CFPB FinEx Webinar

May 26, 2016
1:00 pm CT


Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. During the question and answer session please press star 1. Today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. Now I’d like to turn the meeting over to Irene Skricki. Thank you. You may begin. 

Great. Well thank you very much and welcome everybody to our FinEx webinar today. We’re very excited to have one webinar before the long weekend. And we appreciate everyone being here for this. Today we are going to talk about financial rules to live by. We’ll explain a little more about what that means when we get there. 

But first I’ll do a few introductory slides. Most of you know I tend to do these same slides at the beginning of every FinEx webinar, for those of you who have been on it before, just to make sure everybody’s kind of grounded. And the first thing I’ll do is just say our standard disclaimer which is that this is not, you know, legal guidance or interpretation or advice from the bureau. 

And I also want to add that because we have an outside speaker this webinar, which we are very excited about, we are also not endorsing any speakers or entities or any of the services being talked about today. 

So just a quick intro for anyone who is new to this call or to these activities - Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a relatively new federal agency that helps financial - consumer financial markets work better by making rules more effective, enforcing those rules and empowering consumers to take more control over their economic lives. And that last part is of course what we are talking about today around helping to educate and inform consumers around financial decisions. 

And within the bureau, we have a consumer facing division that is where my office sits, the Office of Financial Education. We also have some other offices dealing with special populations like older Americans and service members, students. And we have sometimes featured their resources on these calls as well. 

So that’s some of what we do. And then just a couple of words of background about FinEx. Again, for anyone who isn’t part of the FinEx, the CFPB Financial Education Exchange is kind of a vehicle for us to get things out to you - news, information, new tools and resources that we have coming out. We’re starting to feature tools and resources from other organizations as well. 

And also for us to learn back from you about what’s working, through surveys. We’re actually going to be launching a follow up survey soon, to find out what some of you have been up to with using some of our resources. And also through in person convenings and other things like that. 

So we’re very happy for all of you who joined. We hope you’re finding it useful. If any of you on the call - if you’re not getting a monthly newsletter that says CFPB FinEx, you may not have signed up. So if you want to sign up or if you’re not getting something, email the address you can see on your screen, which is CFPB_FinEx@CFPB.gov and just say you want to join or say I’m not getting the newsletter, and we’ll make sure that that is fixed or that you are added. 

Next, just a quick update - at this point, we have over 1500 people who have signed up for FinEx. We’ve had eight regional convenings around the country. We have had 12 webinars thus far, over the last year - this is our 13th. And almost all of them are available for you to listen to if you weren’t able to be on them.

They’re all on the Web site. The links at the bottom. I’m going to show it again in a second and read it for anyone who may not have the actual WebEx webinar open right now. So we have a Web page resources for financial educators Web page. Catchy URL - ConsumerFinance.gov/Adult-Financial-Education. I wish it were catchier, but Adult Financial Education. 

And that is where you will find all of the different tools and resources that the bureau has, including information about upcoming webinars such as this one, and information on how to sign up for FinEx in case you didn’t catch it earlier. One final note, we have a resource inventory. I know many of you have probably seen it. It’s on that page, that Web page. You can download it there. 

And it lists all of the different things the bureau has that financial educators can use and access all of them free and available to everyone. My last back on slide, again it will look familiar to those of you who have been on these before. We also have a LinkedIn discussion group on financial education where anyone can join. 

And not only will you see our materials put up regularly, but we encourage people to put up other - their own materials. And I will note that America Saves will be speaking - or that we’ll be speaking about that later today, regularly puts their materials up there. So it’s also a great way to keep up with the work of others. 

So now we will turn to our topic of the day. And I will be speaking on this and then in a little bit I will turn it over to our guest speaker to talk about some of the resources of America Saves that are on the same general topic of helping people to set goals and keep to their financial kind of - reach their financial aspirations. 

So I’m going to just briefly tell you about some research that we have done that informs what we’re talking about today. We have done a series of focus groups over the last couple of years that have informed these reports we called Consumer Voices reports. So we want to hear from consumers, what are the issues that they’re facing, what are the challenges? 

What are their own attitudes and perceptions and thoughts about things? Because we really want to target our financial education in a way that will make sense to people - so we want to hear from consumers. And so we do a series of focus groups on a number of financial topics. And one of those was financial shortcuts or rules of thumb. 

And the idea basically was that, you know, you all know this as financial educators, is that consumers face many complicated decisions day to day in managing their financial lives. We all do that. There are just lots of things people have to manage. And financial educators, I think as a field, we have tried to give people - tried different approaches to helping people manage that complexity. 

In some cases, we give people lots of information and help them to optimize their situation or figure out the absolute best approach. But in some cases, that’s too much, right? I mean for all of us we probably don’t do a really complicated analysis of which type of orange juice to buy when we stand at the grocery store. 

We have some kind of shortcut, or else we would be bogged down in complicated decision making all the time. And so people have shortcuts, sometimes called rules of thumb. And so that’s something that financial educators have been trying, is how do we give people financial shortcuts or rules of thumb? 

And rules of thumb is actually a term that’s used in academics. The definition is something like this - specific actionable guidelines that people can apply to their decisions. So very specific, you know, here’s what to do in this situation. 

And there is some research evidence and I can talk more about that if people are interested, that providing financial rules of thumb to consumers, can work better in some cases some of the time, for some people, than more detailed and complex financial education. Again, people can’t always take in all that information and optimize the situation. 

And so because we’re interested in thinking about ways financial educators are trying to deal with this complexity and trying to figure out what kind of strategies work, we wanted to ask consumers kind of their opinions about rules of thumb, what they thought was useful, what they knew about rules of thumb or financial shortcuts. So we ask that through these focus groups that I mentioned. 

So we conducted a series of focus groups - four focus groups with a total of 308 consumers in four different cities - Atlanta, Boston, St. Louis, Seattle. And we asked people their attitudes, perceptions, motivations and got some very interesting results. And I will just note for any of you out there who are researchers, that this is a broad kind of qualitative insights we’ve gotten. 

But it is not - it was not a representative sample. It was a very diverse sample. But we would not represent this to be kind of, you know, a very representative perspective on exactly what consumers think across America. It is a - it gives us some sense of what some of the range of ideas and thoughts people have. So we just want to make sure people have that caveat in mind. 

We asked people about rules of thumb. And we got - and we phrased the question very broadly. And we got a wide range of responses in several broad topics. I will note that people interpreted - we did not define the term rules of thumb for consumers. We - I just asked them, you know, what do you think of rules of thumb for financial decision making? 

So we got a very wide range of responses. Some meet that definition of a specific actionable guideline for a specific type of decision. Others were kind of broader - aspirations, goals, common financial wisdom. So we let people kind of define that themselves. So we got a range of responses. And probably none of these will surprise you. 

You will undoubtedly have heard many of these in your own practice or these may be things that you yourself aspire to or encourage your clients to try to do. And so for example, in the area of savings, consumers talked about general savings, things like pay yourself first, save 10% of your income or some other percent. We heard all sorts of numbers. 

But generally try to save some percent of your income. We heard people talk about savings for unexpected circumstances, so things like, you know, have three months of salary in a rainy day fund. Some people said have six months. Some people said have a year. People had different numbers. Three months was the common one. 

Or a specific dollar amount like keep $1000 in an emergency fund. And then we also heard about saving for retirement and the kind of idea - the one we heard the most probably was, you know, take the free money. Maximize your employer matching fund. So, you know, don’t leave money on the table. 

Things like that related to making sure you’re getting, if you have a matched savings account at work, that you’re getting the full employer match. So those are some things on savings. Again, kind of - probably no surprise to anyone. Around spending and budgeting, here’s what we particularly heard, I think you would say kind of broader guidelines as opposed to specific, you know, specific things to do. 

Like people said, live within your means. Some even said live below your means, which I thought was quite interesting. Separate wants from needs. Don’t spend more than you make. A few people said use the left over method which is after you’ve paid all of your bills, whatever you have leftover is, you know, is your spending money for the month. 

And so assorted kind of broad ideas about spending and budgeting. And then lastly, around debt, people had assorted ideas, often more about what they felt was good debt versus bad debt. So many people thought mortgage debt was good debt. They thought student debt was probably good debt, but a lot more mixed feelings these days because of - probably because of the, you know, large student debt load that many folks have. 

More specific rules of thumb or ideas around credit cards, such as stay away from credit cards in general. We heard that from a few people. And then things like pay down the highest interest balance before you pay off the lowest interest. Pay off the smallest debt first. Those really are in some ways, classic rules of thumb. 

They tell you what to do when you’re trying to decide what credit card you’re able to pay. And so those are some of the things that people described. Again, I think all of these are things that you would be familiar with. We did also ask people where did they learn about their rules of thumb. And we heard that obviously people said parents and families, as you would expect. 

Interestingly, they said they both learned positive rules of thumb from their families. But they also, in some cases, learned behaviors and habits to avoid. Some people said, we really try to not do what our parents did or what, you know, certain relatives did. 

Secondly, people also learned through their own experiences and in some cases through their own mistakes, so kind of experiential development of rules of thumb. And then a third common source, again not surprisingly, is that people heard things from the financial media, from newspapers, books, television, different people offering financial guidance in those settings. So that was where they’d heard of it. 

All of that sounds very, you know, nothing surprising. I think the interesting part was when we started to ask people well, did you follow the rules of thumb? How did they affect your behavior? We now know that you know a lot about them or many people knew a lot about them. What do you do with that? 

And what people told us were that they really - a lot of the folks and the folks have said, we have a lot of trouble following these rules of thumb that we know and that we hold to be financial guidance of ourselves. And that in fact people became kind of uncomfortable with the idea that there were universal rules of thumb that would apply to everyone all the time. 

A lot of folks said it was just - it was difficult for them in their current circumstances, to be able to follow a rule of thumb. They wanted to save 10% but they couldn’t right now. They wanted to, you know, manage their debt a certain way but well, right now they had competing priorities. 

And so their rules - the kind of financial guidance or rules of thumb that they heard from parents and from financial media and everywhere else, were great ideas but were not necessarily appropriate for everyone, usually including themselves, depending on the individual circumstances. 

And that what they really wanted were rules or guidelines that were tailored to their own individual circumstances. In order for them to take action, they needed something that was customized. Now obviously rules of thumb by definition, are moving away from a highly optimized customized type of advice. 

But I think what we’re finding is people need something a little more customized than the kind of broad guidance that they often hear from sources of financial ideas. So we also asked well, why did you find these rules hard to stick to? And we heard a number of responses but three kinds of buckets. 

One, unsurprisingly, situational financial hardship. In other words, those are big words that mean I don’t have enough money to meet those goals right now. I have other things going on, I have competing priorities. I may be trying to save for retirement and save for college. I may not have enough money to pay the bills this month so I’m not going to make that saving 10%. 

And so essentially, the situation you’re in now either just generally not having enough money or, you know, specific things like unemployment or, you know, medical bills, making it difficult to stay to the rules that people aspire to follow. A second one, which was really interesting, I had a lot of really interesting stories about this, was what we called being pulled off track by others. 

Meaning that within a family or extended family or some other circumstance like that, that not everybody is following the same guidelines around spending or savings or things like that. And so people talked about issues with, you know, with spouses in some case, or partners having the same financial behaviors all the time or not agreeing on everything. 

People talked a lot about kids and the needs of kids and kids who, you know, asked for stuff and it was hard to say no, and kind of how to manage all that. And so that’s an interesting one because it says that we can’t just tell, you know, good financial guidance to one part of a family. You have to think about the whole family. 

And that really I think, got us thinking about that topic. And then lastly, another thing that we heard about why people have trouble in some cases, was fear of missing out, I guess also known as FOMO, with the idea that I want to stick to these rules, I want to save money. You know, I have these financial goals. But I don’t want to miss anything. My friends are all going out 

And this is certainly something we’ve heard especially amongst younger folks who don’t want to, you know, they want to live their lives and do interesting things. And so it just suggests some - I think some thoughts for all of us about how to help people both still live an interesting life but not violate your own kind of guidelines on what you want to do financially. 

So those were three reasons that we heard about. And so the conclusions that we drew again, so summing up what I’ve just said, is that many consumers talked about - that they knew a lot about financial rules of thumb. They were not lacking knowledge about that, but they were frustrated by what they saw, sometimes unrealistic goals that they heard in the media or heard from family members or other places, because they were struggling with these competing priorities. 

And that consumers - a lot of consumers really felt that the financial rules can’t be applied equally to all people. And that many of these rules are too broad and too ill defined to really be helpful in the moment when they’re trying to make decisions. And so our kind of proposal or idea coming out of that was to give a different name to this, which is financial rules of thumb customized to their personal situation, which we called financial rules to live by, meaning a rule you actually use as opposed to a rule of thumb that may or may not be appropriate to you. 

And so in just taking that idea, a few things we’ve developed for financial educators and consumers to use. First, we just put all of this into a - there’s a full report based on what I just talked about and I showed you the screen shot further up at the top. But again, that you can find it at that Web page I’ve talked about, www.ConsumerFinance.gov/Adult-Financial-Education. 

So there’s a longer report describing the findings that I just talked about. And then there is a two pager. I just have a screen shot. You may not be able to see it clearly. I’ll talk about what’s on it in a minute. Just with some ideas for financial educators that’s just kind of summarizing this and giving some ideas on what one could do. 

And that I have kind of summarized here sort of how can you help? As a financial educator, one way to kind of take these findings and apply them is to, when you’re sitting down with consumers you can review what kinds of rules of thumb people know. They can say I know I’ve heard I should save 10%. Or I know I should have six months of emergency savings. 

And because that tends to be intimidating to people, these rules that they’ve heard that they can’t follow, you know, we suggest that you may want to reassure consumers that these common rules of thumb are starting points. And I think the sense we got from the focus groups is that people are - find it comforting to know they’re not the only ones who aren’t following the common financial guidance that they hear in the newspapers or on the radio. 

And letting people know that others have this issue too and that these common rules of thumb are starting points. And it’s more important to establish realistic goals that they can follow. And so really as a financial educator, you can help consumers create their own financial rules of thumb based on their goals and situations. 

You can brainstorm with consumers about how to make their personal financial rules concrete, visible and handy. And there it’s really building on, and again a lot of you probably know this, building on research that really shows that for all that it seems like writing something down or sticking something on the fridge shouldn’t be necessary, right? 

If we have goals we should just make them happen. But surprisingly, people really do - when they make a promise to themselves, or a pledge to themselves or they write something down and put it on the fridge, small things like that can make a difference. And so financial educators can help people create rules to live by that are customized to their own needs and then making them visible or handy. 

And I’ll show you a couple of worksheets that may help people do that, on the next couple of slides. One other just little finding in our research, was that a lot of people seem to find rules of thumb easier to think about in the context of future oriented goals, like retirement or education as opposed to kind of day to day financial management. 

And so that might be a good place to start in helping people adopt new rules to live by. Not that they shouldn’t also have rules to live by for day to day financial topics, but it may be a way to kind of ease people in by getting them to think about longer term topics and setting rules for that that they can follow. 

So as part of this research, we have created three worksheets. I’ll put screenshots up - they may not be that easy to read. I’ll just kind of say what they are. But again, it’s the idea that we wanted to give people something that they could use, consumers could use and a financial educator could share, by helping them around three topics. 

And again, one could do this on any of a number of topics but we chose three that were, you know, came up a lot. So savings, credit, which didn’t come up as much in the focus groups, but the bureau does a lot of work on that. And we know it’s important to people. And then spending and budgeting. And so these are a two page worksheet, again all available on our Web site for downloading, printing, which sort of describes the one I’m showing right now that’s called my savings rule to live by. 

And it has a little bit of text saying common rule of thumb - save 10% of your income. And then underneath it there is some text again, maybe a little hard to read on your screen, saying we know people know this rule, but people may find it, you know, hard to implement in their own situations. So we suggest that you set up your own rule to help you kind of make that concrete and meet your own goals. 

And on the back side, on the right side of the screen here, there’s a little three step process to set a savings goal where it just gives you a little bit of very light touch guidance on how you might want to think about what your goal is, how much you want to save and then whether you want to save, you know, weekly, monthly. 

You can fill in a few little numbers there. And then at the end it says make a promise to yourself. Take action on your rule. And it’s just a little signature line that says I will use my unique rule, live by to help me meet my savings goal. And you can sign it and then you can stick it up no your fridge or, you know, mail it to yourself or whatever. 

And again, nothing revolutionary here, but we think that may help people just the act of creating this rule, and using this worksheet may help trigger people to think hard about their goals and how they can achieve them. And then similarly, we have two others here. The second one is my credit rule to live by worksheet. 

It’s really around credit reports and scores. But we didn’t want the title to be so long. And it’s really just, you know, people al probably know that it’s a good idea to check your credit report once a year, if not more often. And so this does the same kind of thing to say you can check it once a year, here’s how to do it. 

You can check it every four months if you go to each of the three different credit bureaus. And so there is information on this worksheet on where to go to get that, to either do it via www.AnnualCreditReport.com or you can mail in a request. And again, it says set a date and - so it gives a place for you to set a date, either once a year or every three months, four months or however you want to structure it. 

Explains how to do it and then you sign it and hang it up. And it’s meant to be a sort of reminder. So there are a few tips around that. Again, very simple but we’re hoping the act of using this may encourage consumers to actually take action. And then the third and final one - this one was a little harder because there’s not a sort of single spending rule. 

But we took a bit of a complicated rule that people had brought up on the 50/20/30 rule around your sort of mandatory bills or needs, savings and debt payments and then the sort of your wants or flexible spending. And so for those for whom that framework makes sense, we have a little worksheet where you can actually try to quantify. 

Now you really would want a longer budget worksheet to figure all of this out. But again, it’s meant to get people thinking about what do they spend every month on, you know, bills and debts and things they need to pay. And then how much money do they think they have for flexible spending? And then breaking that into either a percent or amount of money each month for wants. 

So you try - get idea sot limit - decide how much you want to spend on flexible things, things you want and then set a dollar amount for that for a week or month. And then you have that number in your head that you will try to stick to and then again, you make this promise to yourself and sign it. 

So this - these are the three worksheets we created. People could do any of a number of things like this around other rules. And we encourage financial educators and consumers to do that. These are meant as kinds of models people can use or can adapt if they want to try this method with other kinds of financial rules that people want to follow or other goals that they want to set 

So I’m going to sort of stop here and sum up and say I do think that, you know, the big idea here is really that - around kind of goal setting is that people find general common financial rules often intimidating and therefore they may do nothing. 

And so the idea I think is that if we can help people figure out what is essential about the rules, what’s the underlying principle and turn it into something they can actually do day to day and then kind of make a promise to themselves or make a pledge, that that can help people as they kind of start out on their journey to meeting their financial goals. 

And I hope this is something that people can really - again, I think a lot of this, you know, when you hear it you’ll say oh yes, that kind of makes sense. I see that in my practice. We hope that some of these tools can help people to help their clients actually take action on some of these things. 

So the nice thing is, as we are starting to try to feature more work from other people is that there are of course other organizations who have done this type of thing already, one of which is the wonderful America Saves campaign. And so we have invited today a guest speaker, Nancy Register from the Consumer Federation of America, America Saves Program, to just give you a quick overview of what they do and some of their tools that you can use. 

Similar idea around kind of pledging to help consumers set achievable goals. And before I turn it to Nancy I’m just going to note, if anybody has any quick questions they want to ask, you can use the Q&A function if you’re in the WebEx in the online part. You can send a question through Q&A that we will read and can - well relay to speaker - I am the speaker. I could relay to myself or to Nancy. 

And then once Nancy is done speaking, we will open it up for voice questions as well. So again, you have two ways to ask questions, either through the Q&A function on the WebEx or voice once we are done with the speakers. So with that, I’m very excited to have Nancy Register here with us. And I will turn it over to Nancy. Nancy, are you there? 

Yes, I’m here. Thanks Irene. 

Great. 

So I want to thank Irene and team at CFPB, for inviting us to be a part of this webinar today. And I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you all and hope to start a conversation about how we can promote and support good savings behavior. Because that is after all, what America Saves is about. So the first screen is just a little bit of context for - and remember, I can’t - I’m going to have to say next slide here, because I can’t control these slides. 

So a little bit of context for who is doing this. The America Saves campaign is an initiative of the Consumer Federation of America which is located in Washington, DC. It was founded in 1968 and it is a pro - it is made up of pro-consumer organizations that range from consumer reports and AARP, down to small electric coops or credit unions and other grass roots organizations. 

It is a - it is organized around providing information, education and advocacy that protects consumers from an array of issues. America Saves is in the education advocacy - I mean education research and information bucket of CFA. And we are really very pleased about the progress so far of America Saves. 

So America Saves is an initiative to motivate and support primarily low to moderate income households, but really everybody, to save money, reduce debt and build wealth. And this is a research based initiative that uses the principles of social marketing and behavioral economics to change behavior, particularly around savings - financial behavior, particularly around savings. 

And the America Saves Week - hopefully if you’ve not heard of America Saves, you’ve heard of America Saves Week, which begins on the 4th of - Monday - the fourth Monday in February every year. It’s an annual opportunity for organizations to promote good, financial and savings behavior. 

And also a chance for individuals to assess their own savings status. And we look at this as the kickoff of the America Saves year every year. So Irene wanted to talk - wanted me to talk to you a little bit about a tool that we used and have used since the beginning of the campaign which really launched nationally in 2001, 2002. We now have about 68 local campaigns around the country. Maybe there is one in the area where you are. 

And we have national initiatives such as Military Saves and America Saves for Young Workers. So knowing that it is based on research that we have done over the years, what we have found is that there are keys to successful savings. 

And as we find these keys and as we find this research information, we use this to develop our program both from an infrastructure standpoint and also from a messaging standpoint. So the next slide. Thanks. So what we know is that people with a plan near - save - are nearly twice as likely to spend less than they earn, have a sufficiency emergency savings and be making good or excellent savings products. 

We also - progress. Sorry. So the other thing that is key to this is that we also know that not only is a plan important but if you have a goal you are - also save more successfully. So when you think about this and when you think about what we are all trying to do, I think we can all agree that what we’re trying to do is change behavior. 

And so how do we accomplish this in the financial arena? So when we think about behavior change I think there are three components that have to - we have to have present in order for the behavior change to take place. The first is that people have to have the information. They have to be educated. They have to have the knowledge that they need, in order to take whatever action we want. 

But knowledge itself isn’t enough. And I was at a meeting at the FDIC yesterday, talking about mobile financial services. And one of the things - the descriptions of what needs to be done I thought, was really quite wonderful. And it said and the way they said it was knowledge isn’t self-executing. 

So it needs to be facilitated. The information needs to be facilitated whether it’s the use of a product, the actual performance of the action or the behavior change needs to be facilitated. And so if financial education itself has to have another component in order for financial behavior to change, people need to be motivated to act on this information. 

And then they also need the opportunity or the access to take financial action. Because if there’s no way for them to effectuate the change, then all of the knowledge and motivation in the world is not going to make any difference. And so one of the ways that we decided that we could help people start to take financial action, was to create a way that individuals could join America Saves. 

And really what my intention here for you all is not so much to - although I would hope that everybody you provide financial education to, would take the America Saves pledge. What I really want you to do is - or hope that you will get out of this is see ways that you can apply what we’ve learned about our America Saves pledge, to add onto or to add value to what you all are doing. 

And this is really very much in line with the rules to live by, particularly the savings one. You’ll see that it looks very similar. Next slide please. So we created, when we launched America Saves almost 15 years ago now, we created what was then called an enrollment form. 

And people had to give their name and address, their telephone number. Back then emails weren’t quite so important but they had to give their email. And they also had to tell us what they wanted to save for, how much they wanted to save, how long they wanted to save. They had to give us other contact information so we could reach them. 

And they - we also asked them to identify a financial institution, where they would actually make a deposit or open an account. Well as you can imagine, this form was hard to get people to fill out and it was - oftentimes, was off-putting in the extreme. And it was - it created a barrier in fact, to participating or to signing up to be an America Saver. 

And it was mostly in local campaigns. So this would be a Cleveland Saver or a Philadelphia Saver and was usually tagged onto the end of a workshop where saving was an important part of what they were trying to get people to do. So over the years, we have tried to reduce the barriers to having people take the pledge. But to continue to provide the information and the action items that helped promote the action that we wanted to have take place. 

And so we have evolved over the years from an enrollment form to a sign up form to a registration form to an America Saves pledge, which essentially says I pledge to save money, reduce debt and build wealth over time. I will encourage my family and friends to do the same. And then it just asks three questions. 

I want to reach a savings goal in order to and then create an emergency fund - buy a car; purchase a house; save for retirement. I pledge to save zero - or not zero. I pledge to save a certain amount for a certain number of months. And at the end of this time I will have saved - and the pledge form does the math for them. 

And when you look at this, what you see is really the very simplest of financial plans that includes a goal. And for us that is key to taking the first step toward taking financial action, which is what America Saves tries to encourage and support and motivate. 

So the pledge form is online. It’s mainly an electronic type of process. But we do have paper pages like the rules to live by form here for Saves - for saving that Irene talked about. But in order for us to go to scale and social marketing tells us that we need to reach 10% to 40% of the population in order to make a change, and normative behavior change, we have to reach a lot of people. 

And so we had to figure out and build in a scalable infrastructure from the very beginning. So this type of action is customizable to the individual because we know and Irene reinforced this earlier, that they want to bring this down to the level where they can see themselves doing this. And so it had to be relevant to them. 

So we didn’t care what they were saving for. They just had to identify something that they wanted to save for. And then we also - you can also have - like I said, if you want to use paper forms, we also provide paper forms that do the same thing. And then they have to give us some way to communicate with them. And for all of America Savers, it is the email. 

And so when you’re - when we were talking to young workers, we were trying to figure out what motivates people to want to take the pledge? And they said that they saw that they could use the pledge as a tool because they thought then they would be more successful in working toward their goal if they had pledge to themselves to save, identify a goal and had an amount in mind that they were working toward. 

And research that we have just done recently and will be releasing very soon, you all are sort of getting a preview of this - shows that young workers in summer jobs programs who had direct deposit and saved a portion of their paycheck, were still saving eight months later. We did a longitudinal study and were - and over a majority of them said that they would continue to save during their next summer jobs program or as they moved into the regular workforce. 

So the pledge is fine. But we all know where good intentions lead us sometimes. Right? And the pledge to yourself really is good intention. So the next slide shows you that it’s really important after you provide them with a way to take that first step, that introduction to financial action, that you create ways to support their behavior and to - at least for us, we discovered this. 

And it’s not only important for the individual to hear the information and supportive work that we do, the supportive resources that we provide, but it’s also important to support and to inform the organizations that they may be working with, involved with, (volunteer) for, receiving services from. 

And so we have created kind of a two tiered after the pledge, process that we provide both organizations and individuals. But for organizations, if you signed up to - as an American Saver, if you took the America Saves pledge and identified say an emergency fund as your savings goal, then you would receive six months’ worth of emails, specifically about that goal. 

It would tailor to you; it would recognize that you had - were saving for an emergency fund; and that you were going to be saving for a certain amount of time. And that we would be sending you information and resources that would help you to save for that emergency fund. And then we also provide a monthly eWealth coach on a variety of topics, not just specific tailored to that person, goal based emails. 

And then we have - four times a year we send out a newsletter that has stories and tips and the information that’s going on more generally, in the savings arena. We also send out dynamic emails. Did you meet your goal? Happy Anniversary. What are you going to save for next? So we can continue the conversation with them about their savings goals. 

And then emails are great and people get them. But we also know that not huge numbers of people open them. And so what we have also created is a way to follow up with individuals via texts and these texts are also goal based. They get about oh, three to four a month. They are tips and reminders. We also have surveys and quizzes that we send out to them during - in this amount of time. 

They have to sign up for these. But research has shown that people get - that get regular reminders who have identified a goal and a plan or - to save, actually save about 6-1/2% more I think. This was the early research that IPA did. So we are sending these to about 7000 people a month and have now just been able to send them - start sending them to the service members and their families. 

So I think that what we have learned is that this step that helps people start to take financial action on their own terms in their own way, has been very beneficial. The feedback that we get is positive. We know that they are - they believe that they are more confident and have been more successful in their savings efforts after having signed up. 

Or for you all maybe have signed up for - or taken a pledge like this for whatever reason they want to. And that the pledge is a core part of what we do for individuals for America Saves. And so we - America Saves really applauds the CFPB for these rules to live by and their worksheets like this. Because we think it’s really a very important part. 

And it gives us that combination of information, motivation and execution and financial action that we know is key. We have signed up about 500,000 - over 500,000 people have taken the America Saves pledge over the last 15 - 12 years. And we are looking forward to reaching tens of millions at some point. But would be happy to work with any of you if you’ve got questions with us, about America Saves or America Saves Week. That’s it Irene. Thank you so much. 

Great. Thank you very much Nancy. That was wonderful. And I love how our efforts really tie together nicely. And the follow up stuff you guys, the motivation support is really terrific. And I think that’s something that any financial educator can figure out ways to do just through their own, you know, interactions with clients and ways to kind of set up that sort of ongoing follow up and motivation. 

Yes. 

We are now going to - we now have about 15, just under 15 minutes for questions. So I will say again, you can email - I have one question that’s been emailed and I’ll read it in a minute. But you can either email through the Q&A, the little Q&A function in the webinar, or Operator, can you tell us how to ask voice questions, phone questions? 

Yes. Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you’d like to ask a question, please press star 1. You’ll be prompted to record your name. To withdraw your request, please press star 2. One moment please to see if we have any questions or comments. 

All right. So again, star 1 and then the operator can unmute your line. So I’m going to just read this first question I’ve gotten via the Q&A tab here, which is someone saying the first question I always get is my retirement plan allows me to take either a lump sum at retirement or an annuity. Is there a rule of thumb that can be used with that question? That is a great question. 

I can’t - the - we can’t really answer that at the bureau in the sense that that is going to be dependent on the plan and the person’s kind of preferences. So I wish I could say more. There is - for anyone who is offered the lump sum, we do actually have a fairly recent resource coming out of our Older Americans office called - that is a guide to lump sum distributions. 

It essentially gives some thoughts about if you’re going to do that, you know, that’s not quite right - on whether or not to do that. So I would suggest you look at that. And I will see if I can come up for the link for that. But it is on the Older Americans page at www.CFPB.gov. Nancy, do you - you may be more able to answer that question, not being a CFPB employee. 

Do you have a response that America Saves might give or CFA? 

Well we have - CFA not so much. America Saves has a retirement section on our www.AmericaSaves.org Web site that you can point people to. I think the needle over the last few years, has been because longevity has been becoming such an issue, has been sort of tilting towards the annuity type of option. But certainly both of them need to be considered for the individual’s specific situation. 

And I’m happy to - if you would like to email me and register at www.ConsumerFed.org, I can point you toward all of the retirement resources that we also use to answer questions like this. 

Right. And not only does it - I would just - not only does it depend on the individual’s preferences, longevity and all, but it also can depend on the particular structure of the annuity…

Right. 

…and/or retirement plan. It depends on fees or things like that. So not - there’s not always one is better than the other I think. 

No. No, it’s not…

Yes. The longevity is a real issue. And so a lot of people are worried and have - we are starting to hear more and more stories about people outliving their retirement nest egg. 

Yes. Yes. And so I just - I did look this up. So the CFPB does have a - something called the pension - the guide for navigating pension payouts, lump sum payouts. I’m trying to find the exact title here. So if you - I actually just Googled to find it, since I don’t have our Web site open in front of me, CFPB lump sum guide. 

And it got me to the blog and the guide that has some information about that. So that was what I - one way you can look at - you can get our resources about that. Great. So let me ask the operator, do we have any voice questions? 

I show no questions. And again, as a reminder, if you do have any questions or comments, please press star 1 and record your name. 

Great. AND I would actually be interested if people have rules of thumb that they have been using with clients or if they have thoughts on what they hear from people about what sort of rules of thumb they’ve been interested in using or ones that they find are particularly effective or any thoughts like that. We’d love to hear that. 

Nancy, while we’re waiting to see if we have any other questions, so organizations can obviously use your materials, is that right, and become America Saves partners? Do you want to tell us a little bit about how that would work, if any of the folks on the webinar are interested in using some of your materials? 

So in addition to sending out information directly to the saver themselves, through the electronic means that I was talking about, we also communicate directly with our organizational partners, our participating organizations. And that is partner updates. We send out partner updates about what’s going on. We also have partner resource tips that we send out every six weeks or so, that are organized around a certain savings theme or topic. 

And that includes a newsletter article that you can edit and use in any way you would like to use that. And it has social media Tweets and Facebook posts and other types of resources that may be useful to you on that issue. What we want to make sure folks do, is keep savings - and for us it’s savings, front of mind, throughout the year, so we are in communication with these organizations all the time. 

And of course participate if you can, in America Saves Week and sign up to be a participating organization in America Saves Week and then you will also automatically get the information that we send out throughout the year. There is a participating on www.AmericaSaves.org. You can sign up to be a participating organization, which essentially gets you all of the organizational material that we send out, for your use to your constituents whoever they are. 

Great. Great. I have another emailed question. I’m just going to quickly note again if you want to ask a voice question, it’s star 1. And the operator can unmute you and you can talk directly to us. So I just got an email or a Q&A question here. Are we going to receive a copy of the presentation deck? So two things - if you would like to see the deck, if you email the CFPB FinEx box, I can send you a PDF of it. 

And again, that email address is CFPB_FinEx@CFPB.gov, CFPB_FinEX@CFPB.gov. Also, this webinar has - is being recorded. So you can also - it’ll - it usually takes a couple of weeks for us to post it on the financial - the adult financial education page that I referenced earlier. We have an archive or all of the webinars. You can listen to any of them, so you can also of course look at the deck once it’s recorded up. It’ll be a YouTube video. 

And also I’ll note that all the resources that I talked about, the paper, the consumer voices on financial rules to live by paper, the two page kind of digest for financial educators which just summarized some of those steps that you might want to follow in working with clients and the three kind of worksheets - the savings, credit reports and spending and budgeting worksheets, are all available on our Web site, www.ConsumerFinance.gov/Adult-Financial-Education. 

The adult financial education page was again, lists all of the different tools and resources in its - those five things - the paper, digest and three worksheets are fairly near the top of that page. If you just scroll down a little bit you’ll see a number of links to different resources that’ll take you there. And there’s a short blog on the rules of - financial reels to live by as well. 

So all of that is there. But again, if you want to - if you actually want the deck, just email CFPB_FinEx@CFPB.gov. That’s the same address if you want to sign up for FinEx, if you aren’t signed up, or if you are not getting the emails. We have a few people who’s - things are bouncing back as undeliverable so I’m trying to figure out - if anyone’s not getting it, let me know and we can see if we can figure out why that is. 

Okay. Let me ask again - Operator, do we have any other voice questions at this point? 

Yes, we do. We have a question from (Yolanda Maker). Your line is open. 

Yes, good morning. Thank you for the webinar. It’s excellent. I wanted to know how an organization could become a partnership that you spoke of. 

With America Saves (Yolanda)? 

Yes. 

Well you can go to www.AmericaSaves.org and sign up as a participating organization. And if you are interested in working with us more closely, please send me an email, NRegister@ConsumerFed.org. And I’ll be happy to - we’ll be happy to contact you and work more closely with you. 

So that’s NRegister@Consumer...

Fed, F-E-D. Frank Edward Dog dot org. 

Fred Edward Dog? 

Yes. 

And I assume Nancy that the America Saves Web site you just mentioned, you could probably also find you through that? Or is there any…

You can. You can for sure. And also if - I just looked at my slides and realized I didn’t have any of our Web sites on there. But if you just type in America Saves at the top, it’ll take you straight to the www.AmericaSaves.org Web site. And yes, all of our contact information is on that Web site too (Yolanda). Thank you for asking. 

Thank you. 

And just to note, Nancy, it is - I assume it is - as you guys are a nonprofit, its’ a free and kind of relatively open process of becoming a partner…

Totally. 

…organization. 

Yes, totally. Yes. That’s exactly the case. 

Great. And I don’t - you guys have - how many partner organizations do you have now? I know your conference…

Yes. Well we have almost 2000 that get our information. But we work with organizations particularly that are interested in specific ideas or campaigns or initiatives and also government agencies. So we communicate with a lot of different types of organizations. An we’re always looking for folks who deliver financial education to hook up with. So this is terrific. 

All right. Oops, I look at my set of emailed questions and someone said for the email address for the deck, that I talked too fast. Let me tell you, that is something I have been told many times in my life. So the email address - I actually should have had a final slide here that said it, is CFPB - and I’m also going to send it directly to this person who is asking - CFPB_FinEx@CFPB.gov. 

So CFPB_FinEx@CFPB.gov. CFPB for Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And I am also sending it just to the person who sent that question. Great. So sorry about that. I tried to slow down. And it is hard for me. Operator, do we have any final questions as we near the top of the hour? 

I show no further questions. 

Okay, great. Well I think we will stop now, with two minutes to spare. So thank you everybody for participating in this webinar. It was great to - we had a good group here, a big group. And we are excited that people are interested in this topic. We’re very happy to have had Nancy Registers with us to talk about the America Saves work and how it can be used along with some of the resources the bureau has. 

So again, thank you very much. Thank you to Nancy. If people have questions or follow up, you can send it to CFPB_FinEx@CFPB.gov. And I think we are finished. Thank you very much everybody. Have a good long weekend. 

Thank you. 

This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participation. You may disconnect at this time. 


END