Investing and growing
How can more low- and moderate-income households be supported to build wealth and achieve their long-term financial goals?
For most households, financial security is not a single state but a series of steps that build on one another over time. People first need to be able to budget and manage cashflow day to day. Then they need to have a buffer of cash savings to weather immediate financial shocks. Usually only with these stable foundations in place does it become possible to work towards future goals and longer-term needs.
Nest Insight’s work considers household finances holistically, looking at the interactions between short- and long-term financial security. While there is much more to be done to shore up the financial foundations of households facing volatility or lacking resilience today, there is also a growing opportunity to support those who have built up an emergency savings buffer to continue strengthening their financial security through investing.
Supported by The BlackRock Foundation, Nest Insight launched an exploratory research programme to better understand the role that investing could play in improving returns, preserving purchasing power, and helping savers in low- and moderate-income households build assets and achieve wider financial goals.
This work comes at a time when government is exploring ways to encourage savers to invest, with data showing that there are about 7 million adults in the UK with £10,000 or more in cash savings who may be missing out on the benefits of investing.[1]
The work has three overarching objectives:
- To understand how many people in low- and moderate-income households are already investing, and how many more may have the potential to do so.
- To explore the barriers to investing faced by people in low- and moderate-income households.
- To identify and test interventions that could address these barriers and support more households to make their money work harder through investing.
To do this, we’ll draw on extensive engagement with industry, policy and consumer stakeholders, alongside insights from qualitative research conducted in 2023 with 22 people living in low- and moderate-income households which explored perceptions of wealth building.
As the project evolves, we expect to work with people living in low- and moderate-income households, and a range of industry partners, to test solutions in the real world.
About our programme partner
Guided by BlackRock’s purpose to help more and more people experience financial well-being, The BlackRock Foundation funds and partners with organizations that strengthen financial security by helping people earn, save and invest – earlier, more often and for their futures. BlackRock’s Emergency Savings Initiative is made possible through philanthropic support from The BlackRock Foundation. The initiative brings together partner companies and nonprofit financial health experts to make saving easier and more accessible for people living on low and moderate incomes. For more information, visit: blackrock.com/corporate/about-us/social-impact
