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San Francisco is literally paying people to save money
By Leslie Albrecht, MarketWatch
Originally published in MarketWatch
June 30, 2017 | 3:21pm

With nearly half of Americans lacking enough cash savings to cover even a $400 emergency, the City of San Francisco is trying a new way to get people to save money — paying them to do it.

The city is recruiting 1,000 people to participate in a campaign called Saverlife that gives participants $60 if they save $20 a month for six months. Participants link their bank accounts electronically to Saverlife so their savings activity can be monitored. They earn $10 a month in rewards and claim their $60 at the end of six months of continuous saving.

The program is open to anyone 18 or older in the Bay Area, but it’s aimed at getting the poorest households to create a modest financial cushion, said Leigh Phillips, CEO of EARN, a nonprofit “micro savings” provider that partnered with the city to create Saverlife.

San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the country — it takes $110,357 a year to live “comfortably” there, a recent analysis found. Mirroring a nationwide trend, about 47 percent of San Francisco families are financially insecure, meaning they don’t have at least $2,000 in savings, a recent study by the Washington D.C.-based think tank The Urban Institute found.

That’s bad news for them, of course, but it also “destabilizes” the entire community, Phillips said. “Not having any kind of basic financial stability is what causes a job loss to become an eviction, a flat tire to become a job loss,” Phillips said.

One family’s precarious finances can lead to evictions and unpaid property taxes and utility bills, which in turn creates costly problems for the city such as homelessness, lost property tax revenue and lost revenue from utility bills to pay for infrastructure. All told, the financial instability of San Francisco families ends up costing the city government (and in turn, taxpayers) $24 million to $54 million a year, according to the Urban Institute.

In addition to the cash incentives — which are funded by EARN’s private donors and corporate sponsors, not taxpayer money — Saverlife participants also receive weekly financial coaching tips.

Saverlife is meant to make saving money as easy as possible — it’s not necessarily about saving for some far-off dream or creating a pool of money you’re never allowed to touch, said Amanda Fried, policy and communications manager for San Francisco’s Office of the Treasurer.

“It’s about smoothing life’s emergencies,” Fried said. “What we find is that big goals sometimes throw people off from squirreling away small amounts. If you’re having trouble making rent, it feels ridiculous to save for retirement. Really what we see is that people need these small amounts of reserves to get through regular dips in their incomes.”

And saving even small amounts can make a big difference. Families who can scrape together as little as $250 to $749 “are less likely to be evicted, miss a housing or utility payment, or receive public benefits after a job loss, health issue, or large income drop,” a 2016 Urban Institute study found.

Saverlife participant Philip Fong — a laid-off software engineer who works three jobs to help support his family of five — has saved $60 so far through the program. But the amount he saved wasn’t the most important result, he said, it was the fact that he’s gotten into the habit of putting away money every month.

“It’s not just the program, it’s the afterward,” Fong said. “The habit is developed for six months, so you’ll continue to do it, and there’s a lasting effect.”

http://nypost.com/2017/06/30/san-francisco-is-literally-paying-people-to-save-money/