As the health effects of the pandemic push millions of Americans out of the workforce or crimp their earning power, federal lawmakers are increasingly thinking about ways to expand financial services to people with disabilities.
A recent hearing by a House of Representatives subcommittee tasked with broadening financial access to disadvantaged and marginalized communities surfaced ways in which people with disabilities can face high hurdles to investing, homebuying and saving for retirement.
The May 24
“This subcommittee has been focused on examining diversity in all its forms and the intersection with financial and economic opportunity,” said subcommittee Chairwoman Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat who also chairs the Congressional Black Caucus committee, in her opening statement. “I am very pleased that today’s hearing will continue that work by exploring the barriers that persons with disability experience in seeking full economic inclusion.”
RIAs and asset managers explain how they’re navigating the challenges by examining the available data, shareholder votes and their own allocations.
At the “Diversity Includes Disability: Exploring Inequities in Financial Services for Persons with Disabilities, Including Those Newly Disabled Due to Long-Term COVID” hearing, lawmakers heard from five witnesses who spoke about their own experiences with barriers to full economic inclusion in the U.S. for people with disabilities. They touched on a number of topics within financial services, ranging from affordable and accessible housing to employment opportunities.
One of the witnesses was Cynthia DiBartolo, founder and CEO of
DiBartolo testified at the virtual hearing about how her continuing passion to work in the financial services industry led her to start Tigress Financial Partners. She said she soon faced difficulties with finding capital, a common problem for people with disabilities who seek to become entrepreneurs.
“I quickly discovered that access to capital, whether debt or equity, was nearly non-existent for people with disabilities, and the barriers to entrepreneurship were more acute and difficult to overcome,” DiBartolo said at the hearing. “Countless individuals like myself were labeled disabled entrepreneurs and fell outside the mainstream of what an entrepreneur is defined as by society.”
Thomas Foley, the executive director at the National Disability Institute, spoke about the lack of access to financial services for people with disabilities.
“Standard financial education leaves out critical disability issues that people need to know about,” Foley said. “Banks, financial institutions and the emerging fintech industry need to do more targeted actions to include people with disabilities in the communities they serve. There is a need to develop trust, particularly at the intersection of race, ethnicity and disability.”
Foley also touched on the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, which currently limits individuals receiving SSI to having no more than $2,000 in assets and couples to have no more than $3,000.
“I’ll never forget as a freshman in college, a friend of mine telling me about this $2,000 asset limit, and I thought she was kidding,” Foley said. “I had no idea why people didn’t want me to save. I had the same goals and expectations as everyone else: I wanted a job, a career, a family, retirement savings, I wanted to buy a house, I wanted a golden retriever. I wanted the American dream. But how was I going to do that without saving?”
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“Simply put, asset limits discourage savings, working and hope,” Foley said. He added that he supported the bill “as a first step to changing the disability economic narrative.”
Witness Vilissa Thompson, a licensed master social worker who is a fellow and co-director at The Century Foundation’s Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, noted the importance of considering access to financial services for people with disabilities from the perspective of how social categories such as race, class and gender are interconnected.
“It’s vital not only to understand the economic barriers faced by disabled Americans, but to apply an intersectional lens to ensure that policies and reforms meant to address those barriers are effective at doing so for all disabled people, not just the most privileged,” Thompson said at the hearing.
Following the testimony from the witnesses, various members of the Diversity and Inclusion Subcommittee reflected on the witnesses’ statements and asked questions about ways they could improve access to financial services for people with disabilities.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, noted the heightened challenges that people with disabilities face with buying homes, particularly in the midst of a housing affordability crisis.
In an industry where diversity and inclusion have historically been lacking, women advisors and investors are making significant inroads on their way to the top.
“We know that individuals with disabilities experience greater levels of poverty, as we heard today, and lower levels of wealth than those without disabilities, requiring an average of an additional $17,000 per year to obtain the same standard of living for many of us,” Tlaib said at the hearing. “Meanwhile, individuals with disabilities are underemployed and underpaid, as, again, many have testified. That means that the devastating impacts of our housing affordability crisis are falling even heavier on those living with disabilities.”
Alison Cannington, a senior manager of advocacy and organizing at The Kelsey, a nonprofit devoted to housing issues for the disabled, emphasized that individuals’ stories should be taken into account.
“Rather than just look at income or credit of the individual, can a mortgage company look at an individual’s story?” Cannington asked at the hearing. “If the mortgage company is solely focused on employment income, getting a loan will be hard for, as we’ve made clear today, a disproportionate amount of people with disabilities who have other sources of income, although severely low, that may be still sufficient to help contribute to a mortgage.”
Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a Texas Democrat who is vice chair of the subcommittee, posed a question about difficulties that people with long COVID have faced in applying for and receiving disability benefits. Thompson answered by highlighting how these challenges for people with long COVID — in which symptoms and effects continue for months after a COVID infection — reflect systemic issues for people with disabilities in getting access to necessary services.
“What we’re seeing when it comes to COVID long haulers is that they are experiencing the same issues that disabled folks have experienced this entire time, of just the lag of everything when it comes to accommodations, getting approval and so forth,” The Century Foundation’s Thompson told the hearing. “So what COVID long haulers are really bringing forth is the complicated issues of disabled people getting the support and services that they need and deserve.”
Ultimately, the hearing highlighted the multitude of areas in financial services where inequities for people with disabilities remain and need to be addressed.
“Removing barriers to economic security for disabled people will not only reduce poverty and hardship,” Thompson said, but also “unlock the significant, untapped economic power of this community.”
