May 28, 2015
1:00 pm CT

	Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time all lines are in listen-only mode for the duration of today’s conference. Today’s conference will feature a question and answer session. To ask a question, please press star 1 and record your name at the prompt. Today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. Now for opening remarks I’ll turn it over to our first speaker. Ma’am, you may begin.

	Great, thanks everybody. I’m so glad that lots of you can join us for our very first webinar as part of the CFPB Financial Education Exchange. Just a quick disclaimer - CFPB employees always note that this should not be interpreted as legal guidance or advice - our own opinions - but we’re very happy to be able to share this with you so next slide.

	So just quickly many of you probably know who we are but we’re the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. We’re a new federal agency - about four years old - that is committed to helping consumers and making consumer finance markets work. We work on both educating consumers, enforcing financial and consumer protection laws and also studying - studying markets and consumer behavior so we can better do our job to help consumers.

	Within the CFPB we are with the Office of Financial Education and within the consumer education and engagement division. This is the part of the bureau that interacts with consumers and the public generally and there are a number of special population offices that work with older American military service member students and others. We look at the general population but we work closely with all those other offices so that we’re able to get information out to financial educators on topics around those populations as well as general financial education.

	And then just quickly Office of Financial Education is really committed to supporting and strengthening channels for delivering financial education to consumers and CFPB is really what we consider a wonderful channel - a way to get information, tools, resources out to help all of you do your jobs better because you are a sort of first line of defense for a lot of consumers.

	We also have things specific for consumers and doing a lot of foundational research around consumer protection issues. So before we get into the content of today’s call, just a quick word. I think all of you heard about this or almost all of you through the recent announcement through the CFPB Financial Education Exchange or FINEX. This is meant to be an opportunity for people to interact both with the bureau to get our latest tools and resources, to share your own thoughts and best practices and reactions back with us and also to connect with each other.

	Over time we will be adding a number of features that will help you do all of those things. Most of you are probably already signed up but if you haven’t, you can just send an email to the inbox cfpbfinex@cfpb.gov to let us know you want to be part of that list. Next slide.

	One of the things that we have done as part of FINEX is we have just put together a resource inventory of all of the different products, tools, resources - things that the bureau has that might be of interest to financial educators both around understanding the financial education field generally, understanding consumers in terms of consumers’ behaviors, motivations, perceptions, some of the different tools that we have for financial educators like training materials, toolkits and other things that you can use in your practice and also tools for consumer that you may want to share with your clients that can help people make certain financial decisions.

	And so that is all available - my slide turner here is going faster than I am but that is all available in a resource inventory which for those of you who are on the webinar part and not just the audio part, there is a website on part of cfpb.gov - our website - that actually has that inventory that you can print, download, look at and link to all the individual reports and tools. So over time we’ll be introducing all those tools to folks via webinars and other opportunities but you can see that all now through the resource inventory.

	And again for any of you who don’t have the web portion of this up, the website is consumerfinance.gov/adult-financial-education. Not the catchiest but that is the subpage that has all the resources for financial educators including this inventory that you can print out and has summaries of all the different tools that we have.

	The last thing I would just note - okay - is we also have a LinkedIn discussion group on financial education that we are integrating into FINEX. I know many of you are already on that but I encourage those of you who aren’t to join. It’s an easy way to get updates on things that the bureau is doing. We’ll also send out emails but people can also post their own things on the LinkedIn group so it’s a nice opportunity for you to share your own work as well and we will be increasingly trying to have discussions on that group.

	Just a few notes about upcoming things since this is brand new and folks are still trying to figure out what it is. We will be having a first e-newsletter. We’ll do periodic e-newsletters that’ll share different resources including some resources and things from other organizations beyond CFPB. The first one is on credit reports and scores. That’ll come out either later today or possibly early next week. Our next webinar will be on credit scores. We have some future ones that are percolating around our owning a home tool, comparison shopping, bill payment. A whole bunch of other things will be coming up.

	We’re starting to organize some regional convening’s so that people can meet in person and share best practices. Again there’ll be ongoing discussions on LinkedIn. We will be summarizing what we hear through the survey that LinkedIn - that FINEX members receive. Many of you have received that and I encourage you to fill it out so we can start learning about some of your work and there’ll be many more things to come.

	So with that, I will stop and we will turn to the content of our webinar today which is around financial wellbeing. The presenter is my colleague who is the senior financial education research analyst here who oversaw this work. It’s a really interesting new report. You can see the report on our website if you go to the webpage I referenced earlier or just Google the title. And [our speaker] will walk you through the results and then we would love to hear people’s thoughts and ideas on how some of this could be actually implemented in practice.

	So thank you everyone. Thank you for signing up for FINEX. We look forward to doing lots of stuff with you together moving forward and I will turn it over to our presenter.

Great. Thanks and thanks everyone for joining us today. So just to kind of situate this project with that great broad overview that gave kind of promoting effective financial education practice through all of the valuable channels out there is part of what we do. It’s sort of in the foundational research related to that. Its core to our strategy. This is a very foundational research project that I’ll be presenting on today and it’s really related to what does success mean. How should we be, you know, thinking about what we’re really driving toward in terms of consumer outcomes in our own work and maybe broadly in the financial education field.

	So it won’t be news to any of you that we’ve heard from the financial education field that standard measures of success for our work are needed and it’s a common question that practitioners get asked and it’s a common question that we get asked. And in order to engage in the type of research that allows us to meet our mandate to educate and empower consumers to make better informed financial decisions, we need a way to measure the success of financial literacy approaches that can be broadly relevant to the field.

	So that’s the motivation for this project and we’ve taken as our guide for the project the growing consensus that the ultimate success metric for financial literacy efforts should be improved individual financial wellbeing.

	So for example the OECD’s international network on financial education in which the United States participates defines financial literacy as a combination of awareness, knowledge, skills - etcetera - necessary to make sound financial decisions and ultimately achieve individual financial wellbeing. So it’s kind of all of those skills and traits that we know about but for the purpose of improving individual financial wellbeing and similarly the vision of the US national strategy for financial literacy is sustained financial wellbeing for US individuals and families.

	So financial educators run programs with many valuable outcomes and ideally these are all immune to that ultimate goal of improving individual financial wellbeing. But this concept has not yet been directly defined nor does a standard way to measure it exist. So the goals of our project have been to develop a consumer driven definition of this concept of individual financial wellbeing.

	I’ll tell you in a minute that means we ask consumers what it means to them to research and develop hypotheses about the key knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors that contribute to individual financial wellbeing, really wanting to understand what are those kinds of intermediate outcomes that we’d be looking for. What do we really think that the direct outcomes of FIN ED can be that would then improve financial wellbeing?

	And we want to know that so that we and the rest of the financial education fields can design financial education approaches that explicitly promote financial wellbeing so we have a reason to say these are the things that if we can help consumer with that should improve their financial wellbeing.

	And a final goal of the project which I’m not going to present on today but which we’ll be able to release later this year is that we have also been developing a way to directly measure financial wellbeing so that we and others can continue to research what personal factors really matter and so that we can better understand how consumers are doing.

	The longer term goal for this work is to be able to test hypotheses that we’ve developed and we hope others will use the financial wellbeing measurement tool to test the hypotheses and the concepts that are most relevant to their own work.

	So the methodology for this project has involved working with a really terrific set of research contractors led by CFPB and including the UW Madison Center for Financial Security, the Urban Institute, ICF International and Vector Psychometrics.

	So first what we did is conduct background research into how financial wellbeing has been defined and measured in the literature to date and what is already known about the relationship between finical knowledge, behavior and wellbeing so that kind of grounded our work but ten kind of the heart of this was conducting in depth qualitative interviews with very diverse consumers in six locations across the united states as well as various types of financial professionals like financial educators, advisors, planners, coaches, tax preparers, credit counselors - essentially people whose job it is to work with consumers around financial decision making and help them improve their financial outcome.

	So we really wanted to triage kind of that expert knowledge and opinion with how consumers themselves feel about their lives, what outcomes they’re having and what’s driving that and what supports are really helping them. And so all of those interviews produce 1600 pages of transcripts to code and analyze and that’s a lot of kind of the raw material from which the findings are coming today that I’ll be presenting.

	And to insure that the factors that we identified were broadly relevant to adult consumers in America across life stage, we interviewed consumers from ages 18 to 95 and this work has been a partnership between our office, financial education and the CFPB’s office for older Americans. So the results that I present again are going to be kind of a synthesis of themes and ideas that really - that resonated across the whole adult spectrum across the United States.

	And then as a final stage we consulted with a dozen academic and practitioner experts from consumer finance and financial capability to help interpret the findings.

	So the end result of this first phase of work is a first of its kind definition for individual financial wellbeing within the consumer financial education and capability field. So without further ado, what we learned primarily from consumers but sort of by these other information sources as well is that financial wellbeing can be defined as a state of being and I want to note it’s a state of being. This is not meant as a planned definition of literacy or capability. This isn’t about the scale. This is about the state of being that’s meant to result from having high levels of financial literacy or capability.

	So this state of being is when a person can fully meet their current and ongoing obligations. They can feel secure in their financial future and they’re able to make choices that allow them to enjoy life and this state of being we heard is not strictly aligned with income level. It’s not just about having money people told us. It’s also about managing it.

	So the definition has four elements. Having control over day to day month to month finances - that really means being able to comfortably meet your ongoing obligations. The second is having the capability to absorb a financial shock which we heard can be achieved in a number of different ways, you know, a combination of having savings, having access to credit and also that for a lot of people the safety net of family and friends is an important and realistic part of how they are protected against unexpected events.

	The third is being on track to meet financial goals - whatever they are for an individual. So people in different stages of life or different circumstances and who have different preferences have different goals so this is really not about being on track for any particular goal but more having goals and being on track to meet them.

	And then the fourth is having the financial freedom to make the choices that allow you to enjoy life. I’m guessing that the first three elements of that definition look pretty standard to you. They’re common in this field generally but the final piece about having the financial freedom and ability to make the personal choices that allow one to enjoy life is a bit novel. We haven’t seen that framing before in financial literacy or education research but it came out loud and clear in our research in our consumer interviews.

	The specifics of what that means for individuals are notable in their variety. Individuals value very different things such as being able to be generous with family, friends and communities, having the ability to go back to school or leave a job to seek a better one or being able to work less to spend more time with family.

	So that means that traditional measures such as income or net worth while very important cannot fully capture this final aspect of financial wellbeing and consumers told us that these deeply personal preferences and aspirations are what give meaning and purpose to the often challenging day to day financial decisions and tradeoff that it takes to achieve a financial life that both provide security and allows choices.

	So as I said, the specific individual goals and vision of the good life differed greatly across consumers but there were two common themes that arose consistently. The two themes that were common for everybody were security and freedom of choice now and in the future. So feeling in control - you can think of that as having financial security in the present. Having the capacity to absorb a financial shock can sort of be feeling financial security for the future.

	Being on track to meet goals you can think of as moving towards financial freedom for the future and having the flexibility to make choices is really having financial freedom in the present. Consumers who have that have the financial flexibility to do what they value and what makes them happy.

	Sometimes financial education can feel like telling people to eat their spinach but with framing the outcome of financial education with this consumer derived vision of financial wellbeing, we can say look this is about improving the quality of your life. This isn’t about just doing the responsible thing. This is about improving the quality of your life and we can connect financial decision making to your vision of financial wellbeing and help people feel more satisfied with the decisions they make and the outcomes they’re therefore able to achieve.

	And as I mentioned, we’re in the midst of developing a reliable and balanced set of survey questions to measure individual financial wellbeing as I’ve defined it here on the scale. We should be able to release that later this year and hope it will be useful to many of you as a way to assess the financial wellbeing of those you serve or to track their progress over time as you support their efforts to take control of their financial lives.

	So our research into financial wellbeing is also trying to understand the specific behaviors, knowledge, skills, attitudes and other personal factors that help a person have higher levels of financial wellbeing kind of holding constant their opportunities and how those are developed.

	You know, I think at a high level saying that behavior, knowledge, skills, attitudes, you know, are the broad categories of what make up this personal financial capability. That’s nothing new. What we’re trying to do is to be more precise about what specifically what’s in those categories again so we can think about measuring outcomes and really targeting approaches to those specific things.

	So we’ve organized our findings in the major areas that you see here. Of course people don’t all have the same set of opportunities so our research suggests that an individual’s behavior interacts with our opportunities and the options available to them to produce a resulting level of financial wellbeing.

	And then their behavior - given that certain level of opportunity - is then influenced by a combination of their knowledge and skills so what they know and what they know how to do, their personality and attitudes and by the decision context in which they’re making any individual choice. And by decision context, we’re referring to the social psychology literature on the power of the situation to influence behavior and choices - for example - how people save more when they’re defaulted into a 401K program. That’s an example of how the power of the situation affects a financial decision.

	And consumers told us that all of these factors are influenced by their current and past social and economic environment.

	Our research led to the development of specific hypotheses in three areas. While opportunity of course plays a huge role in wellbeing, our research focuses on the individual factors that support wellbeing given a certain level of opportunity.

	So in other words our focus is on to learn how we - the CFPB - and others working in financial education and capability can help people make the best of their situation. So our findings about these personal drivers or hypotheses are educated guesses based on the best available information and on a synthesis of existing literature, consumer and practitioner interviews and expert consultation and they fall into these three categories - financial behaviors, financial knowledge and personal traits.

	So first I’m going to describe the behaviors that seem to support financial wellbeing and then I’ll talk about the types of knowledge and skills that likely support those identified behaviors and finally I’ll discuss the personal traits that also appear to support the identified behaviors.

	The four types of behaviors emerged from our research as appearing particularly supportive of financial wellbeing. The first is effective routine money management and what I want to note here is this seems to encompass often sort of unconscious habits, intuition, decision making shortcuts which is interesting. I think the other areas are ones where we can engage people in their more conscious decision making but this one is sort of a habit and can be unconscious which may matter for how we think about designing financial education approaches.

	The next one is engaging in financial research and knowledge seeking - kind of finding information when you need it so that that would support purposeful and informed financial decision making. The third - financial planning and goal setting which gives purpose and structure to sort of individual day to day decisions and the last one - we think it’s important to note that you need to also follow through on financial decisions which is that final step between intentions and desired outcomes. And a shorthand way to talk about these four behaviors is balance and then ask, plan and act.

	So for this research project we focused on trying to understand what kind of knowledge is most likely to influence financial behavior and how it does so. Our first key finding is that factual knowledge in and of itself is not sufficient to drive behavior or behavior change. Of course people need to know things but just kind of knowing facts - the broad literature on kind of behavior generally suggests that just factual knowledge is not sufficient.

	And so the second key finding is that that link between factual knowledge and behavior is sort of mitigated by characteristics like your attitude, your personality and by the context in which that decision is being made. In the course of the qualitative research both consumers and practitioners were far more likely to mention the importance of knowing how to do things than knowledge of particular facts which was really eye opening for us, you know.

	They were asked talk to me about, you know, for consumers what, you know, what’s the information that really helps you engage in these actions or what’s the most useful advice you’ve learned or what do you wish you knew and we ask practitioners what do your more successful clients know that the other ones don’t. And they talked about knowing how to do things in the financial domain so that was really striking to us.

	So the primary knowledge hypothesis suggested by our research is that the type of knowledge most likely to support financial behaviors supportive of financial wellbeing is a set of skills that we call financial ability. So to be really clear, this is us trying to drill down on kind of the skill component that everybody already knows and acknowledges as part of financial literacy, right. Financial literacy is often thought of as knowledge and skills so this is sort of drilling down on what are the skills that are the skills part. It’s not a new concept. It’s sort of a deeper dive.

	So our thought about financial ability is that it encompasses three distinct things - knowing when and how to find reliable information to make a financial decision, knowing how to process financial information to make sound financial decisions and actually knowing how to act on that decision - knowing literally what steps to take to engage in the behaviors that would mean that you were carrying through with whatever decision that you made.

	Two things I want to note. Consumers that we interviewed find the first part of this challenging so knowing when and how to find reliable information part. They said that they don’t know where to start to find useful and reliable information and they have a very hard time finding someone they can trust to give them good financial advice which really has implications for how those of us in the business of providing reliable information, you know, there’s - I think we have our work cut out for us to help engage consumers and make resources available.

	And then the third part of this definition about knowing how to actually execute on financial decisions is really necessary to connect the bridge from the decision to an action or goal attainment and it requires some self-knowledge in addition to sort of knowing these are the steps that one takes to do this thing - to do this financial behavior. Here’s what I call it. Here’s where I go. This is what I do online, you know. This is whatever.

	In addition to that, you need to kind of know yourself too how do I get myself to execute and stick with my financial plans over time. What supports can I use and marshal and what specific steps will carry me forward?

	And so finally based on our research we have hypotheses about four types of personal traits that kind of in addition to knowledge and decision context are likely to affect financial wellbeing through their influence on behavior. The first is having an internal frame of reference which really means comparing yourself to your own standards and not to others and this really matters here because it helps people make kind of spending and other financial decisions in line with their own personal preferences and values which kind of ultimately leaves much more satisfying outcomes for them.

	The second is being highly motivated and able to stay on track in the face of obstacles. The third is having a high level of executive functioning by which we mean having a tendency to plan for the future, being able to control impulses and being able to think creatively to address unexpected challenges. I mean that’s kind of a general set of cognitive skills that people have that are not necessarily explicitly financial but I think they really help people engage in a lot of the financial behaviors we’ve identified.

	And the last one which I think is of particular importance for financial education practitioners because it’s something that I believe we can really affect through how we deliver financial education is having strong financial self-advocacy which means believing in your ability to influence your financial outcomes. So a lot of this is do I believe that I can successfully engage in these behaviors that I sort of know I should be doing, right because if I don’t think I can do it successfully, why would I even be trying. So, you know, if financial education approaches can help people experience success and help build that self-advocacy, that may be a really virtuous cycle.

	So one way that we can kind of think about this whole framework is to use it maybe as a diagnostic to figure out what type of help someone needs to engage in financial behaviors that can improve their financial wellbeing. So we really sort of think about it as what are all of the questions we need to ask to figure out, you know, if it seems like someone wants to and can be and should be engaging in a certain behavior and they’re not doing it, we can ask this series of questions to help figure out what maybe is the type of help they need.

	So I mean if the issue is just that they don’t know how to do it that they’re lacking the knowledge and skills then traditional financial education may be the right solution but increasing consumer’s knowledge of financial facts is not always enough and that’s also not always what the obstacle is to engaging in the behavior. Maybe they don’t feel confident in knowing how to act -- that self-advocacy piece - so that attitudinal barrier could mean that we really need to not just share information but help people experience success.

	Or maybe they have all the knowledge and motivation and determination in the world but, you know, it’s a huge hassle. Their world is set up in such a way that it’s just really difficult to do. Then we can think about kind of how to smooth that path and then maybe they might just lack access to basic opportunity in which case different levers come into play. And while we may not be able to influence those factors through financial education, nevertheless we need to take all of that into account when we design and deliver financial education and really think about what are the barriers that an individual or a group that we’re serving are really facing.

	So in conclusion I just want to say, you know, this research is really - it’s a foundation. It’s putting together a framework. It’s kind of stating what the goal is around defining financial wellbeing so it’s really laying a foundation for future work. So as a next stage we’ve been developing reliable and valid survey scales to measure two of the concepts I described today actually.

	The two that are sort of so novel that there was no way to measure them before are financial wellbeing as we’ve defined it and also this concept of financial ability - the kind of drilldown on the financial skills. So we are creating survey scales to measure both of those. We should be able to release them later this year and we hope that they’ll be useful to other researchers and to practitioners.

	We’ve also - I just wanted to note we’ve been doing follow-on research into how children and youth develop the characteristics that I’ve talked about today. The research that we commissioned on that was published in the flex special issue of the Journal of Consumer Affairs which was released online a couple of months ago. It is free and available to the public so if you’re interested, you can Google the title foundations of financial wellbeing and that’s - you can see the research that we commissioned on kind of how children and youth develop these characteristics.

	And finally we’re planning further research to quantitatively test all these hypotheses that we’ve laid out and we hope many others will join in kind of testing out theories or strategies related to this that are of interest to them and letting us know what you find because we all need to know more about what kinds of support and opportunities can help people have more financial wellbeing.

	So with that I’ll say thank you so much for your time and joining us and I’m happy to take questions.

	Sure. Thank you very much. This is again. I actually want - I’m going to ask can we go back to the slide that’s the box - the four - the four part box? I just want to know where for those - we’re moving it back - actually it’s not that box. It’s the earlier box. Keep going, keep going. Right there.

	So one of the things about this security and freedom of choice in the present and future --  raised some interesting issues about how we can use some of that as a diagnostic thinking about, you know, what’s different and some of the hypotheses underneath that how to help think about what a consumer might need.

	Something I’ve heard from some other practitioners about this general framing is it also helps to define, you know, what is your program or intervention trying to do. So for all of this a lot of like how we actually do the things that are described and you guys know. You as practitioners have been doing it in different ways over the years and sometimes we just haven’t - we haven’t always thought of it.

	People will say oh well somebody’s saving or they’re reducing debt or is their credit score going up. But it helps to know what is a client and what is the program trying to do. are they trying to get control over their day to day month to month finances and maybe one could describe ones program as helping people achieve, you know, security in the present.

	If someone’s trying to save for a long term goal, you may describe it or market it to clients as freedom of choice or think about metrics that align with that. So I think it helps to not say financial education just helps to be more educated but this can help financial educators think about what are you trying to do with different parts of your program, what are your clients trying to achieve depending on where they are in their own personal journey.

	You could think in some ways of people moving through these boxes as they get more finically secure so I think it also helps us think about how to message financial education to clients, to funders, to supports of FIN ED to make the case that, you know, it’s not all about just increasing level savings or just doing one thing but there’s going to be different goals, different people for different programs and I think this kind of helps give a bit of a framework to it and then as you described earlier, the other box kind of can help you be a diagnostic in figuring out what an individual client might need.

	So I find that useful. I’ve heard from some other financial educators that hey like that. So I think now we would love to hear from folks on the webinar, you know, one does this resonate. Does this make sense? Is this helpful in your financial education work? We would love to take questions on this - general questions - but also we’d love to hear what you think of it and how it might apply.

	There was - we’re trying to think through now how can practitioners actually use some of this in their day to day practice. We actually have a little two pager or three pager that is on our website as well with some ideas about that but we’d love to hear from all of you as well about how it might be useful. Are there ways that this might help people add something to their practice or tweak? And again a lot of these people are already doing a lot of this. This is a way to help understand it and think about the goal ultimately of what we’re all trying to do together.

	So operator, can you explain again how people can ask questions and we will open up the floor for questions and comments.

Coordinator:	Thank you. To ask a question, please press star 1 and record your name at the prompt. Your name is required to introduce your question. To withdraw your question, you may press star 2. Once again if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 and record your name clearly at the prompt. One moment for the first question, please.

And you can also ask questions - type in questions if you’re in the webinar. There’s a question function that you can use as well. Do we have any questions?

Coordinator:	I think we have one question coming in. One moment for the name, please. And we do have our first question. Your line is open.

	Great. Can you all hear me okay?

	Yes, we can.

	Okay. I wonder if you could go back to the slide where you were talking about the internal frame of reference and executive functioning and I wonder if you have uncovered any tools for helping to impart those behaviors or those attitudes in clients because I know that’s something that we’ve in our financial coaching work and classes and training of volunteers, it’s something that we’ve talked a lot about and we’ve talked about it using the terms of internal locust of control and external locust of control.

	Yes. No, absolutely. I think that’s very related to that concept of financial self-advocacy so a few thoughts in reaction to that and thank you. That’s a great question.

	So financial self-advocacy - the sort of the best way that I have heard about that or can think about it is kind of actually through the course and, you know, I think financial coaching is actually a great example of, you know, helping people actually kind of have those wins that then build on themselves and create that virtuous cycle so I’m sure you’re actually already really working on that in your practice.

	So a couple - just a couple other reactions are just on the perseverance thing an interesting thing is, you know, there may be some people who are just - that’s like sort of they have that capability more than others but another is that it can be sort of situational and based on levels of motivation so kind of engaging with people about what their motivation is and kind of be having them sort of focused on whatever goal it is that is particularly important to them and then making it really clear how the sort of specific steps and behaviors that you’re talking about or suggesting or working on are connected to that thing that is really motivating to them.

	That’s something I’ve heard that may be useful in terms of helping people kind of persevere or stick with something difficult is when they feel a higher level of motivation around that specific thing.

	And then on the executive functioning thing as you - maybe (Irene) you could maybe speak to this better but I know there’s actually sort of a growing body of practice and expertise around adult executive functioning. I’m more familiar personally with, you know, there’s a lot of early childhood approaches now that are trying to instill this in sort of preschoolers and starting early but I’ll let (Irene) say what she knows about the adult executive function world.

	Sure. And first just on the youth executive function - the youth - the extension to youth issues that (Genevieve) mentioned on the final slide that’s being done does look at when and how executive function can particularly be - what ages are particularly open to - kids open to kind of learning about that and that is - that research referenced as being published in the general consumer affairs but we will also be releasing something about that and there will be a webinar on that in the future so stay tuned for a FINEX webinar looking at sort of youth and seasons or drivers of this which include executive functioning.

	But for adults, there is definitely growing interest. I do know that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities which is a research group - research and advocacy group in DC - has been putting together a sort of list serve on people interested in executive functions, training or knowledge particularly for helping, you know, often sort of economically disadvantaged people, people in public benefits, others who may need help in navigating some of the decisions they have to make.

	So that only started up recently and I know there have been - there’s some early research on that including a book about to come out so...

	They do have webinars, trainings and other material on that for people to check out, right?

	Well they’ve had one webinar so far - well two but it was the same webinar. So it’s pretty new and I’m assuming there’s something about that on their website. Again that’s centered on budget and policy priorities but I think - I think looking forward in FINEX we would love to gather ideas from people who are, you know, on this webinar and part of the broader FINEX network to see what people have tried in that and as we learn things, we would like to share that back with folks. So this may be something where the knowledge within the practitioner world may be, you know, you guys may know as much as researchers do and we’d love to access some of that - some of that intelligence.

	Thank you.

	Great, thanks. Are there more questions teed up (Jeremy)?

	Yes, we do have one other question in queue. And as a reminder to ask a question, please press star 1. One moment for the name, please. And the next question is from. Your line is open.

	Hi. Can you hear me?

	Yes.
	
	Yes, we can.

	Okay. I just wondered - I wasn’t able to connect to see the slides. Is there any way I can access the slides - what section would it be in - on your website or...

	We’re all looking at each other.
 I mean I know for sure one quick answer is both the full report that this information is drawn from which has a four page executive summary as well as the longer report and there’s also kind of a three pager research digest aimed at practitioners so all of those resources are available on our website where said. Do you want to repeat the URL of where these resources are?

	Sure. Its consumerfinance.gov/adult-financial-education - very gripping. And then we are recording and will post this webinar so you should be able to watch it separately...

	Okay, good.

	Once it’s available. Yes, so I don’t know if others have had trouble accessing...

	It was a computer issue for me.

	Okay, sorry about that. Yes, that sometimes happens. Okay.

	Thank you.

	Sure. are there additional questions?

	At this time I’m showing no questions in queue but again to ask a question please press star 1. It looks like our next question is coming in. One moment please. And the next question is from. Your line is open.

	Hi. Thank you. You can hear me okay?

	Yes, hi.

	Yes, we can.

	Okay, great. You had mentioned earlier that there’s a LinkedIn discussion group. How do you - how do we find that and how do we join that?

	That’s great. Excellent. I love that question.

	I’m very happy. I am the moderator of that group and I’m always very, very eager to encourage people to join.

	It’s - so a couple of ways to do it but if you already have a LinkedIn account if you just go to groups and search and just search at the top and if you put in the name CFPB financial education discussion group and you sort of need to do that exactly as is because I find the LinkedIn search feature isn’t all that great.

	You can also go to - if you go to our website that I mentioned earlier - the adult-financial-education site - on the - near the bottom there is a little thing about how to join FINEX and how to go to LinkedIn and that is actually - you can click on that and it actually gives you the group number. So if you do either of those things - and this is different than the CFPB supporters group. That’s a different LinkedIn group. This is the financial education discussion group. Just click join. We have a little over 1000 members now - a lot of financial educators from around the country also, you know, researchers and thought leaders and academics.

	And what we do is - so I put - I or my colleagues put any CFPB, you know, new resource blog, consumer advisory - anything up there that I think would interest folks and then others can post as well. So we regularly have other research reports and tools and I encourage everyone to use that and to put their own ideas. You can also post questions and we’re going to try to encourage more discussion right now.

	It’s been primarily posed to someone’s new research or resource or curriculum that would be of interest. So thank you. Please join.

	Yes, thank you. Yes, will do. Thanks.
	Okay. We actually have now a written question.

	Before you get to that there was another written question that we did answer but people may be more interested in more broadly. The question was were these interviews focused on low and moderate income consumers and the answer is the interviews very explicitly focused on folks around the United States of all income levels including low income but this - the kind of screening and mix of consumers that we did interviews with was sort of meant to be as broadly diverse as possible so kind of urban, suburban, rural, different ages, different backgrounds, different education levels, different income levels, you know, folks who are on wage employment, folks that are entrepreneurs.

	So it was just very broadly diverse and did include both in terms of the consumers interviewed and the practitioners interviewed, folks that served consumers at all income levels. So the practitioners included, you know, credit counselors or financial coaches or other people who work with people kind of in financial distress but it also included, you know, wealth advisors and people who work, you know, with, you know, people who are pretty financially well off. So all of it was kind of purposefully designed to cover a broad spectrum of American experiences.

	Great. A couple other things have come in on - via the emailed questions. One is just a comment. I’ll just share it because I like it. So I’m so excited about the prospect of having consistent measures to evaluate the effectiveness of our programs. Thank you for doing that. I appreciate that. And just a note that the measure initially will measure sort of wellbeing and then it could be used to measure different strategies. It’s not really designed as a program evaluation tool initially. It’s not going to - right?

	Well I mean...

	You could use it as such but...

	You could use it that way initially if you wanted to.

	Right.
	
	So it can be used either as just kind of a general diagnostic to say like how are people doing? What’s their level of financial wellbeing? Or you could absolutely use it as kind of proposed or longitudinal because it’s not going to be sort of a binary yes/no - either you have financial wellbeing or you don’t. It’s going to be a scale and it’s designed to be movable.

	Right.

	 So the hope and the idea would be that kind of - a FIN ED intervention or any of the work that you all do with your clients that kind of over time, you know, their responses to this survey scale would change and then their overall level of financial wellbeing would change and that would be sort of a number that you could see a change in over time so it certainly could be used that way.
	
	Right and the other thing talked about this very briefly earlier and it may have kind of zoomed by but the idea is to then take that scale and really test the hypothesis. So we have hypothesized that financial ability predicts wellbeing. We have hypothesized about certain behaviors or certain personal traits but we’d like to actually test those to see if that’s true. Does it hold out that if you increase somebody’s say executive functioning or you increase their ability to do financial research, does that lead to increased wellbeing?

	And I think we encourage everyone else to also use the scale. When it is released, you can do that yourself. You can do this at home. And the advantage to that is then as we learn how things work, it will help inform peoples’ own program development. It turns out that gee, some of them are more effective for certain people than others. That will be something we might be able to actually learn and we would want to do that, you know, with all of you. So I think it will be useful in a number of ways depending on how people want to use it.

	I am going to read the next question which is how important and realistic is it to have mandated financial education at age appropriate levels in the school system. So would it have to be tested and measured to be effective? Are there funding barriers to such efforts?

	Well that’s a very good question. We do actually have a couple other people here in our office who work on K-12 and youth issues. The - I think the adult financial wellbeing work doesn’t directly address that. The question would be I guess which of these types of skills or abilities can you learn in school.

	So I think that’s something that we’re, you know, interested in trying to learn about ourselves. There’s been some research but I’m not sure that we can give our precise answer to that. Does anyone else here want to try to...

	 No, I’m sorry. That would be a great - I mean we have a number of colleagues that specifically work on the topic of school based financial education and thinking about state policy and in fact we have a whole kind of resource guide for state policy makers around thinking through designing and frankly also evaluating the state K-12 FIN ED strategies so I think that’s available on our website too.

	Yes and I will confess something. That is very - relatively new. It came out in the last month or two and so the resource inventory that I referenced and showed on the screen briefly does not yet include that because that actually came out around the same time. So we will update that. It is elsewhere on our website though not currently on the - not currently on the page I’ve been promoting but it is available out there.

	We posted it for example on LinkedIn so hint, hint those of you who joined LinkedIn. Scroll back a month or two and you’ll see the link directly there. Okay, we have another question - very interesting. Are you going - and then I’ll ask in the second term if there’s any more phone questions but one more typed question. Are you going to track the individuals longitudinally or just have a cross-section of consumers?

	 I assume that this question is in reference to my saying that we are interested in testing the hypothesis but I am going to punt on that and say that the exact research design is TPD. So we are definitely making plans to test these hypotheses and we hope others do and I think it can be done - it can be done in either way and hopefully numerous projects will explore this both in a cross-sectional and longitudinal way.

	Great. are there any other phone questions?

	At this time I’m showing no questions in queue.

	Okay. One last call for any final comments. Either type or press star - what was it  - star 1?

	Star 1, yes.

	Star 1 if you have anything. I’ll just say a few kind of concluding things. One is thank you very much. It’s great that, you know, we’ve had a lot of people signing up for FINEX, a lot of people signing up for the webinars. We’re very excited about that. We will be growing this effort and adding more features as I mentioned earlier.

	This webinar has been recorded. We will post it on that fabulous website - consumerfinance.gov/adult-financial-education when it becomes available. If you have questions about FINEX or want to sign up or learn more, the cfpb-_finex@cfpb.gov is the website so feel free to reach out. I check that box several times a day along with some of my colleagues.

	Our next webinar will be on consumer credit reports and scores. We have several reports and resources for financial educators on that topic that we’ll be talking about. There’ll also be an incentivized initial kind of e-newsletter coming out that covers that as well in the next few days. So lots more to come. We really appreciate everyone signing up. Tell your colleagues.

	And unless there’s any final questions, I think we are set to close just before three o’clock so thank you very much everybody.

	Thank you for your participation on today’s conference. All parties may disconnect. Thank you.


END