reporter: why? it takes away from my necessities, my daily necessities. reporter: has the economy gotten better for you in the last year or so? no, it s actually gotten worse and it s going to get worse. reporter: nicole s salary hasn t budged in three years but her cost of living has gone up and she fears furloughs from the forced budget cuts. that housing rebound that s helping many folks? if you ve lost your house already like nicole, that boom doesn t matter to you either. there s no more middle class. i used to consider myself middle class but now no. reporter: what do you feel? working poor. reporter: poppy harlow, cnn, new york. so are we one america with two economies? ali velshi is host of your money and chris gardner from chicago, we met chris when his remarkable journey from homelessness to stockbroker was drama advertised in will smith s movie the pursuit of
headlines? yes it does but what am i going to do? reporter: a mental health technician at the veterans administration, nicole and her teenaged daughter diamond are renting after losing their home to the bank. how hard is it to get by? exextremely hard. reporter: she s one of the 46% of americans who have zero stock investments and as the markets boom, the gap between them and the wealthy grows. when the stock market rises significantly, it increases the gap in wealth between those upper income households and other households in the economy. reporter: just how much is stock ownership skewed toward the healthy? it was calculated the wealthiest 10% of americans own more than 80% of stocks. the bottom 60% just 2.5%. but with the salary in the $40,000s, she says there s nothing extra to put towards retirement savings or diamond s college education. i can t afford it.
party.. finding you the perfect place, every step of the way. hotels.com the dout keeps hitting record price, home prices are rising but many of you tell me you don t feel any more secure today than you did five years ago. you say it s feeling like one america with two economies. the rich and then the rest struggling just to get by. poppy harlow introduces us to one woman who feels that way. reporter: for many americans who don t own stocks, the recent giddiness on wall street feels a little remote. the dow closed at record highs. are you feeling that? i wish i was. reporter: could you call single mom nicole lowling lucky to have a job in this economy but the reality is she s barely getting by and the stock market boom means nothing to her. is it frustrating to see the
trust and confidence. and those people, again, have been decimated. it s going to take more time, christine for them to come back. young people, those young people that you talked about in your earlier segment. those young people, if you went to college in 2007, which we ll say was the last good, you thought you d come out in 2011, get a job, go on and do what you wanted to do with your life. well, the truth of the matter is, they ve now come out of school, tens of thousands of dollars in debt. no jobs and they ve got to move back at home with mom and pop if mom and pop haven t lost the house. so we go back to the original the original issue, which is there are people right now who are playing offense, right? who are making money and there are other people who are sitting on their hands because they either can t or won t make a move. what does it take to dislodge that confidence and get the spirits going again so we don t have two americas and there s a bigger middle. we ve got to