Check back with Benefits. You can report major life events or see if new benefit programs have become available. Find government and local disability programs including housing, jobs, education, and health care. If you need help with your benefits, you can review these top questions about Social Security. Learn about veterans benefits such as burial, education, health, and housing. There are a variety of benefit and aid programs to help you if you lose your job.
It can help with unemployment insurance benefits, job training, and finding a job. Unemployment insurance programs pay you money if you lose your job through no fault of your own.
You must meet your state's eligibility requirements. Each state runs its own program. Select your state from this map to find out how to apply.
You may be able to file online, by phone, or in person. Some states provide extended benefits when there's high unemployment. Extended unemployment insurance benefits last for 13 weeks. You can apply for extended benefits only once you've run out of regular benefits. Check with your state; not everyone qualifies.
Or a few thousand dollars in the form of a second mortgage. Or many thousands in the form of a grant, which you never have to repay. Of course, some homeowners will qualify for more and some less. Some homebuyer programs explicitly say you can use their funds for closing costs as well as your down payment. Others may or may not have rules about that. Check your local down payment assistance programs to see if closing cost grants are included. Almost all DPA programs require you to borrow from an approved lender and use an approved mortgage program.
You may have to sign up for a particular mortgage product. Many also let you borrow conventional loans ones not guaranteed by the government , including those backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But using an assistance program to increase your down payment amount has some distinct benefits:. In hot housing markets around the nation, home shoppers with little or no cash for down payments are struggling to compete with buyers who can make larger down payments. A quarter of buyers paid for the entire home in cash.
Along with helping you make a more attractive offer, a bigger down payment can save money over the life of your loan. More money down makes your opening mortgage balance smaller. Lower balances mean more equity and lower monthly mortgage payments.
By then, real estate prices would likely be higher than they are today. If you use DPA to buy sooner, you can get a foot on the homeownership ladder. And this can have huge benefits for your overall financial health. Depending on whose addition skills you trust, there are between 2, and 2, DPA programs in the U. These are typically run by state and local governments, and nonprofits at the community level. We list some of the biggest programs in each state below.
The U. While we have made reasonable efforts to make sure the information above is correct at the time of posting, it is subject to change without notice. Please check relevant websites for more information.
That deal comes with conditions:. Get more details from the Step Up homepage. And you must have a score of or above to be eligible at all. The amount you might get will depend on the type of mortgage you choose. No help is available for those buying in Pima County, and only certain mortgages are eligible in Maricopa County.
Find out more at the Home Plus homepage. You can use that for your down payment and other closing costs. This takes the form of a second mortgage of up to 3. This is a first-time home buyer down payment assistance program.
Check out the MyHome Assistance Program webpage for more information. This down payment assistance comes in the form of a second mortgage loan that must be repaid via monthly payments. Medicaid and CHIP help with medical bills for kids whose families can't afford health insurance or can't get it through work. People over 65, people with disabilities under 65, and people with end-stage kidney disease are eligible for Medicare.
Learn more about how to apply for Medicare. Each state has different rules about eligibility and applying for Medicaid for adults. Learn more about eligibility. Each state has different application requirements for Medicaid for adults. Call your state Medicaid program to see if you qualify and to learn how to apply. If your employer does not offer insurance, you're self-employed, or you want to buy your own insurance, you can get it through the Marketplace.
The Health Insurance Marketplace offers health, vision, and dental insurance for you and your family. Everyone is eligible for health insurance through the Marketplace.
You may also qualify for subsidies to help pay your premiums. How you apply for a plan in the Health Insurance Marketplace depends on what plan you choose. Learn more about applying. Visit the Health Insurance Marketplace's top questions section for more help with finding or applying for health care. To file a complaint, call TTY: Contact your state or local social services agencies to find out if you qualify for any health care programs in your area.
Community clinics offer free or low-cost medical services including prenatal care. They often list clinical trials seeking participants for research on medical conditions.
Find out how you may be able to lower the cost of your prescription drugs and medical devices. Charity care programs help uninsured patients who can't afford to pay their medical bills and don't qualify for government aid. Because, in a way, Mexico does beat the U. NAFTA is an enormous and enormously complicated deal.
Looking at economic growth can lead to one conclusion while looking at the balance of trade leads to another. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. It fell steadily from to , and while it picked up following the tech bubble's burst, it did not reach its pre-NAFTA level again until October The fallout from the financial crisis kept it above 6. The partially union-funded Economic Policy Institute estimated that by , , net jobs were displaced by the U.
The automotive industry is usually considered to be one of the hardest-hit by the agreement. But although the U. Jobs began to slip away at that point, and losses grew steeper with the financial crisis. At its low in June , American auto manufacturing employed just , people.
Anecdotal evidence supports the idea that these jobs went to Mexico. Wages in Mexico are a fraction of what they are in the U. All major American car makers now have factories south of the border, and prior to Trump's Twitter campaign against offshoring , a few were openly planning to ship more jobs abroad. Yet while the job losses are tough to deny, they may be less severe than in a hypothetical NAFTA-less world. They now straddle the border. While thousands of U. By integrating supply chains across North America, keeping a significant share of production in the U.
Otherwise, they may have been unable to compete with Asian rivals, causing even more jobs to depart. On the other hand, it may be impossible to know what would have happened in a hypothetical scenario. Garment manufacturing is another industry that was particularly hard-hit by offshoring.
The country was still behind other international manufacturers including:. During the same period, however, apparel prices fell 7. Still, the decline in garment prices is no easier to pin directly on NAFTA than the decline in garment manufacturing.
Because people with lower incomes spend a larger portion of their earnings on clothes and other goods that are cheaper to import than to produce domestically, they would probably suffer the most from a turn towards protectionism —just as many of them did from trade liberalization.
According to a study by Pablo Fajgelbaum and Amit K. The number of Mexican immigrants—of any legal status—living in the U. Boosters argued that uniting the U. Mexico's president at the time, Carlos Salinas de Gortiari, said the country would "export goods, not people. Instead, the number of Mexican immigrants more than doubled, again from to when it approached 9.
According to Pew , the flow has reversed—at least temporarily. Between and , , more Mexicans left the U. One reason NAFTA did not cause the expected reduction in immigration was the peso crisis of to , which sent the Mexican economy into recession. Another is that reducing Mexican corn tariffs did not prompt Mexican corn farmers to plant other, more lucrative crops.
This prompted them to give up farming. A third is that the Mexican government did not follow through with promised infrastructure investments, which largely confined the pact's effects on manufacturing to the north of the country. While the U. The U. Its merchandise trade balance is negative—the U. In fact, the two countries already had a free trade agreement in place since , but the pattern holds—the U. A report by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the deal "increased annual U.
GDP, but by a very small amount—probably no more than a few billion dollars, or a few hundredths of a percent. While the economy as a whole may have seen a slight boost, certain sectors and communities experienced profound disruption. A town in the Southeast loses hundreds of jobs when a textile mill closes, but hundreds of thousands of people find their clothes marginally cheaper.
Depending on how you quantify it, the overall economic gain is probably greater but barely perceptible at the individual level; the overall economic loss is small in the grand scheme of things, but devastating for those it affects directly. The deal was, in a fact, an extension of the Canada-U. Free Trade Agreement, and it was the first to link an emerging market economy to developed ones. The country underwent tough reforms, beginning a transition from the kind of economic policies that one-party states pursue to free-market orthodoxy.
NAFTA supporters argued that tying the economy in with those of its richer northern neighbors would lock in those reforms and boost economic growth, eventually leading to convergence in living standards between the three economies. A currency crisis struck almost immediately. Between the fourth quarter of and the second quarter of , local-currency GDP shrank by 9. Despite President Salinas's prediction that the country would begin exporting "goods, not people," emigration to the U.
Due to growth in other agricultural sectors, the net loss was 1. CEPR argues that Mexico could have achieved per-capita output on par with Portugal's if its growth rate had held.
Instead, it clocked the 18th-worst rate of 20 Latin American countries, growing at an average of just 0.
0コメント