What Families Need to Get ByThe 2013 Update of EPI’s Family Budget Calculator
Issue Brief #368
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The income level necessary for families to secure an adequate but modest living standard is an important economic yardstick. While poverty thresholds, generally set at the national level, help to evaluate what it takes for families to live free of serious economic deprivation, the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI) Family Budget Calculator—recently updated for 2013—offers a broader measure of economic welfare and provides an additional metric for academics and policy experts looking for comprehensive measures of economic security. The basic family budgets presented in this report, as well as those presented via the Family Budget Calculator itself, measure the income families need in order to attain a secure yet modest living standard where they live by estimating community-specific costs of housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, other necessities, and taxes.
EPI’s Family Budget Calculator is particularly useful given the inadequacies of both the federal poverty line and the new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) when it comes to measuring families’ fundamental needs (CCED 2013). EPI’s basic family budgets overcome many of these shortcomings by providing a wealth of geographic and family-type detail; they are calculated for over 600 U.S. communities and six family types (either one or two parents with one, two, or three children). The rich detail afforded by these geographic and family-type customizations, the relative accessibility of these numbers, and the rigor and transparency with which they are developed make the family budgets presented in this report and via the Family Budget Calculatoruniquely valuable to non-experts and academics alike.
