NWX-CFPB HQ Moderator: Heather Brown April 18, 2019 2:00 pm CT Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. Today’s call is also being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect 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 1 on your phone to ask a question. I would now like to turn the conference over to (Bukola Dada). You may now begin. (Bukola Dada): Hello, everyone and thank you for joining us for the final installment of our third Thursdays Community College Webinar series. For Part 4 today, we will focus-on financial education resources for community colleges as rural hubs. My name is (Bukola Dada). I am at I work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Section for Students and Young Consumers as an Outreach Specialist. We have three speakers lined-up today. From Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we’ll hear from Dr. Heather Brown. We will also hear from Dr. Sandra Caldwell from Wyoming Community College Commission and Beth Waitrovich and Brenda Long from Michigan State University Extension. Before we get started, I have to give our legal disclaimer as an employee of CFPB. This presentation does not constitute legal interpretation, guidance or advice of the CFPB. Any opinions or views stated by the presenter are the presenter’s own and may not represent the Bureau’s view. We are not affiliated with and do not endorse any of the speakers or entities participating in today’s presentation. Now with that being said, I will turn things over to our first speaker, Dr. Sandy Caldwell. Sandy Caldwell: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Sandy Caldwell from the Wyoming Community College Commission. I’m leading-off this discussion because this will set the stage for the following presenters. I’m really answering the question why aren’t community colleges rural hubs? Next. Just a little bit of background on me and why I’m providing this section of the presentation. This is just really an outline of me and who I am. I’ve always been at a rural community college including now in Wyoming which by the way if you didn’t know is the lowest population state in the United States and it is so low-populated it is actually called the frontier state so what I’m bringing you today is that I’m speaking from experience. I actually grew up in Southeastern Oklahoma, very rural area of the country. I was actually a rural community college student myself in Paris, Texas which was the closest community college to my small town in Southeastern Oklahoma. I was actually a faculty member in a rural-based community college with a large service area. That was in Texas and I was an administrator in a rural community college in Wyoming and I was actually president of a rural community college at Reedley College in California. Many people think of California as so densely populated but there are actually very rural areas of the state and now I serve as the state administrator for the community college system for the State of Wyoming. Next. So four community colleges and we were talking about rural communities and how they are rural hubs, I will share that community colleges very often are the lifeblood of rural communities. You may not know that rural America actually covers 72% of the actual land mass but only 15% of the population. What that means for community colleges is that they serve very large areas of land mass areas with low population and that results in them having very significant outreach capacity and components to the community colleges through business and industry as well as at the K to 12 system. And nearly 2/3 of community colleges in our country actually serve rural communities and when you think about the proportionality of the total number of community colleges that exist and then the land mass that they serve, it lets you see that community colleges in those rural areas while there are a low population, they serve that large land mass so you can see that very consistent proportionality to the land mass to the total number of community colleges. Rural community college, rural communities in general, and this is all well-documented and I have the resources at the end struggle with higher poverty rates and unemployment and lower post-secondary attainment than those particularly of the suburban and also of the urban areas. When you combine that with very strong evidence around the Number 1 predictor of economic and social mobility being education and the income comes-out they’re actually increasing between those with a credential, post-secondary credential and those without. And there is a good body of knowledge around this and I wanted to grab a few things to really help highlight why rural communities and community colleges serve as the lifeblood of those rural communities. According to a 30-year study of 2000 counties in 44 states, rural communities with community colleges experience significantly more job growth than those without a community college in those rural spaces. And then the rural community colleges tend to drive economic opportunity. They provide access to higher ed but they also are part of creating they create the hubs of information, training and cultural development that are components of creating business and industry as well with healthy communities. Next. When you look at the rural community colleges and how they serve as a rural hub, we very often see that some very specific things and the role that they play and a wedge against poverty and disproportionately impacted populations of individuals and groups. The definition of rural actually is quite challenging. There are several when you look at that and even official federal documents and state documents depending on what the context might be so with community colleges and those in a rural region, sometimes the community that they’re in is not actually the defined - this is actually doesn’t meet the definition of a rural community - yet the colleges serve very large rural surrounding areas. They serve still as that regional hub often in the largest community which is very often very small but a little bit larger than sometimes the 20 and 25,000 depending on the definition. And very often you also see them in with very distinct populations, the tribal colleges in general across the country very often are in rural locations. Very often they serve high minority populations without a post-secondary credential. Very often they serve high-proportion first-generation college students. They often serve regions that are experiencing population loss so that impacts certainly their enrollment in how they manage the resources that they provide and very often they work in dynamics and structures where there is generational poverty and I’ll just give you an example. When I was a community college president in California, they institution itself served a very agrarian base in the central valley of California and the college itself was about 80-81% non-white, 70% of those Hispanic, many of them first-generation and many of them experiencing generational poverty. Next. So then we talked about then what is that impact in overall region? How are the community colleges impacting a rural region? Well, in general and this has been across all of my experiences and states and that’s that rural regions look to the community colleges as a significant component to driving economic prosperity and this pretty much across all the states that do have the community college structure and do have rural-based community colleges. States consider the impacts of the rural areas as a contributor to economic vitality which you heard me describe a little bit prior but you do see a lot of states adopting statewide efforts. Now many of these are not exclusive to the rural-based community colleges but certainly create a significant component around the types of things including post-secondary attainment goals, need-based state aid, access for site-bound adults and incumbent workers which is very often the case in the rural area and how that pathway around dual and concurrent enrollment for high school students creates an outreach particularly around first-generation. There’s a lot of research on that from Lumina, Strada and there’s actually a good body of that combined in the Center for Education in the Workforce at Georgetown University. When you look at the impact at the rural base, rural adults particularly in the ages of 25 to 34 and they have increased educational attainment via college training up to and including an associate’s degree by 25 to 30% when incorporating place-based strategies for completion and alignment with business and industry because they have that pressure between providing for their families in a challenging economic environment and receiving post-secondary attainment. That’s why you see in the rural-based community colleges some very deep entrenchment and connection to the local employers’ economic development entities, workforce development boards and WIBs kind of throughout this country. One thing to note is that rural adults who complete an associate’s degree are 20% more likely to complete a baccalaureate degree which has very strong evidence for economic generation within regions of a state. Next. One of the aspects that I think is sometimes becomes overlooked is the significant component around cultural and social impact of the rural regions and the fact that community colleges in those rural regions may be the only access that people have to these social and cultural opportunities. Very often people think of community colleges and only training centers; however, in the rural base they are very much the connection to the cultural and social impacts that create healthy communities. Rural community colleges often provide the only public access to the humanities, arts and cultural experiences. Why does that matter, right? We need people trained, we need them to work, we need new business and industry. Well it matters because economic growth and diversity has been consistently tied to integration of the humanities, art and cultural experiences in the lives of its citizens. You have healthier communities, you have lower crime rates and you have increased the ability for economic change. Economic vitality is a combination of several things and that includes economic diversity, economic growth and the ability to adapt to economic change. So we want trained people but we also want people with the ability to think and employers have indicated that across the board that not only do they need skilled labor but they also need people who can exhibit critical thinking, contextual understanding and the ability to communicate in various modalities and in a rural base, very often the community colleges are the ones that provide that kind of context. Next. One of the things also to recognize is that rural community colleges are very often the technology and resource hub to many things in an entire region. Some people may not realize this particularly from a suburban or even urban setting and that is access to broadband. The ability to even participate in post-secondary education will be a when you might be site-bound through asynchronous learning with an online or distant learning component but they may not literally have the broadband access. Sometimes the only way that they get that is through their cellphones and if they’re in a remote area, they may not have enough signal to even get that. Academic libraries are often tied to state library systems in dispersed communities where the community college is their tie. That is their access frankly to the world. They receive financial advice and not only financial aid but there is also the capacity for some personal financial advising, not that the colleges do that but that often become the location and a convening spot for other external resources. They receive career and personal advising in a rural base it’s extremely critical when there may be a lack of exposure to what is even possible. They don’t have the role models there. They don’t know what even exists out there which is true for anybody in any setting but much more pronounced in the rural setting. They have the access to mental health support in rural base. In many dispersed communities, there often is nonexistent mental health access that if there is, sometimes they’re completely overwhelmed by the volume that they see because of the remote access and in small communities where everybody knows everybody. There’s also some local stigma tied to that and there can be unfortunately and that’s where that integration in the community college setting is important. Along with that are things like childcare when people have the ability to attend that they meet resources for their children and very often wraparound services for things like voc-rehab, food banks, social engagement, referrals that can happen in a very private setting in the community colleges that they may not have otherwise. Next. So in general the community colleges I hope that I have helped paint that picture as to why they’re on here as a topic as a rural hub. They create the education pathways for post-secondary credential through numerous ways that they do that through the K-12 connection but also through business and industry through social services connections, adult education, all of those types of entities. They promote post-secondary participation through dual and concurrent enrollment. When you have a high first-generation adult population where the children are more likely to be first-generation and low income. They create opportunities for low-income first-generation and minority students that we know have a very distinct differentiation across the attainment and thus income completion or completion (in debt income), I apologize for that. And then they integrate very tightly with business and industry to create a credential completion in the workplace because they know they have to be able to do that in order to meet multiple needs. They provide a cultural and social opportunity that might not otherwise be available and they provide access to technology and resources that are also very often otherwise unavailable. Next. Without killing you on every single one of the slides, I just wanted to provide you with a large amount of the resources that are available for you. I just wanted to have those listed for you. I didn’t just make these up. These are all publicly-available pieces of information. That is my contact and questions will be at the end as I know. I do want to transition now to your next speakers so Dr. Heather Brown is going to be your next speaker and presenter, she’s the program lead for the financial exchange at the Office of Financial Education for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Dr. Brown? Heather Brown: Thank you so much, Dr. Caldwell. I really enjoyed your presentation. I learned a few things and it gave some additional really great insight into some of the needs in the rural communities. I thank you for inviting us, for inviting me to be a part of this (Bukola) because I feel like it’s a great opportunity for me to share some of the resources from the CFPB so if you wouldn’t mind moving to the next slide. This is the standard disclaimer and you’ve already heard it so we don’t need to go through it again but just understand that my views I share or the views of my, thank you, next slide. This is me, next slide. Okay, I wanted to talk with you a little bit about the CFPB FinEx program and that’s the program that I manage at CFPB. This program is being offered by the students program this Webinar so I’m going to be focusing-on that young adult population as I talk about the resources that we can offer but my goal is to introduce you to a lot of the things that you can find on our Web site and also order copies of through our publishing house so that if you have to offer training to the group, you don’t have to make the copies. You can order them in advance and have them shipped to you and many of our materials are, you know, very attractive and bound and very nice to use in courses and training if you’re doing work at community colleges or anywhere that you’re doing work. So the CFPB FinEx program membership has over 5000 members currently and basically we are trying to provide resources, tools, information and support as well as connectedness among financial educators of all kinds. It can be educators at a community college, at a university, it can be professionals that are certified and charging people to do financial coaching and they can also be social workers that are trying to help people that are transitioning through difficult times. So basically anyone that provides financial literacy courses or support to consumers is somebody that is welcome to become a member of the FinEx program and will benefit from the things we do so it just kind of this will show you some of the things that we do. We have a monthly newsletter. We also have at least one Webinar a month and if you want to get on our mailing list to receive information about upcoming events, you can use this box at the bottom, cfpb_finex@cfpb.gov and you can also take note of that in case there’s any questions that you have of me from anything from the presentation. We also do regional meetings or convening’s and I was so glad to hear that they’re doing those, Dr. Caldwell’s the base for many of those in Wyoming. I may even reach-out to try to do one out there. I’m targeted with doing something in the rural area out West and we did one recently in Salisbury, Maryland and what we found was many - much of that you’ve just heard - one of the issues that the financial literacy intermediaries faced in that area is just getting people to come because it takes a long time. It’s not a quick drive, it’s not a drive-by if they’re going to come to get some information so that’s difficult and of course my next suggestion was Webinars because we do a lot of those and they were expressing the challenges that they had around broadband and having Internet. So truly the community colleges can be a hub for the kinds of services that we have. In fact I’ll probably reach-out to some of these. What we can do is come to a location that someone feels that services are needed, we can provide some training at those locations and all we ask is that you bring the audience. You invite-in the different intermediaries if that’s the type of convening it’s going to be. If you have a population you want served, that you bring the audience and we’ll come and bring materials. Of course we don’t have unlimited funding for that but we do have some and we, you know, can work you in if it’s not this year, the next year so we encourage those to reach-out to us if you need that. Okay, so that’s with the next program and you have the e-mail there if you need it. Let’s move-on to the next slide. I’m going to and you can jump this slide too. I’m going to run through some of the resources that are available a good first stop is if you go to our consumerfinance.gov page and then you go to the practitioners’ page, you can move down to adult financial education and you’ll come to this page. And/or you can just click the link below when you get the slides or copy that link into your Web browser and what it’ll bring you to is the Webinars that the FinEx program offers and also where you see the view details and enroll hyperlink that’s to the left of the computer screen on the graphics, if you click on that you’ll also get all of our past Webinars that we’ve offered. And there’s, you know, at least 40 or more there and as we do new ones each month, we post the recording and the transcript and you are free to take the information from there and create your own presentation. You can request some slides for some of those and you can reuse our slides and you can make them your own. The only thing that you can’t do and that’s true of all of our materials, the only thing you can’t do is co-brand them as soon as you make any change including taking, putting your name on it then you have to take our name off of it and it becomes your document but you don’t have to necessarily, you know, give us any kind of citing for it. You know, we do appreciate when you link people back to our Webpage because that’s one of the metrics that we try to push to measure how well we’re doing so this is a great first stop if you’re looking for information. And I wanted to run through some of the things that I thought would be of a great help to you and I’ll probably go through some of these quickly but you’ll be able to see the links then you can capture the pictures if you want or you could get a copy of this presentation. Okay, next slide, please, so I think the credit reporting and scoring is always a super-hot topic among everything we do. But particularly I think with if you’re talking about the student population, I would say that that’s probably one of the most important things they can be focusing-on at that time, understanding what generates a good and bad score, understanding how important it is for them to start building the score in a healthy way. So that when they get out of school, they’re prepared to go into the workforce and manage their finances and start-out without hopefully too much of a handicap. We know that student loans are, you know, part of the first step that comes-out but they usually provide a lot of flexibility in how you pay it back. So if you do that well even though if you have a lot of debt, if you’re paying regularly your credit score should still be strong. Okay, if we can move to the next - by the way the link at the bottom here tells you where you can go for the portal on credit report scores. There’s a ton of information. I’ve pulled a few things out for you in this presentation. If you would go to the next slide, please. All right, so your money, your goals resources, it’s a wonderful, wonderful toolkit which provides preprinted materials, worksheets, it has instructor guides and it also has slides and I’ll show you the link for that in the next slide but basically you can get your toolkit. You also download resources online if you were in a hurry and you didn’t have time to order something through our publishing house and it gives you issue-focused tools on things like behind on bills, there’s a booklet just for that. Debt getting in your way? Want credit for you? All of these are booklets that are part of this toolkit and it really can offer 6 to 10 hours of training just from what we have so you could actually develop, you know, a program for a whole year based on, you know, doing one-hour sessions which is usually the average length of the kinds of things that financial educators teach. We also have companion guides for native communities which would be particularly useful for rural communities for reentry which is becoming more and more popular with the unfortunate crisis we’re having in substance abuse. We’re having more people that are incarcerated and have to deal with how do you manage your finances when you’re, you know, incarcerated and how do you manage your finances and build your credit once you are released? Additionally we have a companion guide for people with disabilities and we just did this week a Webinar on these three guides so if you’re interested in that, you can go back to that page I showed you earlier and visit these Webinars or get a copy of the transcript so that you can learn more about the tools and hopefully download or order a copy of the tools as well. Next slide, please. So just so you know, it’s also available in Spanish and there is an implementation guide that can go with it. The link that you see there at the bottom consumerfinance.gov/yourmoneyyourgoal is where you should go if you want to download it and all of these including the slides deck of several hundred slides is on this Web site and you’re free to use those as you need it. That’s, you know, the part of the public trust and you’re welcome to use it for your own purposes. Next slide, please and I also forgot to mention, it’s in Mandarin as well and more languages coming so this is the best way to understand that toolkit and just so that you can know exactly what’s in it, and these are the modules that are included, setting goals, saving, tracking your income. I’m not going to read them all to you. We have one just on understanding credit reports and scores so you can choose from one of these. You don’t have to do the series. You could also if you’re working with individual clients, you could just bring one person in and talk to them about one of these modules. They may say I’m having trouble paying my bills and that’s what you focus-on so it can be used for one-on-one counseling. It’s also very useful for groups because you don’t have to do the materials. They’re all done for you. Next slide, please. So again there’s a couple of slides that I pulled-out just specifically on credit reports and scores so you can see what’s in there and what it looks like and hopefully that’ll encourage you and whet your appetite to go dig-in more because it does take some time to spend with it to learn to use the materials but not a lot but I think once you see how nicely everything’s laid out, it will save you a lot of time in the long run. Next slide, please. So this is the slide on what is credit and it talks about the, you know, gives an overview of the use of credit, creating a credit history and how that information is compiled into credit reports and used to calculate credit scores. These are things I certainly wish I had of known when I was in undergraduate school. I knew about credit generally but I just knew there’s good and bad and, you know, if you have it bad it makes it hard but I didn’t know a lot about the process for how it was built and exactly what the objective of what it measured. So I think having this background at a very early age for young adults and of course younger is great but definitely college is the time because we know that they’re, you know, people are very they’re target markets for business as they should be because they’re coming-in, stepping-out into the world. That’s their new economy each year and so if they’re not educated when they are stepping-out into that world and they get their salaries and they get credit cards and don’t use it well, it can have lifelong effects as we all know so next slide, please. So I think some of the most important things that we can talk about with young adults and that we should try to emphasize and whether it’s putting up flyers, posters or sharing these slides with groups that you can is that if you don’t have a strong credit history, it can impact your ability to get a job. A lot of people don’t realize that. It can impact your ability to get a security clearance and also in the military there’s a large number of dishonorable discharges each year for credit issues so we do have an office of service members affairs so if you know somebody that’s in the military or in an ROTC program, then you might want to let them know that we have a division that can provide them information and support them. Of course getting a home or an apartment, insurance, and even getting your utilities turned-on, you have to have some credit score in order to do that or you’re going to end-up paying a huge deposit and I think these are things that young people don’t know and I can remember the first time I learned it was when I was in college. I’ll show my age because I we were trying to get a phone line put in our room so you didn’t have to do that anymore because you have phones and I think that’s good and bad because one of the only things that I had established credit on because I didn’t have a credit card when I was in college was my phone line. But now I guess most people their parents bought them a cellphone and maybe they don’t have it under their bill so they’re not establishing credit so we don’t a lot of people that are young and students come-out of school and they may be credit-invisible. Unfortunately sometimes they’re credit-damaged so very important to kind of go through these things with them. And while getting a credit card and establishing healthy credit is important, if you get a credit card before you understand the right way to use it and how to manage it and how to plan for managing, it can be very devastating to someone’s credit and you don’t want to start-out with bad credit. Hopefully your credit will be as good as it can be at the beginning so next slide, please, so here we just put some examples based on the FICO credit score which is the Fair Isaac credit score and that’s one of the oldest algorithms that’s used by the three major credit companies to calculate credit scores although there’s a lot of new ones being generated and coming about now. But I think this is a very powerful slide which is in our deck of the Your Money, Your Goals deck that you can, you know, pull-down from the Web. It’s just looking at understanding where it comes from. Its payment history and amount owed is the largest portion of what goes into a FICO score. And the length of the credit history is less and the types of credit is less and new and whether you get new credit, there’s a lot of confusion around like if I apply for credit, it’s going to really, you know, hurt my score. Well, you don’t want to apply for more credit than you need. That’s never a good way to manage your money. At the same time, new credit has a very small impact compared to the rest of the other things that happen so Number 1 is paying on time even if it’s the minimum payment which we know will not do much for the balance if you don’t do it. So some of these basic lessons I think that are really important for young adults and I think that community colleges can be a hub for providing this kind of training as a service and inviting the community in, not just the students and hopefully the students will come and mix with the community and that will be a learning experience as well. Next slide, please. Okay, so the next slide talks about reviewing your credit reports and it’s a really good guide on how to go through and determine, you know, is your credit report what it should be and it talks about things to look for that could be errors and it also, you know, there’s some other companion things around it that we’ll talk about like how to request your credit report. But these kind of tools are wonderful if you’re doing coaching because you can go in one-on-one and work with somebody and help them through this. You can also just hand it to them and let them look through it and see if they’re comfortable with it if they don’t have a lot of time. So this is an example of some of the many, many things that you can download from our Web site or order on Pueblo. Next slide, please. Okay, so disputing errors on your credit report is another handout that we have and it will help you - help the students and you, yourself if you need to - to correct errors and it talks about how you can file your complaint or dispute. And it also gives you some examples of dispute letters that you can write. You can just take them as a template and put the wording in it so it would be really great I think if we started focusing more on teaching young adults to manage their own credit and work on fixing their own credit because we know there’s a lot of scams out there where people say they’re helping and they’re really not. There are some good companies that do a good job helping but it’s hard to sort through all that when you feel in a crisis so I think learning that early on and how to manage it will give young adults the skill that would keep them from being intimidated when they first start trying to do this like I was many years ago when I decided that I want to use it to figure-out what was going-on with this credit report thing. Okay, next slide, please. Getting and keeping a good credit history is another handout that we have and it talks about the steps you take to keep it and, you know, what’s most important and even to some, you know, some of the materials we have we’ll even talk about the order that things should be paid because people often don’t know things like is this a super-old debt? It may not be the best next payment to make. It’s always good to try to pay everything you owe but if you have something that’s about to go late versus something that’s been late for a while, it’s already damaged your credit so if you move forward and pay the things that might that you can still resolve, then later you can go back and do that. Another thing that often happens is if you go back and pay an old debt or something, it’ll ring bells in the system and essentially what happens is a lot of other old creditors will start coming-back and calling you again because they’re aware that you’re now paying things. So you have to have some understanding of these things and it’s hard for any one person to know all of it but if they understand that they can go to our site and get this information, it’ll be really helpful. Next slide, please. So I’m going to run through this quickly because I don’t want to use too much of our next guest’s time but consumer tips for managing spending is another worksheet that we have which steps you through the challenges that you have identifying spending and it’s just a few boxes to check. But it actually was enlightening for me when I did do something or something came, was revealed to me by looking at that and saying huh, that is an issue and I never really thought about that so these kind of worksheets, we try to make them simple and very easy to use but also powerful so that you can get help in short pieces or in long comprehensive sessions if necessary so you can get this on the site, that URL at the bottom. Next slide, please. Okay, credit-invisibles and local action. These are just some guides that are around how to not be credit-invisible and if you need to become visible and so a lot of students come-out of college and they are credit-invisible if they have never had a utility in their name or had any kind of tradeline or, you know, credit line. And so it’s really important to know how to build that as you go and hopefully not come-out credit-invisible because it can be just as hard to get an apartment if you’re credit-invisible as if you have bad credit so that’s important to know as well. Okay, so let’s move from this slide. These booklets are available on our Web site and also through our publishing house. You’ve probably seen this slide before but just felt like since we were reaching this population, we should mention it again that we do have a portal just for student loans to help you with issues you might be facing and what to do. Next slide, please. And then prepaid cards are also something that I think young adults need to be educated on because a lot of them often are using prepaid cards as an alternative to a credit card. Sometimes parents like to load a prepaid card with funding for them so they can manage their financing and help until they learn to be more judicious maybe in their spending or mature maybe is a better way to say it. But there’s a lot of different fees and costs to different prepaid cards. They’re not all the same and some if you wait too long can take a significant amount of money. I had a card that was a gift card somebody gave me once and I didn’t use it for a while because it was a hotel gift card. And I was waiting for some time to get off and when I finally got there and tried to use it, they said it was no more good but I actually pushed it a little bit and was able to get them to take it but a lot of times they’ll have expiration dates although there’s a lot of things going-on to try to change this. It’s really important for the consumer to beware and to read carefully and understand what it is they’re using and buying and what impact it’s going to have and what fees are there so this is a nice site to drop into if you want to learn about or if you’re considering a prepaid card. Next slide. How am I doing on time? Bukola Dada: You can wrap it up whenever you need to. Heather Brown: Okay, all right, so I just have some additional publications that I can go through pretty quickly. (Bukola) do you want to just kind of click through and I’ll just say next. (Bukola): Sure. Heather Brown: So this is just the general site for free financial education materials in other languages. Next slide, and these are some great additional one-pagers, they may have a back side to them as well but you can get them in one flyer on credit scores and reports and you can just do a search on credit scores and reports and find all of these on our Web site. Next. And this is basically a list of companies where you can get a free credit score. It’s something that we pull together from companies that existed if you wanted to use and a lot of times you can get to your credit card or other ways as well but this is from our Web site as well. Next slide. And then it’s some credit rules to live by and spending rules to live by. The credit rule to live by, check your credit at least once a year. You don’t want to check it too much, not that it hurts it but you spend too much time focused-on that but you do want to know when something changes and a lot of credit card companies now have things, programs to help that. Next slide. Okay, and just more resources on managing spending and credit so just quick enough you can see the location is in adult ed finance, the financial Webpage. Okay, I want to wrap it up because I don’t want to take-up other time. If we have time at the end and we don’t, you know, where we’re holding for questions, I can come back to the additional resources. At this time I would like to introduce Beth Waitrovich and Brenda Long and they’re from Michigan State University and the extension service. Thank you. Beth Waitrovich: Thank you, Heather and both Brenda and I are very familiar with materials from CFPB in particular with Your Money, Your Goals and they’re just awesome materials so what Brenda and I are going to talk about is the extension services in the United States and hopefully give you some ideas about how maybe we can work together with community colleges to provide resources to students and others in the community. Extension is often referred to as cooperative extension and what we do is bring evidence-based science, to non-formal education so noncredit, no tuition type. We may have some fees for our classes but they’re a noncredit to people throughout the country and funding for an extension does come from the federal level through the USDA. Next slide, please. So extension was established under the Smith-Lever Act way back in 1914 and it was created to establish a system of cooperative extension services connected to the land grant universities across the country so extension emphasizes taking knowledge gained through research and education and then bringing it directly to the people out in the communities to create positive changes. So our audiences include agriculture producers, small business owners, consumers, families and young people. Next slide. This map illustrates where the land grant colleges and universities are located across the country. And so land grant university faculty members, what they do, they’re the experts. They translate science-based research results into written, verbal and electronic languages that are appropriate for the targeted audiences. And then county-based educators work with local citizens and interest groups to solve problems, to evaluate effectiveness of learning tools and collect grassroots input to prioritize future research so the county educators are living and working in the communities and they’re able to rely on their existing relationships to respond to local needs. Next slide. So this link right here if you get the slides later goes to that map I just showed you so that you can find the land grant university or college in your state and many states there are extension offices in every county that link back to that land grant university so there’s probably a county extension office in whatever county you live in and extension serves audiences in both rural and urban communities. Next slide. Although not all of the resources and programs that are available across the whole gamut of extension are available in all states. Some of the financial and money management resources that are available include budgeting, savings, credit, goal-setting, student loan education, home buyer education, and other pertinent topics that might be especially pertinent to students such as rent or education. We also have very specific money management topics like food budgeting including programs for low-income audiences through SNAP which is the acronym for food stamps so it’s called SNAP-Ed and also F-net programs in many states and also retirement planning, health insurance and even some money mentoring programs. And delivery methods range from in-person classes, online prerecorded classes, Webinars, video meetings that type of thing so I’d like to pass it along now to Brenda. Brenda Long: Thanks, Beth so I’m going to - next slide, please - to share some of the resources and partners that we have. One is E-Extension which is an online resources, that’s the Web site that you see here. This one is focused-on personal finance. It was developed by extension specialists and faculty nationwide with objective research-based consumer information and you can search for topics from children and money to paying for college for students to retirement planning for your faculty and staff. Next, please. We also partner with the CFPB on Your Money, Your Goals which was just talked about too but we were asked nationwide with the cooperative extension financial educators in many states to train direct service provider staff and community agencies and organizations. These materials might be beneficial for your financial aid and student loan counselors or if you’re working with people to help them set goals and solve financial problems, you can use these tools to help achieve those goals and work through challenges. And the other picture on this slide is the three interactive booklets that are easy to help people begin to address these common financial stressors including pain pills, credit and debt and these can be ordered for free in bulk. Next, please. Another extension partner is the National Endowment for Financial Education and they have the cash course which has enrolled over 1000 colleges, universities or alumni associations. They have worksheets, calculators and quizzes and articles for college students to build their financial skills and get through their college years and also prepare for their financial lives. Next slide, please. Studies show that few Americans have adequate savings for retirement but it’s never too late to start. Forty percent have less than $400 to use for an emergency expense. The America Saves Web site has a savings pledge useful tips and tools. As a community college you can sign-up to be a local partner for several annual campaigns especially during America Saves week each February. America Saves also has several initiatives aimed at college age too. They provide social media posts, media releases and other easy-to-use resources. Next, please. And lastly extension also partners with Money Smart Week which is held each April during National Financial Literacy Month. In 2018 Money Smart Week partners held over 4300 events with 2500 partners in 41 states. One of their initiatives for college students is called geo-cash for cash and it’s a fun event for college students to learn and unlock the mysteries of budgeting and credit. Participating colleges receive a set of seven educational posters designed with infographics on money management topics. Each poster has a quick response or a QR code that students stand to answer a question pertaining to the information presented on the poster. Cash prizes, scholarships and local financial resource vendors can be included and it can easily be replicated and using very few resources in a small time commitment. Next, please, not I’ll turn it back over to Beth. Beth Waitrovich: Okay, so we just kind of brainstormed a few ways that community colleges could potentially partner with extensions so when those potentially host events on your campus, partnering with extension for things such as the geo-cash during Money Smart Week that Brenda was just talking about. And you know, I realize that or we realized that many times community college faculty and staff are already you know, have a lot of things on their plate to deal with just teaching classes and helping students so having a partner to host an event such as geo-cash during Money Smart Week could be very helpful. Also maybe partnering with extension to host a financial management fair for students, a poverty simulation which helps students to become aware for future purposes, potentially for how to work with people that are living in poverty and what are some of the barriers that they face every day. Also another potential event would be a retirement seminar for your faculty and staff for some non-biased education about things that your faculty and staff should know about retirement. The other thing is to share resources with your students that are available through extension and at this point I guess we’d like to kind of throw it back out to people that are attending the Webinar today and see if you might have some ideas for ways that we could partner with you and that would be the end of our presentation. (Bukola Dada): All right. Thank you, all of our speakers for all of the information that you shared today. Before we open it up for questions, if you’re wondering how you can get a copy of today’s presentation, we will have it available on our Web site in a few weeks. You can also find previous presentations from this series as well. The Web site is consumerfinance.gov. It’s also shown on the screen, bottom right corner. You can also contact us via e-mail if you want to receive additional information about this presentation. The e-mail is students@cfpb.gov. Now I will turn things over to the operator to open it up for questions for our speakers. Coordinator: Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1, unmute your phone and record your name clearly. Your name is required to introduce your question. If you need to withdraw your question, press star 2. Again to ask a question, press star 1. It will take a few moments for questions to come through. Please standby. We show no questions right now. (Bukola Dada): Okay, great. If there are no questions, we seem to be at time but again you can follow-up with us if you do think of any questions. Our e-mail is on the screen and we’ll make sure the questions get to the appropriate speakers from today. Thank you again to all of our speakers and the participants. That concludes today’s Webinar. Thank you. Coordinator: That concludes today’s conference. Thank you for participating. You may disconnect at this time. END NWX-CFPB HQ Moderator:Heather Brown 4-18-19/2:00 pm CT Confirmation # 8398735 Page 1