As we passed the two-year COVID-19 milestone, you may have heard talk of a “silver lining” that Americans’ financial situations have improved during the pandemic. Don’t buy it. A closer look reveals that many working people are in worse financial shape today than before the pandemic. However, another silver lining is within our grasp if we choose to seize it. Relative to “before times,” as a nation, we are much more attuned to systemic inequities, especially by race and gender, and much more likely to pledge ourselves to action. We can and should extend this commitment to the challenge of creating a financial system that delivers economic security and opportunity for everyone.

To be clear, no one set out to make America’s working families worse off through the pandemic. The challenge we face is a system that, by default, too often produces outcomes that are simply not in our collective best interest. A look at savings data illustrates the point. Across the board, we responded to the economy shutting down with caution, sending the personal savings rate to an all-time high (from 8.2% in February 2020 to 33% in April). But for working families, who started with very low savings, virtually no stocks or securities, and few protections from job loss and income disruption, new savings were and continue to be drawn down quickly. The inevitable result, according to a 2021 study: the wealthiest 20% of Americans built up 80% of new pandemic savings—the top 1%, 42% of new savings. Almost certainly, these gaps are wider still by race and gender.  

Is this a development any of us would have prescribed for the economic, social, and political challenges we face in 2022?  

We often speak of “personal finance,” a phrase that captures an unspoken sense that our financial situation is strictly a personal affair, impacting only ourselves and the result of solely our personal choices. It’s time to move beyond this simplistic paradigm. The pandemic has reminded us that we have a shared interest in household financial security, given its profound implications for our workforce and the economy—to say nothing of our families, communities, and civic discourse. While our financial choices matter, it’s equally true that none of us can achieve financial security on the basis of our actions alone.  

Throughout the pandemic, we often heard “we’re in this together,” and we’ve seen how important—literally, essential—the physical and financial wellbeing of workers at every income level is to our overall economy. Going forward, with the lessons of the pandemic in mind, let us resolve that household financial security becomes a national and business priority, a shared concern.

With a new commitment must also come a shift in which institutions take up the cause—and in how. We need the actors with the most influence on family wellbeing—employers, financial services firms, and policymakers—to make their workers’, customers’, and constituents’ financial security a priority. Fortunately, more often than not, we have shared interests: research shows that greater financial security begets more productive workers, more loyal customers, and more engaged citizens.  

To unlock these “win-win” results, however, we need institutions to focus not just on the actions they take—the wages and benefits they provide, the products they offer, the rules they write—but on the outcomes they achieve. It’s outcomes that deliver benefits, the return on investment. For issues that matter most, we expect powerful institutions and their leaders to be accountable for results. CEOs must deliver profitability and rising share prices; policymakers must deliver peace and prosperity. Going forward, let us resolve to know if our customers, workers, and constituents are becoming more financially secure, and if not, to determine what more we must do.

With this ambitious agenda, we need a specific place to start: research shows that even a few hundred dollars of a liquid savings cushion can add critical financial stability for families, and we should demand of ourselves that every household be able to build up at least this reserve. This is a goal we can achieve, and everyone has a part to play. Financial services firms can close the gap in access to quality savings products. Employers can make workplace emergency savings tools the norm. Policymakers can provide incentives, infrastructure, and regulatory clarity to make emergency savings attractive and practical. And Americans can maintain their early pandemic drive to build savings.

Throughout this work, we should remember that basic financial security is essential if families are to build long-term wealth, and address wealth gaps—by income, race and gender—that have continued to widen during the pandemic (when the net wealth of the top 1% of households rose seven times faster than the bottom 50%). In an era of rising populism, we must ask ourselves how much inequality is ultimately sustainable.

The pandemic has awakened our sense of responsibility as a nation, and challenged us to commit to address some of our most deep-seated, far-reaching, and costly ills. We are all exhausted, and the temptation to let our newfound urgency dissipate is enormous. Yet, we know our problems will not fix themselves, and the next crisis, whatever form it takes, looms. Let us seize this moment to make family financial security the norm, and leave the pandemic years with a silver lining that truly matters.

Timothy Flacke is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the national nonprofit Commonwealth.