More than half of people who identify
as LGBT are worried about their financial future.
According to Prudential's latest
Financial
Wellness Census, 52% of LGBT are worried about their financial
future.
The study, released earlier this month,
looked at how people are holding up during the coronavirus pandemic.
To do that, pollsters compared data from December 2019 and May 2020.
Twenty-five percent of LGBT saw
household income fall by half or more due to the pandemic, pollsters
reported. More than half (56%) of the 18% unemployed cited COVID-19
as the reason for not being employed.
Overall, 51% of Americans said that
their financial health was negatively impacted by the pandemic, with
people of color, women, younger generations, small businesses and gig
workers disproportionately impacted.
Jamie Kalamarides, president of
Prudential Group Insurance, said that lack of financial resiliency is
a threat to democracy.
“The American worker and their
families are under a tremendous amount of stress,” he said. “COVID
was the catalyst that lowered the river and showed the rocks that
were the underlying causes – lack of accessibility, lack of
emergency savings and lack of a path towards sustainable financial
wealth. This lack of financial resiliency is a threat to our American
democracy because without a path toward the middle class that’s
available for everybody, our society is at risk. The solution is not
to have individuals and their families try to bootstrap themselves
up. It’s about fixing the systemic challenges and problems and
barriers that cause inequity within America. With that, we can all
have financial resiliency.”
Out of six demographics, LGBT had the
highest percentage of respondents (25%) who said their household
income had fallen by half or more. Gen Xers were at 22%, Millennials
21%, women 19%, men 14%, and Boomers 8%.