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In New Jersey, 1.2 million households fall below the $61,200 annual income a family of four needs to meet a basic survival budget, the study of financial hardship has found.
More than half (53%) of all jobs in New Jersey pay less than $20 an hour, or $40,000 annually, according to the ALICE report (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed).
Nearly a fifth of all households in more than three-quarters (85%) of New Jersey’s 560 municipalities are struggling to survive, it says.
Seven out of those 10 households are white, and nearly a third of the wage earners are between 45-64.
“I think what strikes me most is how vulnerable these people are,” said Stephanie Hoopes Halpin, the author of the report and director of the New Jersey DataBank at Rutgers University told Nj.com. “You look at Superstorm Sandy, for example. You had tons of people who didn’t even take on any water during the storm but had their savings wiped out just by not working for two weeks.
“You have to think about the fact that there are individual emergencies like that every day that don’t get national headlines.” READ MORE….
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