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Financial Well-Being

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Importance of Financial Well-Being

Importance of Financial Well-Being

Financial well-being is an important part of your overall personal well-being and can be achieved regardless of income. Being financially well means you can meet your current and ongoing financial obligations, feel secure in your financial future, and are able to make choices that allow you to enjoy life – in other words, financial freedom. However, data shows that personal finances continue to be a leading cause of stress for many Americans. Financial stress occurs when there is uncertainty around finances, a sense of worry about the future, and a lack of security. Like most types of stress, this can impact your:
  • Ability to sleep
  • Physical health
  • Emotional health
  • Relationships
  • Performance at work
  • Family life

If you have or are currently experiencing financial stress, you’re not alone – there are many resources and professionals available to help and it’s going to be okay. Getting to a place where you are financially well takes time but it’s never too late to start thinking about your finances.
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Google's Find Food Support Search Tool

1 in 8 Americans will experience food insecurity during their lifetimes. If you’re facing food insecurity, you are not alone, and Google has created this site to help you find community-based support.

Find local support
 
We’ve created a locator tool that you can use to find your nearest food bank, food pantry or school lunch program pickup site. To use the tool, simply enter an address into the search bar and information for the sites closest to you will be displayed. If possible, call a location before you visit to verify days/hours they are open and any requirements. If you can’t find a nearby location, you may be able to find support options in the additional food support resources list below.

Google's Find Food Support Search Tool

1 in 8 Americans will experience food insecurity during their lifetimes. If you’re facing food insecurity, you are not alone, and Google has created this site to help you find community-based support.

Find local support
 
We’ve created a locator tool that you can use to find your nearest food bank, food pantry or school lunch program pickup site. To use the tool, simply enter an address into the search bar and information for the sites closest to you will be displayed. If possible, call a location before you visit to verify days/hours they are open and any requirements. If you can’t find a nearby location, you may be able to find support options in the additional food support resources list below.

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)

What is SNAP?

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest federal nutrition assistance program. SNAP provides benefits to eligible low-income individuals and families via an Electronic Benefits Transfer card. This card can be used like a debit card to purchase eligible food in authorized retail food stores.

Who is eligible for this program?

To be eligible for this benefit program, applicants must live in the state in which they apply and meet certain bank balance limits. A household with an elderly (over 60) or disabled household member may have a higher bank balance limit.

Visit SNAP’s eligibility page to find out more about eligibility requirements and how benefits are computed.

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MHealthy Financial Well-being

Financial well-being is an important part of your overall personal well-being and can be achieved regardless of income.

Being financially well means you can meet your current and ongoing financial obligations, feel secure in your financial future, and are able to make choices that allow you to enjoy life – in other words, financial freedom.

However, data shows that personal finances continue to be a leading cause of stress for many Americans. Financial stress occurs when there is uncertainty around finances, a sense of worry about the future, and a lack of security. Like most types of stress, this can impact your:

  • Ability to sleep
  • Physical health
  • Emotional health
  • Relationships
  • Performance at work
  • Family life

If you have or are currently experiencing financial stress, you’re not alone – there are many resources and professionals available to help and it’s going to be okay. Getting to a place where you are financially well takes time but it’s never too late to start thinking about your finances.

In One Year, Pandemic Forced Millions of Workers to Retire Early

From flight attendants to grocery store managers, older adults made the tough decision to end careers

Retirement is supposed to be a happy time, but Lucie Desmond expects there will be tears when her paperwork comes through.

Desmond, 62, has been a flight attendant for 36 years, most recently on the American Airlines route between Phoenix and London. But after repeated leaves forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, she has put in to retire much earlier than she had planned.

“I could have done that till I was 70,” Desmond says. “Then COVID hit.”

U-M, Farm Bureau working together to reduce hunger in Michigan

New project seeks to improve food assistance programs by empowering parents and elevating families' expertise

Written by Andrea LaFerle, Director of Public Relations and Marketing, University of Michigan School of Public Health

For long-time Ishpeming resident Lizzy Nevala, her town is a tale of two cities: The one where those lucky enough to have well-paid jobs in mining are doing great, and the one where residents need to decide whether to pay rent or buy food.

“You have people that are doing real well and are living in town and paying these exorbitant prices. And there are people who are living on minimum wage or if the mines shut down or get laid off and then they’re in trouble. It’s either feast or famine here,” said Nevala, director of operations at the Ishpeming Salvation Army in Marquette County, who for 20 years has been working with the organization providing support for residents in need.

Now, University of Michigan researchers are partnering with the Michigan Farm Bureau to understand the unique challenges rural families face when accessing nutritious meals through food assistance. Often, these programs are designed without the user perspective in mind and are implemented in ways that many families do not find accessible or respectful.

“While a lot of efforts related to solving hunger focus on urban settings, rural families face food insecurity as often as urban families do,” said Kate Bauer, associate professor of nutritional sciences at U-M’s School of Public Health who leads the U-M-based Feeding MI Families program.

“If we look at Michigan’s Top 10 counties for food insecurity, eight of them are in our rural counties, including all of northern Michigan. By elevating parent voices, we hope to build an equitable and responsive nutrition safety net for Michigan’s rural families.”

Michigan Farm Bureau recently announced its focus on the eradication of childhood hunger in the state. The organization has worked with U-M in the past to study health care access issues in rural settings.

“We’re seeking a sustainable approach to eradicating childhood hunger. Feeding MI Families will help us better understand the systemic causes of food insecurity and low food access for rural Michigan families, and will deliver recommendations for how our organization can strategically invest in rural Michigan,” said Tom Nugent, director of Human Resources at Michigan Farm Bureau and head of the organization’s For-Purpose Task Force. 

“When we looked at food insecurity in Michigan, we saw the hardest hit counties were in the northern part of the state including the Upper Peninsula. We knew we had to focus our efforts there to learn more about this problem and be better able to tackle it long-term.”

Feeding MI Families: focusing on both urban and rural families

At the beginning of the pandemic Bauer, an epidemiologist, worried about the many families who were experiencing hunger as schools and day cares closed, people lost their jobs, and the economy came to a halt. She started working with local and national experts to identify strategies to ensure that all families were able to consistently access nutritious food.

In these conversations, Bauer noticed discrepancies between what families wanted and what food assistance programs provided. At the same time that many families were saying they didn’t have enough food to eat, some programs weren’t being used to their fullest. The underlying problem, she would find out, was simple: The people making decisions about food assistance were not consistently talking with the beneficiaries of these programs.

To address this gap, Bauer and her team developed Feeding MI Families. It began with a focus on Michigan’s urban families supported by a $400,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. With this funding, the project has engaged parents from Detroit, Grand Rapids and Battle Creek who have experienced food hardships, building their capacity for advocacy and community-based research.

Over the remainder of 2022, these parent leaders will conduct surveys and interviews with 750 families in their communities. Of particular importance when working with these urban families, many of whom are Black, Latino, Middle Eastern and/or new immigrants, is how racism and discrimination has affected their ability to access food and food assistance—and what can be done to eliminate these serious barriers to health. The ultimate goal of this work is to develop parent-driven recommendations for food assistance that feeds families with dignity and respect. 

With the Farm Bureau, Bauer’s team will replicate its urban work across Michigan’s 57 rural counties—including every county in the Upper Peninsula and northern lower Michigan. This month, parent leaders from these counties will survey 600 rural Michigan families to document their expertise and ideas for change. The Farm Bureau will use their recommendations as a road map for future investments to eradicate rural child hunger.

“Many Michigan families are still struggling, perhaps even more so than during the early days of COVID-19. The pandemic is ongoing, the federal aid mostly gone, and food prices and gas prices continue to climb,” Bauer said. “Many parents are talking about the current ‘food crisis,’ which they do not expect will end anytime soon. In partnership with the Kellogg Foundation and Michigan Farm Bureau, Feeding MI Families is helping us understand how to move forward and best meet these families’ needs.” 

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Target survey areas for the Feeding MI Families program are denoted in green. Blue pins signify federally-recognized Native American tribes. Red pins denote the Feeding MI Families work in Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Battle Creek with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation grant.