CFPB FinEx webinar on Your Money Your Goals Resources

May 24, 2018
1:00 pm CT


Coordinator:	Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode until the question and answer session of today’s conference. At that time you may press star then 1 on your touchtone phone to ask a question. 

I would like to inform all parties that today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections you may disconnect at this time. 

I would now like to turn the conference over to Irene Skricki. Thank you. You may begin. 

Irene Skricki:	Great. Thank you very much. And welcome everybody to our FinEx webinar today. I appreciate everyone turning out just before a long weekend. So we are going to jump into our topic today of some of the new Your Money Your Goals resources that are available. 

First, a quick disclaimer. We always start off all of our calls with this. This presentation is being made by Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection representatives on behalf of the Bureau but it does not constitute legal interpretation, guidance, or advice. And any opinions or views stated are the presenter’s own and may not represent the Bureau’s views. 

What I’m going to do quickly is just say a few words about FinEx and Bureau so everyone’s on the same page. I know many of you are familiar with this. Then once we’re done with that, we’ll jump into our topic for today with our special guest presenter. 

As many of you know, the mission of the Bureau is to regulate the offering and provision of consumer financial products or services and to educate and empower consumers to make better informed financial decisions. And it’s of course that latter part of our mission statement around educating and empowering consumers, which is what we’re talking about today and what the work of the Office of Financial Education and our sister offices are. 

I’ll just note that we don’t have our org chart up here right now, but in addition to the Office of Financial Education where I sit, our presenter today is from the Office of Financial Empowerment which works with economically vulnerable consumers. 

Just quickly, FinEx -- and this is a very busy slide but don’t worry. We won’t actually really talk about it. I always put it up just to show that there’s lots of interesting and exciting things that FinEx is doing. The Financial Education Exchange is our way to get our tools and materials out to financial educators of all types, including all of you on the phone hopefully. And also learn back from people what’s working and what sort of things you’re finding. So we do webinars like this. We do newsletters. We do convenings and a number of other things.

And importantly, if any of you on this call are not signed up -- and probably most of you are -- if you are, you will get a newsletter every month called CFPB FinEx News and Updates. But if you’re not, you can sign up either by emailing our inbox CFPB_FinEx F-I-N-E-X at CFPB dot gov. Or if you go to our web page, there’s now a signup box where you can put your email address in. 

And just to show you our web page, the resources for financial educators page is a place where you can get all of the different tools and resources that the Bureau has. And you can also connect to other offices’ pages such as Financial Empowerment, who we’ll hear from today, and get all of the different things that we have available. That URL is consumerfinance.gov/adult-financial-education. And we’ll have that up on the screen again later if anybody wants to see it. 

	And I also  want to mention that we also have a discussion group on LinkedIn, a financial education discussion group where all of you are invited to join if you’re not already in it. And we will both post our own materials but also, we encourage all of you to post, to put up questions, to put up resources. So it’s a way where everyone can share their stuff. And it’s a nice opportunity for everybody. 

So that is a little bit of background on FinEx. Again, hopefully anyone who isn’t in it will join. And this is almost our 30th webinar. I think we’ve been doing these for three years almost every month. And I’m very happy to be featuring Your Money, Your Goals resources this month. 

We did a webinar on this way back when we started in 2015 but since then Your Money, Your Goals has put out lots of new tools and resources and companion guides and booklets and interesting things, which many of you may not know about or if you do know about them and want to learn more about them. So we invited our colleagues to come and speak. And so Yuliya Rzad has joined me today to talk about this.

Before I turn it over to her, just quickly -- and many of you have been in these webinars before. If you want the PowerPoint, we are happy to send it to you. But you need to email me to get it. If you put it in the WebEx little Q&A function, it will disappear when we finish the webinar and I can’t write down all of the email addresses as we go. So if you email the FinEx inbox CFPB_FinEx@CFPB.gov and just say I want the PowerPoint, I will send it out to you. And again, we’ll mention that again at the end. 

And also if you have any questions as we go, you can put it into the Q&A function or the chat function within WebEx and then we will open for voice questions near the end. So you will also be able to ask questions that way. 

So with all of that, I will turn it over to Yuliya and we’ll go to her first slide. And Yuliya, we are very happy to have you here. So it’s all yours. 

Yuliya Rzad:	Thank you. I am really happy to be with all of you this afternoon. I want to start off with just talking very briefly about the Office of Financial Empowerment, which is the office where I work within the CFPB. And the office that owns the Your Money, Your Goals resources and materials. 

Like Irene mentioned, our primary focus is to work with economically vulnerable populations. And our goal is to increase financial well-being among those populations. We see that through building capacity of organizations that work directly with them, advancing research that helps organizations implement financial education, financial empowerment strategies, and expanding inclusion of vulnerable populations in the financial marketplace. Next slide. 

Your Money Your Goals was initially created as a toolkit. And if you happened to have listened in 2015 to the webinar, you would have been told about our toolkit for social service providers and then we came out with several more. 

We have since scaled back on our toolkit and we’ve created just one. It is a toolkit designed to be used by organizations that provide social services, by faith-based organizations, financial institutions, legal aid offices -- basically by any organization that has a direct contact with a person who would benefit from financial education. 

The idea of the toolkit is to provide information on a variety of topics, provide tools that a frontline staff person can use with the person that they’re working with to solve an immediate problem related to their finances and for the frontline staff person to be able to pick exactly what they need for that particular moment, for that particular person. 

The toolkit itself is quite large. It’s more than 300 pages but it is not a curriculum. It’s designed so that you pick what you need depending on who you’re meeting with. 

We launched the toolkit in 2015. Since then we have trained more than 25,000 frontline staff on how to use the toolkit and its tools. And we estimate that they have reached nearly one million consumers with information with our toolkit. 


Irene Skricki:	So Yuliya after this call maybe we can reach the last 20,000 to get us to a million. 

Yuliya Rzad:	Really hoping. 

Irene Skricki:	Right. So with everyone’s help, we can get there. 

Yuliya Rzad:	This is just a little brief overview of the topics covered in the toolkit. It is pretty comprehensive. We start with talking about goal setting and saving work through kind of the cash flow money management process of checking your income and spending, checking and then figuring out how to create a cash flow budget based on what you have tracked. 

But we also do a great deal of explaining and talking about debt and issues around debt, credit reports and scores, financial services, and consumer protection around identity theft, around scams, and potential fraud that occurs. We try to explain, red flags for people to look for, and try to help people, guide them through a process. If they feel like they have been the victim of identity theft, what they need to do and if they want to protect themselves from becoming a victim, what they can do. 

So the toolkit has each of these topics in a separate module. And after the explanatory information about the topics -- which is designed to be used for the service provider, for the frontline staff person there are tools related to each topic that could be used with a person that they’re meeting with, a person that they’re helping. 

The idea being that most of these conversations happen in the context of some other program, some other offering, some other purpose but that financial issues always come up no matter what you’re talking about. You can be talking about housing. You can be talking about a legal problem. You can be talking about health care. Almost always, financial issues come up and we train staff to be able to weave the particular information in toolkit weave those tools into their conversation that they’re already having so that it’s not a supplementary service. It becomes integrated with what they are already doing. 

The toolkit is available in English and Spanish -- both downloadable and in print. It’s also available in Traditional Mandarin but in download only form. You can find all of that on our website. And we’ll get to the link a little bit later in the presentation. Next slide, Irene. 

We created a toolkit and the toolkit is supposed to - it’s very broad. And because it does not cover unique needs of a particular population, we decided there are some groups of people, some populations that when it comes to financial issues need more tailored information, have specific needs that the toolkit is too broad to meet. 

And so what we decided to do was create companion guides to the toolkit for three different population groups. One is for Native communities, one is for people with disabilities, and one is for the reentry population. 

These companion guides are designed to work in tandem with the toolkit. They more or less do not duplicate any of the tools or information in the toolkit. Instead, what they do is they add on information that is specific to that population in the topic areas already addressed by the toolkit. So next slide, please. 

The first one I want to talk to you about is the Focus on Native Communities Guide. We call them companion guides. And when we developed this guide as well as the other two, we worked very closely with expert panels designed to ensure that the information we are providing is relevant to the population we’re trying to address, that that information is written in a way that is culturally sensitive, and that the tools that we added to help this population are tools that address issues that are important to them. 

We did this with each of our guides, including the Native Communities Guide -- bringing in expert tribes, those Department of Social Services from various tribes. And so when we present this product, we do so with the hope that it’s an accurate representation of the type of financial empowerment information that is most useful to these communities. 

If you go to the next slide, please, the Native Communities Guide has a pretty lengthy introductory section that tries to ground financial empowerment in a cultural context that makes sense for Native communities. We talk a lot about cultural and emotional influences on financial decision-making in the toolkit and we talk about it even more in this guide. And we also have a pretty lengthy section about how to implement Your Money, Your Goals in Native communities at the beginning of this guide -- going into very great detail. Even a little budget for how much it would cost to set up a training on the toolkit and the guide. 

This is feedback we received from our expert panel about information that would be important to include so that the guide could be used actively by people who work in and serve Native communities. And so we listened and we made sure that we included everything that they felt that they needed in order to be successful. Next slide. 

This slide covers some of the additional tools in the companion guide that are specific to Native communities. Some of them are reframing or revisions of tools in our toolkit. The first one you see is about using values to set goals. And it takes our goal setting tool and brings into it the very context of value-based decision making in Native communities. 

We also have a tool about saving and asset limits that is tailored with information about particular asset limit rules that apply to people living in Native communities when they receive particular types of funding streams. We have a tool that helps youth start to make decisions about what to do with their Individual Indian Money IIM Account. They all receive them when they turn 18 and it is a great opportunity to make decisions about what to save, what to spend, and what your goals are around having those funds and what you want to do with them. 

We have a tool that addresses financial planning on an annual cycle because so many people in Native communities have seasonal income streams. Their monthly cash flow varies greatly depending on what month of the year it is. And so we created a budget tool that helps them take into account those peaks and valleys and look at it from a year-long perspective. 

We also created several tools in partnership with our Office for Older Americans that talks about financial empowerment in elders. This is a topic that we learned was very important to Native communities and we wanted to talk about elder financial exploitation, getting help for when you see it happening and what to do in your community to prevent it. So we have several tools that talk through those issues and how to deal with them. 

Next slide, please. 

So the next guide I want to talk about is our focus on people with disabilities guide. Like the Native Communities Guide, we developed in close partnership with an expert panel that was comprised of organizations that serve people with disabilities. It was representative of different types of organizations, serving people on different levels of the disability spectrum, serving people with physical disabilities, serving people with mental disabilities, trying to make sure that we involve the community that we are trying to serve in creating any kind of document that we hope will be useful to them. Next slide. 

Just like the Native Communities Guide, this companion guide also starts with a little bit of grounding and kind of trying to put financial decision making and financial empowerment in the context of the disabilities community. We have some introductory tools involved in helping people walk through, how to start having the money conversation with people with disabilities and how to tailor that conversation depending on what kind of disability and the extent of disability. Next slide.

And then we have ten tools that are created to again kind of add information to the tools in our existing toolkit that are very specific for the needs of people with disabilities. So we have a tool in our setting goals module about figuring out how to pay for assistive devices. Those devices are often very expensive but there’s also lots of resources available for, you know, things like low interest loans or zero interest loans and for purchasing this kind of equipment. 

In our saving module we have an additional tool that talks about an able account, which is a tax deferred savings account that you can set up if you are a person with a disability. We have a tool in our checking income and benefits module that talks about how to estimate SSI payments that really can show people that you don’t have to think that you will lose your benefits if you start working, but you can work and still continue to receive SSI, which is Supplemental Security Income. 

	And this tool helps you kind of balance out, do the calculation to see if I make this much money from a job what will my SSI payment become. If I make a certain amount more or less, how will that affect me SSI payment? So that you can make really informed decisions about working and understand that there is no reason why you have to be unemployed in order to consider receiving SSI. 

We have our income and benefits tracker and the income module and our spending tracker and the paying bills module were recreated here. These tools in this guide -- as are all the tools for all three of our guides -- are you’re able to download each tool electronically and fill it out in a PDF document that are a fillable form. So not all the tools in the toolkit are like that yet. We’re working on making that change but for the time being, you know, it’s very important that the tools in the People with Disabilities Guide are fully accessible. And so some of the tools we took we didn’t make too many changes to them. We just made it so that they are compliant with Section 508 and so that if you are using a screen reader, you can use the tool fully in the way that it was intended to be used. 

We also have a very simple monthly budget tool. It is not a cashflow tool. This monthly budget tool is really designed for people who have one or two sources of income, who have very simple kind of income and expenses stream so they could just get a basic picture of what their month looks like. It’s usually designed for people who are on fixed incomes where their incomes arrive month to month and it is usually the exact same amount every single month. Next slide, Irene.

In module six, in our debt module, we recreated again some of our tools from the toolkit designed so that they were fully accessible for people using screen readers. And then in our consumer module called Protecting Your Money, we created an additional tool that helps people identify financial abuse and exploitation in the context of the disability community.

Like Native communities, these are populations that are sometimes targeted for identity theft and we thought it was very important to include tools that help people identify this and know what they can do about it when they see it. Next slide. 

Finally our last guide is Focus on Reentry and it is designed for the reentry population -- people in the justice system who are on their way out, transitioning out of the justice system, people who have just left the correctional institution. Next slide. 

And Focus on Reentry looks and feels a little bit different than the other companion guides, but its purpose is the same. It is designed to be used with someone either preparing to exit a corrections facility or who has just transitioned out of one. And they’re often dealing with multiple issues with a case worker or a social service program provider and we encourage people to try to weave in tools that are specific to financial problems that they could face using the tools in this guide. 

They can be used one on one, as most of materials are designed for. But in some cases, especially for this population they can also be used in small group settings. They’re usually small workshops and classes that happen with this population -- either while they’re preparing to exit the corrections system or once they’ve transitioned out. And so these tools can be used in both of those settings. Next slide.

So like I said, this companion guide is structured slightly differently than the others. All of the others are structured the exact same way as the toolkit, so things are broken up into nine modules. In Focus on Reentry, the structure is a little different and this slide tries to explain how those things go together. 

There’s a whole section on managing money, which includes saving income and benefits, paying bills, and getting through the month which is our cashflow budget section. There is then a section on dealing with debt and understanding credit reports, which combines our modules on debt and credit. 

There’s a whole other section that does not have a correlation with the toolkit about background screening reports because this is information that is particularly important to this population and doesn’t have like a correlated topical area in the broader toolkit. 

There is a section that combines our financial services information and our consumer protection information called Using and Protecting Your Money. And then there’s an additional section with additional resources specifically targeting the reentry population. Next slide. 

So just going to go quickly through some of the tools that were designed for the reentry population in this guide. There’s a tool to help you kind of get a sense of where you are now called My Money Picture, a tool to help set goals, and a tool to help you figure out what documents and identification you need to put together. 

Often people exiting the corrections system have to, you know, reestablish identification, they have to, you know, they have certain rules that they have to follow. And the list of documents that they need to put together in order to do things like rent an apartment, get a job is lengthy so we have a tool that helps people kind of walk through that. 

And then we have particular tools dealing with debt for the reentry population. Often if they have debt when they went into a correctional facility, that debt tends to accrue and keeps accruing. And we created a Tracking Your Debt Worksheet that helps you kind of lay that all out in the context of the reentry population. 

There’s also a checklist of things you can do to try to start paying down your debt that also again has resources that are very specific to this particular population. Next slide. 

Credit reports and scores have several tools that are specifically created for the reentry population. One is a checklist to help you review your credit report to look out for particular things. People in correctional institutions are another population that is often targeted for identity theft and fraud. 

And so it kind of walks you through when you are reviewing your credit report to make sure that everything on there really belongs to you. And helps you keep very detailed account of all the things that you are seeing that you think are there in error or because of potential fraud. And then there’s another tool that helps you figure out how to dispute those errors with the credit reporting agencies. 

So then there’s a whole section with two tools and two handouts that explain background screenings and reports. This is a topic area that is of particular interest. It is very important to make sure that everything in those screening reports is accurate and correct. If not, it has some dire consequences for your ability to rent an apartment, to get a job.

And so we have several tools and handouts that help people walk through all of those issues. All right. Next slide, please. 

Now I want to switch gears a little bit. In addition to our companion guides and our toolkits, we started realizing that all of those documents are relatively lengthy. They’re designed to be kept at your desk and you pull things out as you need them. They’re not particularly engaging. There are no pretty illustrations. And they’re not very compact. 

And so we decided that we wanted to create some content that too information from the toolkit on a particular topic and created kind of something small, something engaging for the consumer that can be used either in one on one conversations or in workshops or classes. And we call them booklets. 

They are - you can’t tell from this slide but they are the size of one sheet of like 8-1/2 by 11 paper folded in half. And they’re spiral bound. And well what they do is they take tools on a particular topic and they kind of shorten them and they make them very interactive and kind of engaging with more illustrations and more color. 

This first booklet is called Behind on Bills. They are not meant to be used digitally. They are meant to be used in hard copies so you can order up to 50 copies for free or you can download the professional print file from our website and order many more copies if you’d like to through a printer of your choice. We offer the file and printing instructions if you feel like 50 copies is not enough and you need hundreds and hundreds. Next slide. 

This particular booklet has eight tools and all of the tools are around kind of paying bills -- so income tracking, expense tracking, bill prioritization, where to get help, and a tool about debt collection -- what to do if a debt collector is calling you. 

They’re color coded. So tools that are a bluish-green color are ones that people can use to kind of get a picture of what their existing situation is. Tools that are yellow are about goals and identifying ways to either increase income or decrease expenses. And tools that are red are designed to address challenges that are immediate and pressing if someone is in a crisis. Next slide.  

Irene Skricki:	And just to state the obvious here, they all feature cute animals. 

Yuliya Rzad:	They all feature cute animals. So this is what they look like. When you open the booklet you see the cute animal and just a little bit of information about the tool. And then it’s like a foldout and the tool folds out into an 8-1/2 by 11 sheet that you can photocopy. It’s cute and colorful on the front but the inside, the actual tool, is always in black and white so you can make as many photocopies as you need. And then when you fold it back up, there’s additional kind of like things you can do, next steps to address this topic. 

So this tool that you are looking at here is about goal setting. And there are seven others. When we designed these booklets, our idea behind them was you know, as a financial educator or a frontline staff person, you have the booklet on your desk and you can show it to someone you’re working with and when you figure out which tool you want to be using with them, you can unfold it, make a photocopy of that black and white section, and then help them fill out the tool on the photocopy. 

We can’t print them in sufficient quantities to have them -- to give one person one entire booklet at every meeting. But we have seen people use them in financial coaching sessions. So if you’re planning on seeing somebody seven or eight times over the course of multiple weeks or multiple months, they use it as almost like a mini-textbook with homework. You know, do this tool this week. Come back, we’ll talk about it. We’ll do another tool the following week, something like that. 

And we’ve also seen people use these as almost like a curriculum for workshops where they go, they put 30 or 40 people in a room, they spend a couple hours and they go through each of these tools and fill them out. So this is people who offer like financial education workshops on an ongoing basis. Next slide. 

So this is a bigger version of the tool. So you can see this is a spending tracker. You see the cute animals. You see the ostrich with its head buried in the coin purse. The tool tells you a little bit about what it’s used for, what you need in order to complete it, and a foundational question to ask. 

Each of these tools say at the very bottom they start with one question and they ground the experience for the person you’re working with for that particular tool. Next slide. 

	This is what the spending tracker looks on the inside. As you can see again it’s all black and white so you could photocopy it easily. There’s a spending tracker in our toolkit but it is really long. It’s multiple pages. It’s more granular. These tools are designed to be kind of more accessible, more quickly completed, and something you do for if you want to talk to somebody but you’re not going to sit and do, you know, two hours on you know, tracking expenses. The idea is it’s more quick access. Next slide.   

And on the back of the spending tracker it prompts you to go kind of one step further. Now that you’ve tracked everything you’re spending for a month or a week, it asks you to kind of think about which of these things are needs, which of these things are wants. Then that sort of leads into the next conversation about what can we cut out, what can we reduce in order to help you match your spending better with your income. Next slide. 

We recently released a second booklet. When we released the first, people told us this is great but you’re missing all this information about debt and you’re also missing all this information about credit scores and reports and it should all be in here. And we responded to that by saying, not every one thing can cover the gamut of all financial issues. If we put all of that information into the booklet it would be 300 pages like the toolkit and that was the issue we were trying to avoid. 

So we created a second booklet. This one is called Debt Getting in Your Way. It is laid out exactly the same way as Behind on Bills but all of the tools in this booklet are designed to help people deal with debt issues. Next slide. 

Again, there are eight tools in this toolkit. Again, they have the same color coding as the prior one. The tools here help you keep track of what your debts are, just listing them all. They help you figure out how to get a copy of your credit report. There is a tool designed specifically for issues around student loan repayment. There is a goal orientation tool to help you kind of stick on track with kind of your debt reduction plan.

There is a tool of help you think through expenses that you don’t see every week or every month but that come in seasonally and perhaps could lead to you incurring debt because you hadn’t planned on having them that particular month. So it’s a way to help you plan for that and try to make a plan to save for those expenses so that when they occur they don’t lead to you incurring additional debt. 

There’s a tool that helps you prioritize payments for debt in months where the budget just isn’t working out well to try to figure out what to pay first, what to pay second. And again, we replicate the tool about what to do if you’re being called by debt collectors. Next slide.

All of this content -- our toolkit, our companion guides, our booklets -- are all available on our website, which I did not list the hyperlink. But it’s consumerfinance.gov/your-money-your-goals. Like the FinEx website there is a little box to sign up for listserv.

We will soon be releasing a third booklet that talks about credit and credit issues. And so if you want to know when that comes out, the best way to find out is to join the listserv because that is how we announce all of our new happenings. 

This is also the place where you can get copies of all of this content. You can download everything in PDF form. And there are links for ordering copies of all of these things. Like I mentioned with the booklets there are - we limit the number of copies you can order. There is a maximum. But there is a way to get in contact with us on the publications ordering website if you want more than the maximum. It asks you to kind of send us an email explaining what you need and why. And that will lead to me giving you a call to talk to you about that and hopefully approving your request. Next slide. 

So this is the second part of our website. It’s like a very long page so we have to split it up into two slides. Here is the URL I was mentioning. And you’ll see there’s a page to go to for the toolkit, a page to go to for the booklets, a page for companion guides.

And we actually have an online resources pages that each of these documents has dozens of URLs for resources on this topic, go here. For resources on that topic, go there. So the online resources page puts all of that on a website and in categories. So rather than trying to dig for a URL you may have seen somewhere, you can just go on our online resources page and find what you were looking for. Next slide. 

So here are our hyperlinks that we were talking about. No, Irene this is your stuff. 

Irene Skricki:	Yes. Sorry. You’re done. 

Yuliya Rzad:	I’m done. 	

Irene Skricki:	I think that was your last slide. Anything else you want to say before I close up on whatever’s not appearing here? 

Yuliya Rzad:	No. I usually have a resources slide but I think we just combined ours together. The very first one is that Your Money, Your Goals link that I was sharing earlier. 

Irene Skricki:	Right. And then of course we also have the adult financial education, the FinEx email, and just the LinkedIn page. And again, I’ll just remind everybody that we have - if you want this PowerPoint so you have all the URLs in one place, just email that address you see there -- CFPB_FinEx@CFPb.gov and say you want a copy of the PowerPoint and I will send it to you. 

We also record these webinars. So it takes a couple weeks before we get it up, but it will eventually appear on the adult financial education page along with all of our other previous recorded webinars. 

So Yuliya, that was awesome. I loved these resources and I know lots of people out in the field0 do as well. So let’s we have a little bit of time for questions. So I’m going to have the Operator tell you how to open the line to ask a voice question. And also you can send in things through the Q&A or chat function on the WebEx. I will be monitoring that. But let’s have the Operator tell you how you can ask a question via the phone. Operator?

Coordinator:	Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, press star then 1. Make sure to unmute your phone line and record your name clearly. If you need to withdraw your question, it’s star then 1. Again to ask a question, please press star then 1. Please stand by. It may take a few moments for the calls to queue. 	

Irene Skricki:	Great. And right now I have to say this is a very calm and placid crowd here. Usually we get at least a few questions via the Q&A function. Here we go. We have some. First, a thank you from somebody saying thank you so much for an overview of these great resources. So thank you, Yuliya. 

And then secondly somebody asked when will the new credit booklets be coming out? These are great resources. 

Yuliya Rzad:	So we are targeting October/November in terms of having them in stock and able for you to order. 

Irene Skricki:	Great. And Yuliya I’m going to just add a question of my own here because I’ve heard this. Are both of the others available now? I know there have been points where they’ve been out of stock.

Yuliya Rzad:	Yes. They’re both available.

Irene Skricki:	Okay. 

Yuliya Rzad:	They are all well stocked. 

Irene Skricki:	Okay. Wonderful. They’re very popular and I know that there have been times when people have said, you know, I can’t get the behind on bills one because they’re all out. So, sounds like we’ve been reprinting. 

Operator, do we have any voice calls right now?

Coordinator:	Currently on the audio portion, no questions. 

Irene Skricki:	Okay. Again, it’s star 1, right?

Coordinator:	That is correct. Star then 1.

Irene Skricki:	Great. I always want to ask this question but on a totally non-serious note, it must have been really fun for whoever got to decide which animals got associated with which topics. Because they’re really quite…

Yuliya Rzad:	It was super fun. 

Irene Skricki:	…clever. 

Yuliya Rzad:	It was super fun. There was a big group of us. Every time a new booklet is developed that sits with our design team to make decisions about what animal and also what it’s doing. 

Irene Skricki:	Right. 

Yuliya Rzad:	There are many competing opinions. 

Irene Skricki:	I’m sure. 

Yuliya Rzad:	So…

Irene Skricki:	I’m sure. Well in some future life I want to be on the animal choosing committee for these booklets. All right. Let’s see. We have a question through the Q&A function. Are there teaching guides in support of the two booklets Behind on Bills and the debt one that go along with the booklets?   

Yuliya Rzad:	That’s a great question. On the Your Money Your Goals main web page, there is a section -- and I didn’t go through it for time -- but there’s a whole section on training and implementation. If you go on that page, there are for both booklets there are training outlines and PowerPoint presentations with trainer notes that you can use to kind of do a workshop on the booklet. 

Irene Skricki:	Great. And Yuliya there’s also some evaluation tools. Is that right? Like before and after questions and other things you can use…

Yuliya Rzad:	Yes, we have pre- and post-training surveys that they’re usually tied to a training on the toolkit and companion guides. I suppose you could also use them if you’re doing a training just on the booklet. So if you are planning on training on companion guides or the toolkit, there are also very long, in-depth presentations that are designed for you to kind of like you can do the whole thing -- which will take nine hours -- or you can do portions of it that all have trainer notes. And there are also our pre- and post-training surveys that you could administer to your participants. That’s all on the training and implantation page.  

Irene Skricki:	And I’ll just put - in fact I just went back…

Yuliya Rzad:	Yes. 

Irene Skricki:	…for those people who are watching you can see on the lower part of this, the Your Money Your Goals website there’s a training implementation section and also a tips and ideas section. What is in that section, Yuliya? 

Yuliya Rzad:	The tips and ideas section has kind of little short articles about ideas to encourage people who are doing trainings on our materials. So either training of other frontline staff or training to consumers directly. In the case of the booklets, they’re kind of it’s like a tips page for things to consider as you are planning your trainings.  

Irene Skricki:	Great. Okay. We have two things that have come in via Q&A. One actually relates to what you just said. But first I’m going to read a comment. Another one just came in. I work at Catholic charities. I run a reentry program and one that collaborates with a bank to refinance predatory debt. Both offer financial coaching and intensive case management, so these tools are going to be a great help to my staff. Wonderful. That will make the folks that worked on the reentry guide very happy. All right. Then I now you can answer this one, Yuliya. Does the Bureau hold in-person trainings for counselors -- presumably on Your Money Your Goals? 

Yuliya Rzad:	Yes. So every year we host a cohort of organizations that we then train in person on the resources that we have based on their priorities and what their organizations are doing. Right now we’re working with a group of 60 organizations. We will be soliciting for our new cohort probably in the fall -- another great reason to join our email listserv because this is how we publicize when we solicit for the cohort. It is a competitive application process. But we do try to provide training in one way or another to as many applicants as we can.

We also on occasion host national or regional webinars to do training directly on these resources which we also publicize through our listserv. So yet another reason to join. 

Irene Skricki:	So Yuliya, in the earlier days I know you guys did lot of train the trainer workshops. So I know from people I’ve talked to there are people doing training on Your Money, Your Goals that aren’t necessarily directly affiliated with the Bureau, right? They may have taken that training and are offering that training to others?

Yuliya Rzad:	That’s exactly right. There are a whole host of cooperative extensions that offer on a continuing basis training on the Your Money Your Goals toolkit and all of the other resources. 

If this is something you’re interested in, you want to get training for you and maybe a couple of your staff, I encourage you to email the FinEx email address. Irene will be able to forward that to me. And I will try to connect you to either an upcoming training we’re having with one of our cohort organizations or a trainer from a past cohort who we know is continuing to provide the training. 

Irene Skricki:	Right. And Yuliya, the current cohort is on the website somewhere, right if people wanted to see who the existing organizations are that are…

Yuliya Rzad:	Yes. It’s in our blog. It’s a bit difficult to get to. But if anyone is interested, I can send that link to you Irene and they can if they want to send you an email about it. Yes.

Irene Skricki:	Yes. Now, wonderful thank you. I have two more questions but I just want to -- two more written questions. First let me just check with the Operator. Are there any voice questions? 

Coordinator:	Yes actually. We have a (Pricilla Graves). Would you like me to queue up her line?

Irene Skricki:	Yes. She has a voice one, too. So let’s take her on voice and that may take care of one of our written ones as well. 

Coordinator:	Okay. Ms. (Graves) your line is now open. 

(Pricilla Graves):	Hello. Thank you so much. The question that I’m asking is the same one that I typed in. And my question is relating to the population of inmates that are requesting their credit report. 

Should we write a letter to the credit reporting agency to accompany the request for a credit report that they would hand write of course because a lot of them they don’t have the internet in the correctional facilities.  

Yuliya Rzad:	I don’t think I know that topic well enough to give you specific advice but I do know that in our reentry companion guide, there is like a whole list of steps that you can take with that concept of doing it by hand or by mail -- not through the website. 

So the tool about how to get your credit report in the reentry companion guide is all about how to do that in the context of using the US Postal service. And there’s a form. There are steps that have to go in a particular order. So I would refer to the tool. And you can just go download a copy of the guide when we’re done with this call and check that out. 

(Pricilla Graves):   Okay. Excellent. Thank you. 

Irene Skricki:	Great. Okay. Let me read the next question we have. Relating -- this is another fairly technical one, but -- relating to the responding to a debt collector page, it mentions trying to settle with a debt collector. How could that affect a credit report? Would it show up as negotiated? Do you know the answer to that, Yuliya?

Yuliya Rzad:	I don’t know.

Irene Skricki:	Yes, there’s a whole - yes. We may have a lot of information on debt collection and impacts on credit reports, but I think the two of us may not be able to directly answer that. Maybe going to Ask CFPB. 

Yuliya Rzad:	Irene can you copy and paste that question somewhere?

Irene Skricki:	Sure. 

Yuliya Rzad:	Then we can hold onto it so maybe we can answer that for this person. Also, whoever asked that maybe you can email that question to the FinEx email address because there are experts we could as who we work with. 

Irene Skricki:	Right. Okay. And I did capture that. Okay. Let me ask. We’re almost at time. Let me see are there any other questions via audio, Operator?

Coordinator:	Currently no questions via audio. 

Irene Skricki:	Okay. Wonderful. Well, we’re just through. It’s two minutes before time so why don’t we wind down here. So Yuliya, thank you. This was really helpful. And I always enjoy these myself because I learn so much. Even though I know a bit about these tools, there’s always new pieces that are truly great to learn about. 

So again, we have recorded the webinar. It will be up in a few weeks on our website. You can request the PowerPoint or any other questions or if you want to be connected directly to Yuliya. If you email CFPB_CFPB at FinEx dot - sorry. Wow, I really muddled that one. CFPB_FinEx@CFPB.gov. It’s been a long day. And request the PowerPoint or ask any questions. I will happily take care of that. 

And again, all of our materials are available for download, for order in certain quantities. So this has been terrific. Thank you so much, Yuliya and everyone else. 

Actually let me just - one minute. There’s one more thing. Is there a place to ask questions for a nonprofit organization that are using these resources and have personal finance questions?

Yuliya Rzad:	Yes, absolutely. You can email your questions to YourMoneyYourGoals_CFPB.gov.

Irene Skricki:	So the only caveat I would add as I read this question -- if people have individual questions about their individual finances, we have to be careful here about giving sort of guidance to an individual without knowing someone’s whole financial situation. 

So we can often answer in a more general way but it’s not sort of like an individual coaching function.

Yuliya Rzad:	Yes. It’s not a tailored coaching response.

Irene Skricki:	Right. We aren’t able to that exactly. But we’re certainly happy to try to connect people with whatever resources we have that could be helpful, so. Great. Well these were some great questions. Thank you everybody. I hope that you found this useful. We will continue to have monthly webinars going forward. Again if you’re not in FinEx, definitely sign up because you’ll get announcements for the next webinars. 

And I think with that, we will close. So thank you so much. Thank you, Yuliya. And thank you everyone who joined us today.  

Yuliya Rzad:	It was a pleasure. Thank you. 

Coordinator:	That concludes today’s conference. Thank you for participating. You may disconnect at this time. Speakers, please allow a moment of silence and stand by for your post conference.


END
NWX-CFPB HQ
Moderator: Sharon Mobley
05-24-18/1:00 pm CT
Confirmation # 7476574
Page 1