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Moderator: Heather Brown
January 30, 2019
3:30 am CT


Coordinator:	Welcome, and thank you for standing by.  At this time, all lines have been placed in a listen-only mode until the question and answer session.  At that time if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one.  Today's call is being recorded.  If anyone has any objections you may disconnect at this time.  I would now like to turn the call over to Irene Skricki.  Thank you, you may begin.

Irene Skricki:	Great, thank you everyone and welcome to our FinEx webinar today on Pathways to Financial Wellbeing.  We're very excited to have a new report and some new research to tell you about today.  So I will get us started here.  First, as government employees, we always have to do our standard disclaimer saying that this presentation is being made by a Bureau representative on behalf of the Bureau but it does not constitute legal interpretation, guidance, or advice.  And any opinions or views stated are the presenters and may not represent the Bureau's views.  We always start with that.

	Just quickly -- probably most of you on this call know who we are -- but we'll just remind everyone that the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection regulates the offering and provision of consumer financial product laws and services.  And we also educate and empower consumers to make better informed financial decisions.  And it's of course that second part of our mission there about educating and empowering consumers which is why we are here today and why we run the financial education exchange, to help get our tools and resources out to all of you in the financial education field in order to better help consumers.

	Quickly, any of you have been on one of these webinars before know that I always show this one slide -- not to intimidate you -- but just to let you know that financial education exchange is our way of getting our materials out to all of you, hearing back from all of you about what's working, what's not working, what you're seeing out there in the field.  And we do that through a number of things, including these webinars.  Surveys, newsletters, some in-person convenings.  We actually have a conference coming up on October 17th, which hopefully all of you got an e-mail about.

	So you should be - if you're in FinEx, you will be getting a monthly newsletter -- approximately monthly -- including the one announcing this webinar.  If you don't get that newsletter and would like to join FinEx, you can e-mail cfpb_finex@cfpb.gov.  It's at the bottom of the screen there.  I'll have that up again later.  You can also sign up directly on our Web site.  So again, some of the things you can access through joining FinEx, learning more about our tools.

	Just a quick shot of the place - a screenshot here of all the tools and resources we have are easy to find on the resources financial educators page; consumerfinance.gov.  And that's where you'll see past webinars as well as quick ways to get to our different resources for consumers and educators.  And that is where also if you have not signed up for FinEx there's a little signup box on the middle of - right there where you could put your address in and we will add you to the mailing list.

	So that's our standard background, just to get everybody up to speed on FinEx and give people a few more minutes to get logged in.  We have a really neat webinar today.  We have some new research on financial wellbeing and financial skill that our office assistant director Janneke Ratcliffe is going to walk us through.  I think it's interesting because it makes a case for things that probably people - you probably won't be surprised by what you hear, but this will I think give you research basis for some of the work that you're all doing and I think that will be - I think an exciting thing for a lot of you.  And then we try to make these practical for educators, so at the end we'll just show a few of our tools and resources, just to give you a flavor of how you might implement a few of the ideas that you hear.

	So with that, I will turn it over to Janneke.  We are so happy to have you here today, Janneke.  And one more thing - I'll just note that if you have questions during the webinar as we're talking, send them through the Q & A function.  I will check that and if it's something urgent I guess or, you know, a clarifying question, I will ask it of Janneke then.  Then at the end you can continue to do that and also ask questions through voice function; we'll tell you how to do that at the time.  When that time comes.

	And the very last thing I'll say is that for those of you who want a copy of the PowerPoint we can send it to you after the webinar, you just have to e-mail the FinEx inbox.  Don't ask for it through the WebEx function because I can't write all that down as we're going and it'll go away when we end the webinar.  So just send it to the cfpb_finex@cfpb.gov inbox and I will send you that afterwards.  Okay, Janneke.  You're up.

Janneke Ratcliffe:	Thank you, Irene.  Thank you everybody for joining us today.  I'm really excited to speak to you.  First because -- as Irene mentioned -- we have some brand-new research that's really hot off the press.  And second paper we're talking about today is a culmination of several years - about five years' worth of research, trying to answer a fundamental question that we posed when we really started the Office of Financial Education, which is how can financial education really help people change their lives for the better?  Help them meet their own goals?  So I'm - next slide.  Thank you.

	So as I said, it's been a long project with many steps.  We've shared those steps with you along the way in previous webinars.  In order to address this key question that's on the far right -- what can help people have better financial wellbeing -- we first had to define and measure success.  What is a definition of success of financial education that's universal and global and can cut across a lot of the different things that you all are teaching different people in all kinds of different ways?  And then we had to collect a bunch of data about people's circumstances and their behaviors and their knowledge and their financial wellbeing.  And we've done -- as I said -- webinars on all these things, so I'll just walk you through the highlights of some of that work.

	So first, we -- as I said -- we had to define what does financial wellbeing mean to people?  As it's an overarching goal that all of us are trying to accomplish is improving people's financial wellbeing.  So we went to people and they told us what it meant to them.  It's primarily comprised of four elements that you see on the slide here that -- taken together -- basically explain a person's sense of their financial security and their financial freedom of choice in the present and then as they look out into the future.

	Well, once we have that definition, we also found a way -- an easy way -- a standard and reliable way to measure it.  Even though it's a very subjective concept, we turned it into something that you can measure and actually get like a number between 0 and 100 to assess someone's state of financial wellbeing.

Irene Skricki:	Janneke, I'm going to stop you for one minute, because I'm getting several people saying they are not hearing us.  Does anybody hear us would be the question.  Can - is - if anyone can hear my voice, can you just send - okay, yes.  Some of you can hear us.  All right, thank you very much.  Wow, a lot - oh, this is sweet, lots of you can hear us.  Thank you everybody.  I think the couple of people who had not - were trying to access to their computer.  Okay, never mind.  I just wanted to make sure we weren't talking on.

Janneke Ratcliffe:	So they're going to dial in?

Irene Skricki:	Yes, I sent them a message.  Okay, sorry.  Carry on.

Janneke Ratcliffe:	So we're looking right now at the financial wellbeing scale.  Again, we've done a webinar on this before, but this is a simple, 10 question questionnaire with questions like I can enjoy life because of the way I'm managing my money.  These are questions that people can answer right there on the spot.  They don't have to go look up information or think about math or numbers.  They can just answer these questions.  And it generates a single digit - a single score.  Sorry, a single score from 1 to 100.

	So from there we were trying to answer the question what does an individual's score really mean?  So we did a national survey to provide context and a benchmark for financial wellbeing scores.  You can see here the national distribution in that bar chart at the top of this slide.  The average for Americans is 54, which is right in the middle of the range.  So, you know, don't think of it like grades or credit score where it's sort of a distribution towards the higher end.  This is a normal distribution with the largest single group of people right there in the middle with a score of 51 to 60.

	And what these scores mean - for example, if you have a financial wellbeing score under 40, it generally is associated with having almost everybody in that bucket has a fairly high level of financial insecurity as evidenced by their likelihood of experiencing financial hardship and having difficulty making ends meet.  And then if you have a financial wellbeing score of over 70 - almost nobody in that category has those kinds of financial insecurities to report.

	Now, as we looked at the data that we collected in this study, we could see that many things -- like financial insecurity -- varied with financial wellbeing score, but that no one single thing fully explained someone's financial wellbeing score.  For example, I like to take the example of income, because a lot of times people think, "Well, income drives your financial wellbeing."  And it is true that we saw that people with higher income had -- on average -- higher financial wellbeing than people with lower income.  But many people with lower incomes had higher financial wellbeing scores than people who fell in the higher income groups.

	So that leads us to the new stuff and the next -- and the question that really today's research is about -- what helps people have higher financial wellbeing?  Another way to put that more technically is what is the relationship between financial capability and financial wellbeing?  And by financial capability we mean those knowledge and skills and opportunities that financial education is focused on.  And this is after taking all these factors into account we want to answer that question.  So we - let's see, is there this slide here, this key concepts next?

Irene Skricki:	Yes.

Janneke Ratcliffe:	Okay, great.  Thank you.  So to do this, the researchers and the underlying research was performed by Abt Associates.  The researchers worked with five concepts and we wanted to know how these things were related.  So first of those is financial wellbeing; you know what that is, we've already talked about it.  But the second concept is financial situation.  And by that we mean the real financial circumstances.  Things like their savings and ability to make ends meet and their credit standing.

	The next concept we need to - we wanted to consider in this equation is behavior.  Now, we know that a lot of things outside a person's control might affect their financial circumstances.  And we want to know, what's the role of behavior?  What's the role of decisions and actions that people actually take?  The third - the next concept we want to talk about was financial knowledge.  This is of course the heart of financial education and we measure that using well-established questions like test type questions about what things people knew.

	And finally we introduced a new concept called financial skill.  When we did our original groundwork with consumers, we noticed that people were actually less likely to talk about how what they knew was important to their financial wellbeing, they were more focused on the things they knew how to do.  So this led us to want to tease apart this concept of skill from actual factual financial knowledge.  So we also created a scale for that.

	And you can see it there.  When we - you know, consumers described skills, it's frequently it sort of seemed to rise to the top.  And so we developed a scale around those that we call financial skill.  It involved - basically it involves the ability to know when you need to seek out new information, how to find reliable information from reliable sources, how to process that information to make a decision -- for example -- you know, to do comparison shopping or compare terms or understand what you're getting into.  And then also how to take that information and make it into a plan and stick with that plan.

	So it has questions like I know when I need advice about my money.  Or I know how to keep myself from spending too much.  Or I know how to make complex financial decisions.  We wanted to use this concept of skill in this analysis to figure out if it made a difference or if it mattered.  And here's a bit of a spoiler alert, but it did matter a lot.  And so we're also releasing this new measurement tool and introducing the definition of financial skill as described above.

	So - yes, so just to say a word or two about the study -- if we could go back a couple slides, I'm sorry I got them out of order -- we did use the data from our survey that we - the nationally representative survey.  And the Abt Associate researchers did a bunch of complicated statistical analysis I will not go into right now, but they did - have released a full technical report on this that you can refer to if you're interested.

	I do want to say one kind of research-y thing that I want to stress there under limitations.  That these questions were asked of people at one point in time.  So we know all this information about them as of a given day.  We can then see which things are related to or correlated with or associated with other things.  But we can't really say that first there was this and then there was that.  So this isn't what they call a causal analysis.  It's more correlational.  So just keep that in mind as we go through.  So I will now go to this somewhat frightening looking slide.

Irene Skricki:	Do not be afraid.

Janneke Ratcliffe:	I promise we will not get too technical with this.  But this is just to show you how things were connected.  Or we're using the technical term, associated with each other.

Irene Skricki:	And there will be a simpler version later, don't worry.

Janneke Ratcliffe:	Okay, no panicking.  So first, on the far right of the slide is our outcome of interest, financial wellbeing.  And then we'll kind of work back to the right.  The first thing we want to know was how is objective financial situation -- we mean people's real financial circumstances -- how is that reflected in their subjective sense of financial wellbeing?  We were wondering whether there might be a disconnect between people's actual financial circumstances and how they feel about them.

	The second thing we looked at was the -- going over a little bit further to the left -- how do financial behaviors --8 like managing money, planning, savings habits -- how do those kinds of actions and decisions relate to people's financial circumstances and their financial wellbeing.  Does it make a difference what people do?  Or is it all about, you know, factors outside one's immediate agency and control?

	And finally, we asked what is associated with those financial behaviors?  What knowledge, what skills, what resources, etcetera seemed to be associated with the financial behaviors that in turn might be associated with financial situation and wellbeing.

	And so we'll move on to the findings.  And this diagram actually shows the strength of the relationships. (Irene:) For anyone who knows the research-y stuff, right, the little secret little numbers there.  So the first finding we had - this is describing the first linkage between financial circumstances and financial wellbeing.  There is a strong association between objective or real world financial situation and their sense of financial wellbeing.  And the next slide here illustrates that in a different way.  And suggests that financial wellbeing score is a good reflection of what is really going on tangibly in people's financial lives.  Things like their credit, resources like savings, hardship, making ends meet and out of controls like employment, income, and education.

	And those explain a big portion of someone's financial wellbeing scores.  The good news about that is that financial wellbeing is very easy to collect using the scale.  It's a lot easier to collect than a host of these financial metrics.  And because of the scale, financial wellbeing is benchmarked, it's comparable across people and over time.  Across programs and against national benchmarks.  You know, there's our survey, which (gives a national  benchmark  but also FINRA is collecting it in its National Financial Capability survey, which is every three years.  And they said Federal Reserve is collecting it in a national survey called the Survey of Household and Economic Decision-making.

	And you are aware of many others using it, too.  Hopefully many - some of you on the phone are using it.  And so as it becomes more broadly used, the scale is - can become an accurate and benchmarkable way to measure a very complex set of things.

	Okay, and the next slide is the second finding.  This is about the second association - how does behavior once actions and decisions relate to their financial circumstances and their financial wellbeing?  And what we found that both income and behavior have strong associations with people's objective or real world financial situation.  So in other words, we say what people have matters, but what they do with what they have also matters.

	All right?  And then the third finding and the final linkage about how knowledge, skills, and other factors the behaviors that had the most explanatory power.  And we found that financial skill was strongly associated with those behaviors.  More strongly than financial knowledge.  So what this suggests to us is that, while knowledge is of course necessary, a big part of what we have called knowledge is really about skill rather than knowing a bunch of financial facts.  I'm sure this is somewhat obvious to people who do financial education every day.  But we hope that this empirical evidence helps clarify the importance of skills and sort of tease them out of the equation and especially certain skills in particular.

	You know, if I was asked and expected to teach someone all of the financial concepts and facts that they would need for all the financial decisions they might have to face over a typical lifetime, first of all it would be a lot.  And my guess is not a lot of it would sink in and stick.  So by contrast, the skills of knowing when you need to collect information for a specific decision, knowing how to find it, knowing what's a reliable source, knowing how to evaluate it and compare it and how to put the information to work - those kind of skills are transferrable from one financial decision to the next.

	Another thing we saw -- and it's not on the slide, but I do want to mention it -- is in the controls in that model we saw that confidence is really important.  We call it - in a report it's called financial self-efficacy and so the shorthand we're using for that is confidence.  And it also had a strong relationship to those key behaviors.  And what we think that means is that financial confidence develops hand in hand, probably, with financial skill.  It's kind of like building a muscle.  We'll talk about that a little bit further on down.  But we wanted to highlight from these findings both the importance of financial skill and of financial confidence.

	So now this is a simpler slide that Irene promised you that sort of connects all the pieces - the chain in a single nutshell.  Now we'll go from left to right.  financial skill -- how you find, process, and use financial information-- and related to that, financial self-confidence is related to a certain set of financial behaviors which in turn are related to, you know, the real facts about a person's financial situation, which in turn relates to one's sense of financial wellbeing.  There is basically the punchline slide.  The bottom line.

Irene Skricki:	Yes, this is the answer to all of your questions.

((Crosstalk))

Janneke Ratcliffe:	So thanks for sticking around to hear that.  Now we are going to go on, just spend a few minutes talking about what are some of the implications that we're taking away for financial education.  So first -- as I said -- you know, there's some things that this tells us we might want to focus on.  This may be, you know, that you can pick and choose from a number of things or in your own program you can say, "Oh, yes, this is exactly what my program is doing for people and this is why it's working to increase their financial wellbeing."

	So I wanted to look at some of the specific actions that we identified that had a strong relationship with financial outcomes.  And the three categories were effective money management, planning behaviors, and a habit of saving.  And Irene if we could go to the next slide, those are broken down even further into detail.  We ask people a whole lot of questions.  And these were some of the ones that -- again -- the ones that were the most strongly associated with financial outcomes.

	Under effective money management, this revolved around things like paying all your bills on time.  Staying within budget.  Paying off credit card balances.  Checking the bills received statements regularly.  And then follow through on a couple things; financial commitments to others and the goals you set for yourself.

	In terms of the planning behaviors that stood out, there was, you know, consulting the budget to see how much money you have left.  Because that's - beyond just having a budget it's like using it to guide your spending.  Actively considering steps you need to take to stay on budget.  Setting goals.  And plans of action was the detailed steps to get there.  And then finally, savings habit.  Having a habitual, regular savings pattern was a behavior that factored in.

Irene Skricki:	I have an urge to turn this into a checklist, don't you think?

Janneke Ratcliffe:	A checklist?  Well, there are little checks, but it's not like every program has to do all these things.  These are just some of the pieces of the puzzle and different programs are doing to emphasize different things under different circumstances for different programs and different audiences.  And then if you flip back one slide -- you know, I think we've already talked about this a fair amount -- but again repeating what we're talking about with financial skill.  How to find reliable information.  How to process the information to make decisions.  And how to then execute on those decisions and, you know, adjust as necessary to circumstances as you keep on track.  Okay?

	So a couple slides further.  Then continuing from these findings we developed some recommended approaches at a high level.  First is -- not surprisingly -- build financial skill.  Help people learn how to seek, find, and use information.  The second sort of, you know, takes into account that as people start to go out there looking for information, there should be good information to help them out there to guide them in these teachable moments.  And that information can support development of their skills as well as their financial knowledge.

	Third, we identified this - the importance of not just having a plan and sort of saying I'm going to do this but then actually following it through over the long run.  So helping people figure out how they're going to stick to their plan.  And then the fourth is provide opportunities to practice for building skills and financial confidence together.  We hypothesize that if people practice and apply the skills, they also learn new financial concepts and facts and they build confidence.  So this can start forming a virtuous cycle, where skills, knowledge, and confidence grow together through practice.

	For more specific ideas and techniques about approaches, I'll refer you to our report Effective Financial Education: Five Principles and How to Use Them.  This lays out, you know, a - from research and also from educators such as yourself suggested techniques and approaches that can help people improve their financial wellbeing.  

	I'll go through them real quickly here but know the individuals and families to be serves, implies that it's not, you know, a one-size-fits-all approach but that these techniques and approaches should vary depending on what you're trying to accomplish for whom, as we've been talking about today, providing actionable, relevant and timely information, and as we've also been talking about, build - help people build key financial skills. The fourth principle is about building on motivation when that is a component of what's needed to help somebody achieve greater financial wellbeing, and then make it easy to make good decisions and to follow through on them.

	So that is pretty much it. I encourage you to stay tuned for what's next. We are looking forward to more research that will refine our understanding of relationship and causality between all these factors and we will - I know we'll keep working with you and your peers to learn how this kind of research can be applied to your work, what you see as working for the people you serve and improving their financial wellbeing and how we can continue to make this information real and useful to you in your work.

Irene Skricki:	Great. And I'm going turn now and say a word about a few tools that directly related to this. I just want to note, somebody has sent in a comment about how this I guess the sort of concept can apply to health as well, which is a small step to health and wealth program, I think someone's referring to. I think that's a great observation. A lot of these things are very, very relevant. Great.

	So just to give you all a few ideas about some of the tools and resources we have that are related, first just quickly, this is our beautiful little suite of reports. The slide here just shows that for everything - for really what Janneke just said in 20 minutes you could spend hours and hours reading. We have five reports now. 

	The last two are the new ones that just came out really just a week and a half ago but there's one on the definition of wellbeing, Measuring Financial Well Being, the results of the survey called Financial Living in America with the data about what people's wellbeing is, and then the two new ones, the Pathways to Financial Well Being is really the four little boxes that you just about the pathway from skill to behavior to objective financial situation, to objective subjective wellbeing.

	And then there's a special - an additional report on the skill scale -- I'll fill in more about that in a minute -- but these are all on our website so you are welcome to read in more detail. And there are also as Janneke mentioned, there are technical reports from the contractor who worked on that, Abt Associates, where you can actually read all the like really dense research stuff, for those of you who are gluttons for punishment -- excuse me, researchers. No, and I love research. I'm just kidding. 

	So a couple of other things I just want to mention. One is that, and some of you know this, if you're interested in using the well-being scale, the subject of well-being scale, we do have an online version of it where you can actually answer the questions online, you or your clients presumably, and it gives you a score immediately and along with some links to resources. So that's at consumerfinance.gov/financial-well-being, and you can also see how their score compares to other US adults. So that's - especially for people who might be using the scale and hand scoring it, which is a little bit laborious. You can now do that online. 

	Then we, you know, we covered this quickly but this - I think the skill scale is kind of interesting. It is another - we like ten questions scales so we now have two them. But the skill scale is something that you can use. We've shown here that it's a one-page questionnaire very similar to the well-being scale. This is measuring people's self-reported financial skill but we've actually found that it actually is a pretty valid and predictive result. And there's a user guide that goes with it.

	So we have not done as much thinking about how practitioners could use this. I would love to hear people's thoughts about that in different settings, be it on this call or in, you know, meetings and convenings to come, but the skill scale is sort of new thing that might be of interest to some of you who are really interested in figuring out where people are in terms of their financial skill and that might help you know how to work with them to improve their skill. So that is available online as well, both the scale itself, the little scoring rubric and then the report measuring financial skill, the user guide are all online.

	And then just a couple more things I want to note. We do have a whole bunch of tools and resources at the bureau and some of them are actually, you know, fairly specifically aimed at financial skills and some at financial confidence. So just to note, for the financial skill piece some of our tools are particularly aimed at helping people to see how information applies to their life, for example, which is one of the aspects of skill, how do you process and then execute. 

	And so for example our auto loan cost comparison tool, the comparing auto loans worksheet on the left, is a tool that people can actually use to compare different auto loans and see which gives you the better deal and walks you through how to understand the total cost of the loan as opposed to just the monthly payments. So that is really a skill to be able to figure out which product is the best one for you, and this information helps you to get there. So that's I think an example of a tool that helps fill financial skill.

	Similarly our always popular My New Money Goal budgeting worksheet allows someone to determine what they would like to save for or, you know, pay down debt or something and then actually help lay out their monthly budget. It's - you know, many of you have budget issues I'm sure but this is kind of a quick and easy paper version that I think is also very oriented at how do I take action, how will I save money in order to meet my goal, so it gets to that goal-setting behavior as well. And these are all things you can either get on our website or order through our fulfillment center.

	And then just on financial confidence, again, we have some resources that are - explicitly do that. One great kind of programmatic thing for financial confidence of course is financial coaching. I know a lot of you may do that, know about it or are interested in it. We did a study on financial coaching. We have some lessons for practitioners in a report that's available online, and generally coaching is about helping people determine what they want to accomplish and then helping work with them to show that they can do it and help them do it. So that is - a lot of that is about motivation and confidence. 

	We also have a number of, for example, a set of worksheets called our Financial Rules to Live By worksheets, which allow people to set a goal for themselves. It shares what a common financial kind of rule of thumb is and then lets you set your own, if you feel yours should be a little bit different, if your savings goal is different or your, you know, when you want to check your credit report is different, and then actually write out a plan and sign it. So that really gets to the confidence that I can do it and I'm going to do it. I'm committing to myself to do it.

	So we have four now, hopefully more in the future, again, all on our website and all just touching loosely on the topic of financial confidence. We have many other tools that would fit as well. We just wanted to give you a sample, and I think actually of all of these we've probably had a webinar at some point in the past on the underlying research. 

	So I am going to stop there. I just put up on this final slide of some of the web addresses. You don't have to - you can get to all of them through the adult financial education website. The email for both signing up for FinEx but also, importantly, for requesting a copy of the slide presentation is that last one on the screen, CFPB -- and there is an underscore there. It's hard to see -- cfbp_(finex)@cfbp.gov. That is the magical email address that will get you to us and we can send you the PowerPoint and if you have other questions or things, that is the place to go.

	So that is the end of our formal presentation. We now have time for questions and answers. So continue to send them through either the Q&A function. I will also now have the operator tell us how to do voice questions. Operator, can you give people instructions on that?

Coordinator:	Yes. Thank you. At this time if you'd like to ask a question, please press *, 1 and please record your name when prompted. If you would like to withdraw the question, you may press *, 2. Again to ask a question, please press *, 1 and please record your name when prompted. One moment please for the first question.

Irene Skricki:	Great. And while we wait for that, for voice questions, there is actually an interesting question here that came through the WebEx, which is, "Could you talk a little bit more about the relationship between the financial well-being score and the financial skill score? Why would you administer the skill scale if you already have the well-being score? Janneke can answer that but of course they're measuring different things, though interrelated.

Janneke Ratcliffe:	Yes, I think that's a great answer. I also think the financial well-being score is where seeing it is an outcome measure. It's like, you know, your sign that among other things that you may be measuring, if you have a program that's advancing savings or helping people improve credit or helping people buy a home, you obviously have some specific things you want to measure about that activity but then you also want to know, perhaps, how's their overall financial well being as a result of this, which is a holistic sense of how all these different pieces fit together.

	Well then you may want to ask yourself how is it that my activity can do more or, you know, can - how is it my activity managed to create this improvement in financial wellbeing? And it might be through improving their knowledge. It might be improved through directly advancing one of those behaviors that they saw, you know, the planning behaviors or the savings habit, or it might be through developing these skills. 

	So if you are focused on something like trying to help people learn how to find the information they need and how to analyze that and build their confidence at doing that, then you might want to take that skill scale at the beginning and see if there's enough opportunity there to enhance their skill. So that might be one way, like check their skill scale and see how this looks, do they even have the fundamental skills. If they don't, that might be a really good place to start.

Irene Skricki:	It's interesting because there are actually some other scales, not your scales out there on financial self-efficacy. One could imagine a world where you could test their financial knowledge, you can test their financial skill, you can test their - we're not suggesting you do this but I'm just saying - thinking aloud that, you know, you're measuring a bunch of different inputs, all of which different degrees go into financial wellbeing. So wellbeing is the outcome.

	I think we do know more about the - we've thought more about how practitioners can use the well-being scale. The skill scale is a little newer in terms of - so I wouldn't - I probably wouldn't, if you're starting from scratch, I would start with the well-being scale because we can tell you more about it, I think.

Janneke Ratcliffe:	Or start with the skill scale and let us know how it's working.

Irene Skricki:	That's true, or that, yes. Because I - it was really - it was developed for research purchases. The question is how and under what circumstances is it useful for a practitioner to use and we'd love to hear that from all of you. Hopefully that was helpful.

	Let me just check with the operator. Do we have any voice questions, voice mail - voice questions? Oh, operator?

Coordinator:	I'm sorry. I'm showing no voice questions at this time.

Irene Skricki:	Okay. And again to ask them it's *…?

Coordinator:	Star, 1. 

Irene Skricki:	Star, 1 if you want to ask a question verbally. A couple other things have come in. I'll just - I'll address these. Someone asked if there are continuing educations units and the second question is do we have a certification program for teaching and presenting financial education. 

	For the second one we do not certify people. There are quite a few other programs out there so we would just, you know, refer you to look at - or suggest you look into some of the options that are out there. We don't currently have that. 

	For CEUs we right now do not have - we have not yet set up relationships with the organizations that would give the stamp of approval to our webinars for CEU purposes. That's something we have talked about doing. So right now we aren't in a position to do that, but that would have to come from the organizations that actually provide those credits. 

	Then we have a couple of questions on - let's take this one. This one looks interesting. Oh great resources, especially for coaching. Thank you. We do love those positive comments. Would the tools and resources on financial literacy be useful in teaching high schoolers or is it more geared to teaching adults? 

	Well depending on what you're referring to, and you can answer this too, Janneke, we have a wide range of things, including a bunch of things for youth financial education. 

Janneke Ratcliffe:	We do. You can also check our youth financial educator's page on consumerfinance.gov to look into some of those things, and we're developing more every day. We also have a page for parents to use in having a money conversation with their kids and there's no reason that any of the activities and ideas on the parent's page couldn't also be used by a financial educator working with a younger group.

	Among the things that you've seen today, for example, I think the auto shopping sheet is a great example of what could be used I would say most likely in a high school context when kids are the age when they're starting to really learn applied financial domain facts and principles and skills. 

	And so you want with that auto shopping sheet, you can teach them some of the fundamentals of what to think about when you're buying a car but it also really leads them through a process of looking for information and learning how to compare various options. So that's some of that developing some of that skill around seeking information and processing that information to make decisions. 

Irene Skricki:	Also a very concrete way to understand credit and the different length of a loan and the implications that has for monthly payment and total cost and whatnot. That does lend itself very well for high school. 
	
	We have a number of other resources on how to compare different curriculums that other people have offered on - for teaching youth. We have a measurement guide on youth financial capability, or literacy, I can't remember the exact title. There have been webinars on all of these things. So again, a lot of the things that we have if you look back through our webinar archive, which is on the Adult Financial Education page that I have the web address up for, you can find a number on specifically on different youth financial education topics. 

Janneke Ratcliffe:	And I should also add for the certain high school crowd there's some good online tools for planning how to pay for college and looking at various student debt options. 

Irene Skricki:	Of course. I will just say because this question comes out that the well-being scale some people have said can we use it with, you know, with teenagers and, you know, it was developed for adults or for 18 and up. Some of the questions, because they are related to how you're managing your money now and making ends meet, you know, most teenagers are not doing that directly. There's still someone hopefully feeding them and clothing them.

	So where - I don't think it's - it might be useful as something to look at and have kids think about what these things might mean in the future but we don't - the score was not - the scale was not tested or developed for that age cohort. 

	Oh look, and someone has put out the link to our other webinars if anybody wants to go to that. Great. 

	Let me just quickly check, are there any voice questions, operator? 

Coordinator:	I show no questions at this time. Again, as a reminder if you'd like to ask a question, please press *, 1 and please record your name when prompted.

Irene Skricki:	Great. Okay. We have one other -- and keep sending them as well through Q&A, the Q&A function -- there's another question about on the whole issue of motivation, presumably motivation and self-efficacy. I'm interested in the ideas to get folks motivated. Do you have any ideas that have worked in the past?

	I would actually love to pose that question to financial educators generally. 

Janneke Ratcliffe:	 We can also refer people to the report about principles for effective financial education, the section building motivation. There's several sort of fundamental ideas there. You know, one we start with the point that motivation isn't always the obstacle, it's, you know, quite often it's basic skills or knowledge or access to things. But in the cases where motivation can be a part of the equation, there are several attitudinal factors that we focus on there, things like perseverance, things like financial self-efficacy, which is really the confidence part that we were talking about there. 

	We present in there some examples of research and techniques that work with clients.  Financial coaching is a good example. A lot of financial coaches I imagine are really working with people to help them set their own goals and direct themselves through the process and build their confidence and motivation to reach those goals. Another example of a technique, and I think someone mentioned I'm not familiar with this health program about small steps, but certainly in finance the motivational technique that's been shown to be effective in certain cases is, you know, small victories on the pathway to bigger changes. 

Irene Skricki:	Yes. Another thing -- we pulled up the report here so we can see what we said -- but there's evidence that, and these are things we - there is actually research of it for, but peer support, right? One way to be motivated is to have people who help keep you motivated, and peer support groups and different peer accountability mechanisms are something that has been shown to be effective as well in the financial area. So those are some ideas.

	I'll also note some practitioners that we have talked to when we're putting out this business report kind of building on the idea of starting small is really around celebrating successes, so really, if you're coming in with financial challenges and you're feeling stressed and unhappy, celebrating successes early and often and really recognizing and acknowledging any goal that's been reached can get people - can build, right? 

	You start to feel - you lose the first pound, you're more motivated to lose the second. Eventually I give up and go to milkshakes, but in general this principle is a good way. Other things around the room are using reminders, nudges, other ongoing support to really help people stay motivated and remind them of what it is they're trying to achieve. So. Again, I think those are all things that probably many of you would agree with intuitively and may also have tried in your programs.

Janneke Ratcliffe:	One thing we're hearing is that the financial well-being scale in itself can help. I'm not sure if motivate is the right word but certainly engage people. It really creates - because it talks about the way in which their money situation is really affecting the way the way feel, then you're people are then sort of being able to connect the hard and the difficult work they might need to do around financial education and making behavior changes to, you know, financial security and financial freedom of choice now and in the future. So the questions and the kind of language in the scale might in and of itself might be motivational. 

Irene Skricki:	Right, right. Great. I think we're nearly at the end of time. Operator, are there any voice questions now?

Coordinator:	I show no questions. 

Irene Skricki:	This is a group that communicates through written communication more than verbal. So last chance for any additional or voice written questions. I think we've covered most of the things that, or all of the questions that have come in. 

	And I do want to mention that if these topics are of interest to you, I mentioned this in passing, we do have a conference that's really going to focus on the topics we talked about today and really focus on getting practitioner input from attendees on how can you build financial skill, how can you build financial confidence and how can you build liquid savings as being another significant indicator of financial - or connected to financial wellbeing that we found in a previous study. 

	So we do have a conference coming up on October 17 here in D.C. You can attend in person but you can also watch remotely. It's the same platform, the WebEx platform, that we have a video piece so you can speaker. So if anybody is interested in continuing this conversation, there - you can find information on that conference. 

	We do have a registration page on our website. I'm not sure how exactly to get to it. But we also sent out a newsletter about it. You can also always email the FinEx inbox and we can send you the - how to register. It's a free conference, one day, and it will be focusing all of these topics, especially on getting input from all the participants, from all the frontline financial educators on how to do some of these things.

Janneke Ratcliffe:	And we'll be gathering that feedback from people that are remote as well as.

Irene Skricki:	Informally, yes, but we will. Great. So I think I see no more questions. I'm assuming - oh and look. Thank you, Heather. We now have the registration link for the conferences in the WebEx Q&A function, if anybody wants to dash to that before we end the webinar completely and it goes away. And again, you can always get by emailing the FinEx inbox CFPB_FinEx@cfpb.gov. Also the way to get these slides sent to you afterwards. And if you have any other questions, feel free to reach out to that.

	So unless there's any - nothing further, operator, I assume? My quiet group remains quiet.

Coordinator:	No, I show no questions.

Irene Skricki:	Okay. Great. Great. Well this is great. We'll end a few minutes early. Thank you so much, Janneke. That was really fascinating and I think there's a lot. Again, it's - I know it feel very research-y but for those of you who are practitioners how this - you can - I think you can actually go to funders, supporters, clients, partners and say, "It's not just a gut instinct now. We know that these things actually are related, are correlated, and can really help hopefully refine some of the work you're already doing to focus even more, you know, on skill and helping people move towards that skill and confidence."

	So I hope that there are practical implications there for all of you. So thank you very much and we appreciate everyone being here and we will end now. Thank you, Janneke. 

Janneke Ratcliffe:	Thank you.

Coordinator:	Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect. 


END
NWX-CFPB HQ
Moderator: Heather Brown
01-30-2019/3:30 pm CT
Confirmation # 8727904
Page 1