My partner in underbanked crime (no pun intended), CFSI’s Innovation Meister Rachel Schneider, has been thinking about real people.  Oddly enough, we all do that too little.  Besides, this is a very cool project.  Behold:

It can be hard to understand why 30-40 million households in the U.S. use non-bank services and informal mechanisms to manage their finances. Most of us who use traditional checking accounts think that they provide an obvious and straightforward way to receive directly deposited salaries, pay bills and keep cash safe. In some years, they generate interest income or offer rewards of some other kind. And, if you can maintain a minimum balance, they are low cost, even if no longer ubiquitously free.

But I recently had the opportunity to talk to a few people who don’t share that perspective.

One woman – let’s call her Joanna – shared the fact that she only puts a few dollars of gas in her car at any one point. She is too worried that she might need the $15 that she’d spent on gas later in the week for some unexpected expense. She can’t afford to leave that value just sitting in her car in “illiquid” fashion (blame me for the pun, not Joanna). As a result, she is forced to overinvest in trips to the gas station and to manage anxiety about running out of gas on her way to work, since her gas gauge is always on empty.

Another woman – let’s call her Melanie – described her weekly budgeting system. She and her husband both have full-time employment, but her husband works in a restaurant that gives him a variable number of hours of work each week. Sometimes it is 25 hours; sometimes 40. With careful planning, they can make their income and expenses match over the course of the year; but because of the weekly variation, they sit down at the kitchen table every Monday night to figure out which bills they can afford to pay that week. This investment in real-time financial planning is necessary, but also time consuming, complicated and stressful.

Figuring out how to offer financial services that meet Joanna and Melanie’s need for real-time access to cash and budgeting information is hard work. So is designing public policy to encourage the development of high quality financial services that increase financial access.

That is why the Financial Access Initiative of NYU, Bankable Frontiers Associates, and my organization, the Center for Financial Services Innovation, have partnered to launch a research project called U.S. Financial Diaries. Over the course of 16 months, we’ll interview 300 families across the U.S. twice each month, reconstructing detailed cash flow statements for each family. We hope that this intense investment in understanding these families’ financial lives will yield the genuine insights and understanding that are necessary to create the new, innovative solutions to real problems for Joanna, Melanie – and the 30-40 million households like theirs.