Parents doing great educating kids Judaically, not always financially, OU program planner says

Several Jewish groups told JNS that they are ready to help, as Jewish Americans, like all Americans, are struggling with price increases.

Some 55% of Americans say affordability is the main issue as Election Day approaches in November, according to a recent Gallup poll.

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“There’s no real middle class anymore in the community,” Baruch Niebloom, founder of the financial tech nonprofit frum.finance, which works with Orthodox Jews, told JNS. “So many people are getting tuition discounts from schools, because they don’t have the income.”

“It’s not only people who are struggling. It’s people who are wondering if they’re OK to retire, if they can afford a house, if they’re just starting out, if they’re newlyweds, first job, whatever it may be,” Stacey Zrihen, a financial planner who volunteers with the Orthodox Union’s Living Smarter Jewish program, told JNS.

Zrihen trains a team of about 100 volunteer coaches, and she deals with a community that doesn’t tend to have a written budget. Financial planning “hasn’t historically been taught in schools,” she told JNS.

“I think parents, who are doing a great job educating their kids Judaically, are not always doing a great job educating them financially,” she said.

Both those in their mid-40s and 50s and younger couples, “who are just starting out, who don’t have a great blueprint for what it looks like,” are having difficulty, according to Zhiren, who said that the OU program gets thousands of annual requests.

“The clients that we’re working with are struggling more than in the past,” she said. “When I got married 33 years ago, the costs of our home, our car, those costs have multiplied—some of them even tenfold.”

Even as nearly every household now needs to bring in two incomes, there is a limit to revenue, and families ought to focus on cutting costs, according to Zhiren.

“I call it the household black hole category,” she said, of purchases from stores like Amazon, Target, Walmart and Costco, which she said often go beyond necessities.

“I think there are people who are taking vacations, because it’s something that we do and we’d like to do,” she said. “It’s a wonderful thing if you can do it, but I don’t think that has to be something that’s considered a necessity.”

“If it is, the way that it’s done might look a little different if you’re trying,” Zhiren told JNS.

She said other areas, like hiring cleaners, sleep-away camp and dining out, can be cut back if necessary.

Shalom Goodman, co-founder and executive director of Collective Kindness, a nonprofit that he formed in 2023 to support Jewish families navigating financial challenges, told JNS that he left a Wall Street Journal editorial role in 2024 after seeing the Jewish communal struggles.

“I heard about a family around Passover that did not have enough food, and I just asked around, ‘Who wants to help out?’” he said. “I got around $5,000 in under half an hour.”

“If you help out a guy, it always ends up with you helping others,” Goodman, who is an ordained rabbi, told JNS. “It evolved.”

The project went from aiming to give families a little extra money to Goodman realizing that families earning $80,000 or more could be underwater.

Debt appeared to him to be the primary culprit, so he paired families with financial experts who could help dig them out of debt. But then he found that some in that field were dishonest and prioritized making money off those in debt rather than helping them get out of debt.

“We saw an opening of just honest experts, who know all the options out there, who we pay hourly to work with you” and “who aren’t earning any extra money” as commissions for directing families toward particular options, he said.

Collective Kindness lays out all of the potential debt resolution options in advance, in case families want to try to implement those on their own, and it offers its experts for those who are feeling overwhelmed by the process, according to Goodman.

He isn’t sure if the debt problem in the Jewish community has worsened of late, but Collective Kindness has expanded its operations. As its services become better known, “a lot of people are opening up. ‘Hey, I’ll be honest, I do have high APR debts,’” he told JNS.

People who register for his nonprofit’s Kosher Debt Help initiative report average credit card debt of more than $60,000, with average interest rates over 23%.

One-time emergency help is a specialty of the Jewish community, Goodman told JNS, but debt can be an endless cycle that calls for deeper solutions.

His organization’s program helps reduce those interest rates for some 560 families to an average of under 1.5%, giving those coming for help not only some financial relief in the short term but also the education needed to carry that forward, he said.

Niebloom, of frum.finance and a former senior software engineer at HubSpot, told JNS that “what we found is a lot of other organizations are focused on either putting out the fire directly or on very short-term planning of just how to do cash flow, which leaves a lot of gaps.”

“There’s a big undercurrent of not knowing how to reach long-term goals like tuition and retirement, and because it’s so ill-defined, you end up with this cloud over many people, really at all income levels,” he said.

Many Orthodox Jews fear that increasing their incomes will lead to losing government benefits that they need, but Niebloom tells them that they can avoid that by making the right financial decisions.

The goal of frum.finance is to “take away this pattern we see, this general anxiety” and help formulate long-term goals on paper, getting them down to defined numbers, “instead of them being like these nebulous ideas in the back of their heads,” he said.

Once it’s defined, and people sometimes see more clearly the gap between their current income and what it will take to reach their goals, “people are much more likely to listen, to make a career shift,” Niebloom told JNS.

Of more than 1,000 members affiliated with frum.finance, including 300 families involved in deep planning, he hasn’t seen increased stress and anxiety from the current economy, he told JNS, “because I feel like people were almost maxed out before things were rough.”

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