asset-Building Resources

CFED recently published its “2009-2010 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard.” The Scorecard measures the financial security of families in the United States by looking at the whole picture of asset ownership and protecting against financial setbacks.

The Scorecard ranks the 50 states and the District of Columbia on 58 performance measures in the areas of Financial Assets & Income, Businesses & Jobs, Housing & Homeownership, Health Care and Education. In addition, the Scorecard also assesses states on the strength of its policies to help individuals and families build financial security.

The national leaders on the 2009-2010 Scorecard—those states that earned an overall “A” in performance measures—were Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Vermont, Washington and Wyoming. Detailed data for all states is available online.

By comparing the states, the Scorecard not only highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each state, but it also exposes the wide differences between states on a number of items directly tied to financial prosperity. Some of the findings include:

• More than 22% of jobs in this country are in occupations that pay a median wage that is insufficient to raise the earner’s household above the poverty line. In West Virginia, 38.5% of jobs are low-wage. Washington D.C. has the lowest percentage of low-wage jobs at 7.2%.
• The highest homeownership rate is in Minnesota (nearly 75%) while New York has the lowest homeownership rate at 53%.
• The average home in Kansas costs about twice the median income of a Kansan; in Massachusetts, the average home runs six times the state’s median income.
• 89.6% of employers in Hawaii offer health care benefits to their employees compared with only 40.1% of those in Montana.
• More than 91% of the people in Massachusetts have health insurance while only 72.5% of Texans are insured.

The Scorecard includes a detailed look of state-by-state information on 12 policy priorities that can help residents build and protect assets. Information on each of these policies—which range from first-time homebuyer assistance and payday lending protections to college savings incentives and access to health insurance—is available at scorecard.cfed.org.

This article originally ran in the IDAresources.org Update Newsletter on 11/12/09 and is available for archival purposes.
For updated information on asset building and the AFI program, please see www.IDAresources.org.