The Story of the Center for the New Middle Class
There cannot be a more misunderstood group of people in the financial services space.
Back in 2017, I was set to testify in front of an Arizona legislature hearing committee on non-prime consumers. As I sat and listened to other people testify to the plight of the non-prime consumer, I quickly became aware that very few people really understood. All of the other participants–both those testifying and elected officials–talked about this group of people as if they were people in poverty, vulnerable immigrants, and people who are unbanked (without access to mainstream banking).
But I knew that the non-prime consumer was a much larger group than that and far more significant to American society than just those sitting on the edges of our economy.
The non-prime consumer makes up nearly half of the US population. It's an enormous group of people who have vastly different experiences needs and challenges. They are not a monolithic group. In many ways they are the very Foundation of many local economies. They are the nurses, bank tellers, insurance agents, small business owners, government workers, school teachers, and any other profession you can think of. Non-prime isn't really about the profession, the individuals, or even the income level: being non-prime means no longer having access to mainstream, short-term credit options.
Realizing how few people understood the breadth or the importance of the non-prime issue in the United states, I became convinced we needed to create more awareness.
At Elevate credit, we established the Center for the New Middle Class. The charter was clear: research the issues, challenges, and behaviors of America's non-prime population. We called them the “new middle class,” because in modern American life, access to financial stability had shifted to whether people add access to credit products that can help them avoid financial catastrophe.
We got to work immediately.
We have released scores of reports, reams of data, interviewed hundreds of consumers, and collected tens of thousands of survey responses about the financial situation of American households.
During the pandemic, the Center for the New Middle Class was one of the only places in the country that was actually tracking household level data about what was going on. We released data almost monthly through 2020, and quarterly since then. One of our most powerful research instruments was the longitudinal study called the Survey of American Household Finances which measures over fifty measures of a household’s financial situation and has been running monthly since 2018.
The Center for the New Middle Class has given me a chance to see the vista of American finances in an unique way. Many people have access to business data or macroeconomic data, but few have access to understand what's going on within the households of America's families.
