Financial emergencies happen. Whether it’s a car repair, a medical expense, or lost hours, everyone has times when they need an emergency savings cushion to fall back on.

Many Americans don’t have a cushion, living paycheck to paycheck, juggling their finances every month to stay on top of their bills. Numerous studies have shown that almost half of us don't have $500 saved for emergencies.

There are lots of financial services out there, but very few of them are designed to help people who are just getting by. The services that are available to these folks are often exploitative and carry heavy costs (think payday loans).

As a society, we often wait to address problems until it’s too late, focusing on treatment of problems rather than prevention. There are lots of examples of this, like healthcare, the environment, and homelessness, to name a few.

What if we tried to proactively prevent financial problems before they occur, and prevent unexpected shocks from becoming a financial crisis? That’s the big idea.

To do that, we decided to start a nonprofit, The Flagstone Initiative, to help improve financial stability and mobility for people who are working hard just to pay the bills, to help give them some kind of financial stability, without the conflict of pursuing profit off of them.

We have partnered with landlords who are interested in helping their residents, landlords who want to do right, not just make a buck. And by helping absorb shocks and keeping residents from a financial crisis, we can create a win-win for residents and for landlords.

We are a curious bunch, and we have a lot of questions:

• How can we help people save for “everyday emergencies”?
• What are the best opportunities to "enter the tunnel" and provide assistance when people are faced with scarcity of money and/or time?
• How can we help landlords improve the financial stability and mobility of residents?

We continually seek to better understand the challenges faced by residents, and we are identifying and testing possible solutions to address some of these challenges. 

To aid our search for greater understanding, we regularly conduct surveys and interviews aimed at understanding people’s quantitative financial situations and how they feel about them qualitatively.

We combine these elements with data obtained through our real estate partners to develop a more detailed picture of what’s going on.

Beyond improving our understanding, we use our insights to inform strategies for helping people. We are running a series of pilot tests of potential solutions, measuring the results both qualitatively and quantitatively.

We will periodically publish our insights and findings on this blog. We hope that you will find them interesting, useful, maybe even eye-opening. And sometimes we’ll share things that seem obvious but bear repeating, to emphasize their importance.

If you have any comments to share with us, or just want to say hello, you can drop us a note at hello@flagstoneinitiative.org 

Thanks for reading,

Grace, Keith, Shashank, and Shin