>>Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. Today’s call is being recorded. 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 Dr. Heather Brown. You may begin. >>Heather Brown: Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining our Webinar. We’re going to get started right out the gate and so we have time for any questions that you want to ask. This session is going to be on the Misadventures in Money Management. Try to say that three times quickly and we call it M-i-M-M or MiMM for short and basically the discussion is about a wonderful tool that we have that’s incorporated into gamification and storytelling into financial education so we want to share that with you. And I think that a lot of different intermediaries and financial educators have found a lot of creative uses for this tool and we’d like to share some of those for you but certainly the audience that it’s targeted at will really appreciate it when you’re working with service members and those in our JROTC or ROTC. I want to take a minute and introduce our guest speaker today. Her name is Mechel Glass. She is a Financial Education Program Analyst in the Office of Service Member Affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She started her position in that role on August 24th of 2014 so that’s only a couple of years after the Bureau was started so she’s been there from almost the beginning. She brings a wealth of knowledge based on her years of service in the nonprofit community helping veterans and their family members resolve financial issues. Mechel began teaching financial literacy after inventing an educational finance board game and card game under her own organization, her own company and she sold that company to Consumer Credit Counseling Service in 2007. So she was on the bleeding edge of technology as we say back in that time coming-up with these new financial education tools that are interactive and we’re so fortunate to have her here at the Bureau. Prior to joining CFPB she was Vice President of Education for Clearpoint Credit Counseling Solutions for 7 years and she managed a team of community development officers across 15 states. She has her she’s certified as a project management professional a PMP. She worked for IBM as an International IT Project Manager for over 10 years and she’s also an Army veteran and served over 16 months in foreign service during the Persian Gulf war. She has a Master’s from the University of Oklahoma in international relations and she received her bachelor’s from Kennesaw State University in international affairs. In addition to her PMP she also has a (facts) PPM and those of you that interact a lot with government will know that that is the federal equivalent of a PMP and she’s at a Level 3 which is the highest level that you can be at. She leads the Office’s Program on Misadventures in Money Management and she is planning some expansion on that at some point in the future and she’s also a financial educator, a published author and a successful entrepreneur in addition to her military service so Mechel we thank you for your military service and we welcome you. I’m going to go through some preliminary slides first and then we’re going to hand it over to Mechel to do her presentation and demonstration. The disclaimer that I must read is that this presentation is being made by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau representatives myself and Mechel on behalf of the Bureau which does not constitute legal interpretation, guidance or advice of the Bureau. Any opinions or views stated by us are our own views and may not represent the Bureau’s views. Any inclusion of links or references to third-party sites does not necessarily the Bureau’s endorsement of that site or the third party’s products or services that they offer. The Bureau has not vetted necessarily all third-party sites, their content and products that they offer. And there may also be other entities or resources that are not listed that may also serve your needs in those cases. All right, about the Bureau. Most of you know the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regulates the offering and provision of consumer financial products and services from under the federal consumer financial laws and educates and empowers consumers to make better and informed decisions. This is our FinEx slide and it talks about the things that our FinEx programs offer. Most of you get the mailings so you’re aware of it and that’s how you knew about this. But if you got this notification from a colleague and you have not gotten a direct mailing from us telling you about Webinars in the last 30 days, then you might need to send an e-mail to the box at the bottom, cfpb_finex@cfpb.gov and join the FinEx list so that you can get advance notification of all of our resources and Webinars. In addition to the Webinars in the newsletter, we do regional convenings out in the field and if that’s something you’re interested in, reach-out to us and let us know as we’re planning our schedule for next year’s regional meeting. We have a regional meeting coming-up in Wisconsin at the University of Wisconsin and another one coming-up in West Virginia at West Virginia University Center for Financial Education. So if you’re nearby either of those and you’re interested, send me an e-mail to the CFPB box and we will make sure you’re on the list to be invited to that. Okay, let’s move on here. Also all of our past Webinars are posted on our Website and so if you go to this page and the link’s at the bottom of this slide, you will see the upcoming Webinar posted here. And if you go to the right of that box, you will see the e-mail address box. You could actually put an e-mail in there to join the CFPB list. We’re hoping to expand the list to include full business card information soon so that we can do more outreach in the regions by region and have that ZIP Code and city-state information so stay tuned. Hopefully that’ll be coming-up but in the meantime you can also send an e-mail with a copy of your business card to the cfpb_finex box and I will add you and all of your business card information so you will be getting invitations for things that happen regionally. Okay, and our last slide just kind of covers the highlights of the Webpages for the FinEx program. The first one is the adult financial education page. If you go under consumerfinance.gov, and then you go to practitioners, if you’re doing it by clicking the menu items then you’ll come to a choice for adult financial education and all of the resources and publications and past Webinars are all at that location so that’s where you want to go for that. You’re welcome to download our past slides and reuse them as long as you don’t change them if you keep our logo on it and if you want to change them, you’re welcome to do that but you need to take our logo off and put your logo on. And then you can also be a part of our LinkedIn group and many of you are already and you can check-in there and see that we’re getting more and more announcements every week and it’s a great place to get updates on what’s going-on and you can also ask questions or ask about resources. The only thing we ask is that you don’t market things for profit through that site and that you keep it relevant to an audience of financial educators and with that I think we’ll move to Mechel now. I’m going to pull here slides up and pass the ball to her so that she can control her slides and I want the audience also to be aware that you may ask questions in the chat box or the Q&A box. You can usually some people use the chat for everything, chats and Q&A and you can also send me a private message by clicking the 2 button in the dropdown and that would come just to Heather Brown if you had something you wanted to just ask me but if you ask a question, you might want to do all participants because people may have the same question or if they didn’t have it, they may benefit from the answer as well. And I think I mentioned that you can download the slides later. We’ll have those posted-up within the next couple of weeks so you can download the past slides and if you have a question, if you enter it into the chat, we’ll get to it at the end and we’ll also open the lines at the end so that you can ask questions. All right, with that, I’m finished with my introductory comments and I am going to pass it over to Mechel. Mechel, are you all set? >>Mechel Glass: Yes, thank you, Dr. Brown. I appreciate that introduction, thank you very much and welcome to everyone who has joined us on this Webinar today. I’m very excited to be here to talk about OSA’s flagship program, Misadventures in Money Management which can be found at mimm.gov, that’s M-I-M-M dot gov. This is a tool that we designed specifically for service members but don’t fear because even though it’s got great information that we built for service members, any person can use it so this is open to share with other people in the community who want to learn about personal finance and now I’m going to see if I can page to the next page. >>Heather Brown: You’re moving it. >>Mechel Glass: Perfect. As you probably know many of you that are on here, the Dodd-Frank Act established the Office of Service Member Affairs and there are three things that our office is statutorily mandated to do. The first is to educate and empower service members and their families to make better informed decisions regarding consumer financial products. The second thing we do is we monitor and we analyze consumer complaints that are submitted by service members and their families and then the third thing is we coordinate efforts among other federal and state agencies as appropriate regarding consumer financial protection measures related to consumer financial products and services that are offered to or used by service members and their family. So as you can see we have a lot of things that we do. Okay, so this came back to my agenda, there it goes, all right so what I’m going to talk about again is talk about our office which I just did. I want to talk to you about some of the challenges that young service members face which is why we designed the Misadventures in Money program. And I want to give you a demonstration of that program today and then I’m going to talk about some outcomes that we’ve seen from implementing the program and I think you know enough about me so service members regularly interact with financial products throughout their life cycle when they’re in military service. For most service members financial products help them move to a new city or to a new country. It helps them to fund an education, buy a home, start a family, manage those unexpected bumps in the road but when you’re serving in the military, it also involves many unique challenges now found with other professions. Like not being in control of when and where you’re going to move because service members and their families are regularly relocating from duty station to duty station and then when financial issues go wrong, the effect on their lives can be amplified. This slide is showing some examples of the rates at which service members and veterans use some of the common financial products and services that civilians use. For example 97% of all service members have a checking account or a savings account. Ninety-one percent of service members are more likely to have a credit card than non-service members and 1/3 of service members have four or more credit cards in their name. Over 60% of service members have a car loan or a lease or they’re making some type of monthly payment on a car. Now the challenges that young service members face it can be pretty impactful on them because if they’re distracted by financial problems, then they can’t do their job to the best of their ability and if the problems get too out of hand, then it can really hurt their careers. So on this slide it shows that an average of 3,400 to 8,000 service members are separated each year from the military because of financial issues and these separations take a real tool, not just on the service member but on their families as well but it also costs the government hundreds of millions of dollars a year to recruit and replace those service members that are leaving the service due to those financial issues. And then recently the Department of Defense announced that they were implementing a new security clearance rule that makes it even more important that a service member resolve any credit reporting or debt collection issue as quickly as possible because previously what DOD was doing was they were doing background checks that were periodically done like every 5 years. And so service members had a chance to check their credit history and clean-up any errors and you know, they could review those within that 5 years but now DOD is implementing a continuously monitoring policy that will automatically check the service member’s credit history so that’s why it’s very important for them to be on top of their personal finances. Now let’s talk about Misadventures in Money Management. Misadventures is an online graphic novel meet, choose your own adventure virtual learning experience that incorporates video bookends and when I talk about video bookends, I’m meaning that it’s, you know, picture yourself looking at a comic book online. But before the comic book starts, there’s a video that introduces you to the character and then you will choose through that graphic novel which path that character takes when they make certain financial decisions. You will actually make those decisions for the character and then at the end depending upon what you choose, the video will play which will show a really good outcome if you made the right decisions or it may show a less than optimal outcome. So that’s what makes it fun. Some of the things that we incorporated from this is just basically listening to our audience. As Heather mentioned before, we did incorporate gamification which is for those who aren’t familiar with the topic, it’s basically just using game elements and game design techniques in a non-game context. So whatever you’re teaching you can also use or implement or make game design and put some of those gaming elements in your education. It doesn’t necessarily have to be online. It can also be something that you do physically like with cards or with a board or something like that but it’s just bringing some of the gaming elements into the learning to make it more interesting and make the learning stick. So to access Misadventures in Money Management you’re going to go to mimm.gov and the storyline what we use throughout the program is based on a group of young people who all signed-up for military service and each of them had a different financial issue that they must face as they enter into the military and they needed your help to navigate the different options and the choices presented. When you go to MiMM, your screen will look like this. You will choose if you’re a service member or a civilian, then the next screen is if you choose the service member, we’re going to ask you what type of service and so in this example you see we clicked active duty and then we asked you okay, well which branch of active duty are you with? And then we clicked Army and then you clicked the continue button. When you click the continue button, then you get a screen that looks like this. Now when we first implemented this program which was back in 2016 we had a sign-in and then we had this really long pre-assessment test. Based on feedback from young people in the delayed entry, from people in ROTC and from active-duty service members, they told us that was a roadblock to them actually doing a character. So listening to that feedback, we have today taken-off the sign-in requirement so when you go to mimm.gov, you won’t have to sign-in but it will still keep your progress if you want to exit out and come back, you’ll get a code that will be shown at the top of this screen and you can use that code to come back in to save your progress. Now each branch or like each type of service that we have for example delayed entry, delayed entry or those young people who are they signed-U.S. to go into the military with a recruiter but they haven’t left for basic training yet so they’re still a civilian. They’re just waiting for their day to go-in to make the training so they’re officially still civilians. For those they get a certain set of characters. Then we have an iteration of this for those in the reserve officer’s training corps which is ROTC and they have a certain set of fixed characters. We also have an iteration for Junior ROTC and this year we actually launched the active duty portion of Misadventures and they have another set of fixed characters. So the characters are based upon where the person is in the military life cycle and then we assign those characters based on where they are and what things we feel they need to know at that point in the military life cycle. Now before I give you a demonstration of it, I want to talk a bit about outcomes because all of us want to know yes, you have a nice program, it looks neat and all that but are people learning? And I can tell you positively that yes, when a person or a service member or when anyone comes to this page and they take the MiMM program and they finish the MiMM program, we look at that pre and post-assessment to see if there’s been some knowledge increases and here’s an example of one of those questions. You can see from here that when they come-in, the question is when buying a car I should focus first on negotiating what, a monthly payment I can afford, the best trade-in value for my old vehicle, the total purchase price for the car dealer fees. When they took the pre-assessment, 55.44% of people said a monthly payment I can afford and that’s not the right answer. The right answer is the total purchase price. At the end when they took that post-assessment after taking this course, 76% said the total purchase price so as you can see, knowledge improvement is taking place. That’s a 43% improvement. Another question we have, a car shopper can require a salesperson provide and then the four options are an independent mechanic’s assessment of the car, the pricing, paperwork and out-the-door cost to purchase the car, the sales commission percentage or their Federal Trade Commission license. And as you can see again, there’s a 15.7% improvement from this one which is B which is the correct answer, 67% on their post-assessment got the correct answer which is wonderful and those are the things that we want to see. So we do measure by using a pre-assessment and a post-assessment to see if knowledge is taking place. Overall I can tell you that the percentage of future and current service members who have scored higher on the post-assessment than the pre-assessment is 74% which is absolutely wonderful. We’re very, very happy about that. Now at this time I would like to share my screen and show you the program. Are there any questions before I go on to the demonstration? I don’t think I see any in the chat. I’m going to bring-up my screen but if there’s any questions just hit the chat button and type that in and I’m sure Dr. Brown will help me answer those questions. >>Heather Brown: Absolutely, and I don’t see anything yet so but I am keeping an eye on it, thank you. >>Mechel Glass: Okay, now one thing I do want to remind you of before I bring-up the simulation is that if you go to our Website and you click-on practitioner resources, service members and veterans and then click on Misadventures, let me see if it’ll - it’s a little slow - you’ll get our Misadventures in Money Management page here. So this is the service members’ page and then you can see this overview of MiMM. Click that and that will tell you everything about MiMM that you want to know. There’s a button to experience the adventure, there’s a video that will give you an overview of it. There’s videos from the Sergeant Major of the Army Daniel Dailey who is a proponent of MiMM, really loves the program so he did a video for us. You can see the branch battle where the branches in the military are competing with each other. As you can see right now, the Coast Guard has the highest completion rate and then you can look by participation and you can look at U.S. states to see who has the highest program completion rate. We have all of that and you can see the top 10, all of those things so there’s a lot of different things here that we put-in which again these are elements of gamification to try to drive like a way for them to play as teams against each other to get their interest in the program. You can see how many people from the Army have played, how many people from the Marines so again you can incorporate a lot of these things in your own learnings if you’d like. Some other things on the MiMM page that I want to show you is that if you want to order materials like let’s say that after I finish this demonstration and you’re interested in getting some more information about Misadventures, on our (Pueblo) site where you can order bulk orders of information, we have the little miniature push cards that you can order. We have the sample comic books that you can order and then we have the flyers and again all of these things you can get for free so I wanted to make sure I covered that, that you can order all of those things and then also you can look at the comic books online because we provided the downloadable copy of it as well so if you want to look at the comic book, see what that looks like and then order some, you can do that. And the comic books are basically just going to give you a scenario of the first learning objective of some of the characters and then show you how to get to the Website so as I said before, this is what the page looks like once you self-select where you want to go, remember I told you there is a reentry code if you come to Misadventures before and you want to save your progress without it shutting-down and starting you over, you just put-in that code to start again. But there’s no code required so what I want to do right now is I’m going to play an introductory video that people will see when they come to Misadventures and the introductory video basically introduces you to the characters and their financial problems and then we’re going to play one of these together. I know the volume may not be the highest but again, you will have access to mimm.gov and you can play with this yourself so you can watch this video again when it starts so here we go. >>Man: Oh, did things go wrong with these service members? Several friends signed-up for military service and made bad choices with their money, choices that could have been prevented. Now Angela struggles to simply buy groceries. You can try a credit. >>Woman: Thank you, Mr. Self Esteem. >>Man: Sorry, didn't know this was a touchy subject. >>Woman: You know, why do I have to buy all 12 items? Can I buy just like 7? >>Man: And now Cruz’s financial life revolves around his expensive new car. >>Woman: Here's your lunch. >>Man: Thanks. >>Woman: Thought you were going to make money in the military, it’s like money for food and you know, our future. >>Man: But this car is really cool. >>Man: Of the top 5 money mistakes that service members make, Dirk made all 5. He decided to live like a king on an 18-year-old’s money and managed to for a very short time. >>Man: Hello? ((Crosstalk)) No not the... >>Man: That short time created a financial (blow) that he may never get out of. >>Man: Oh, really, come on! >>Man: And this is Miya, years from now at age 23 after deciding to leave the military. Despite receiving several promotions, not only did she arrive home and have to move back in with her parents, she had to move back in with her parents. >>Woman: Milkies. >>Man: All those years and had nothing to show for it but a duffel bag. >>Woman: I just want to go back in time. >>Man: And James, James unfortunately spawned the fall of civilization. His financial choices were so bad, he initiated a zombie apocalypse. Why do you care? Your job in this training program is to go back in time and to make better financial decisions as each of these service members, make new choices so that Angela doesn’t end-up having zero credit and becoming a bad person. So Cruz ends up having a life and not just a car. (Dirk) doesn’t end-up being a punchline. Miya isn’t in a future of regret and (James) doesn’t spawn the downfall of civilization. Okay, so these may not be real people but they do have real financial lessons to teach and you need to care about your financial obligations and learn how to make positive choices with your money or it could affect your success in the military, get it? Go on each of their missions, walk in their shoes, make choices that change each character’s financial future and learn how to control yours. >>Mechel Glass: Okay, so that is the video that plays when they first come-in and start the adventure and then they get to choose any of the characters that they want to choose. For this example I’m going to bring-up Cruz and as you can remember from the video, Cruz's dilemma is his brand new car that he just bought so we need to go back in time and see if we can make better choices for them. You’ll also notice on this particular tool which is mobile-enabled. It’s built on the Web but it’s built for mobile devices. It can play on any type of mobile device from an Android, iPhone, tablets, all of those. That was one of the requests from our user group that they really wanted to do the adventure when they had time or when they ran into a situation where they had a decision to make, they could quickly go somewhere and just find the answer and then move-on. So we did that and then also one of the things that they don’t like is reading a lot of instructions and directions so you’ll notice on the menus that we don’t have instructions or directions. There’s just things like start which means click or scroll and that’s what you do. You just scroll-down to see the adventure and that’s one of the things that they like about the program so with this one Cruz, this is Cruz right here and he’s got a car but it keeps breaking-down and you know, he paid $200 last month and then this month $400. So he’s thinking, you know, I think if I just buy a new car that won’t break down, I won’t be having these types of problems so the question is what’s the first step in preparing for this battle and this is where the audience will make the decision. So if you choose one path it’ll take on place, if you choose another path it will take you on a different route so I’m going to choose what you can afford and possible financing options and so once you choose that, then it says that he made a good decision because he’s now preparing to make a budget and he knows what price he can afford so it’s good negotiation power. And then after that we give them a tip and this tip can be saved by hitting the little heart and you’ll notice at the beginning menu there was a section for the content or lesson objectives and the tips so if there’s a tip that they really like they can heart this or favor it and they can explore more and this basically is information a lot of the information we took from our CFPB Website or from our ask questions and we incorporate it here. So if we had a worksheet like how to use a budget, we would just click-on that. I don’t have that loaded here today but if you click-on that it would bring-up the budget and all these other things so that’s a good thing with the program. And then it says you’re tired, you’ve been training hard, what’s the next smart move you should make and then they get another set of questions. Should they rest because the salespeople are experts or should you continue researching online? If they say just rest, rely on the sales experts, then it gives them this part that, you know, that might not be the best thing because you are giving-up negotiation power because you don’t have that important information. It’s always good to have independent information not good and then we give them a tip to explain why researching is the best thing to do and so on and so forth. So what I’d like to do now is go further down into the mission and show you what happens as a result so if he goes through and he makes, you know, different decisions like I only want to focus-on the monthly payment then he gets hit because he’s losing negotiation power and then he gets a tip about that, why that’s a bad thing. And then he’s talking about his trade-in value which is the dealer is offering him $2000. He thinks it’s only worth $1000 so it goes on and on and it asks him should you go ahead and take the deal and in some of these when they make the wrong decisions, we don’t want them to do that so that’s when we will tell them to try that decision again if it’s a fatal mistake. And that was a fatal mistake so we’re going to have him try that again and be skeptical of a (deal that's) too good to be true so there are points in the lessons where we don’t want them to make too bad of a choice. We want to stop them in their tracks and say no, no, no, no. Let’s go back because there are other things you need to look at. So then this is where he sees damage on the car and he tells that to the dealer and he says you know, trying to distract him so he’s telling him let’s just take the car for a test drive and now you need to make a decision, should you accept his explanation and take the test drive or should you demand a vehicle history report? So if we say demand the vehicle history report, you are able to block his response I’ll just say that and so he says I’ll just take the VIN number down myself and get the information so we’re just again telling them about what they should do, then we explain what is a VIN, again when they look for more information, we tell them where to find the VIN numbers, all of those things, where to look on the car to find it. Because some of our young service members didn’t even know what a VIN number was so we thought that it’s very important to let them know. I’m not sure if you know this but in the military like I was mentioning before 60% of them have some type of auto payment that they’re making so this is a very, very hot topic so to say in the military. And we really want them to understand this negotiation process when they’re thinking about buying a car because when service members enter-in as an E1, E2, they’re not making a lot of money and some of them have found that it’s been very stressful trying to make the car payment when the bill keeps coming month after month. So now this is something that happens when people go to a car dealer, you know, you’ve negotiated but you’re exhausted and you’re tired and you’re hungry and you just want it over and that is another tactic that has been done to keep people to rush people into signing the deal. So now he’s saying that the car will be gone tomorrow, let’s just get this deal over with and so your decision is should you be patient or should you buy the car before it disappears? Let’s say let’s buy it before it disappears and if you do that, he says let’s do the deal. He won but again we think that’s a fatal mistake. We’re going to tell him to try that decision again. Be patient. Because there’s more lessons that we need to teach them so here when we tell them to be patient, remember they can’t go forward because that was a fatal mistake. We do keep track that they missed the question but we let them know immediately that you can’t go forward so in this one he’s asking him to give him all of the out-the-door costs for the car so that he can take that information home and research it. So when he gets home, he sees that there’s an important recall on the car and he sees there’s two fees that just don’t make sense. Why are there two fees in this paperwork? He should remove those; so he calls back and he tells them can you remove the dealer prep fee and the dock fee and then we have a deal and he said sure, no problem. And so when he gets there however Cruz actually reads the contract and he says the dock fee is still in the contract and the dealer says I can’t, you know, I can’t sell you the car without that. It’s normal, it’s just $9 added to your monthly payment, you know, he was telling him I’m selling you the car at a loss and then there’s another decision. Should you just pay the car, you know, buy the car with the fee or should you be willing to walk away and start over? We’re going to say buy the car with the fee and when we do that, that’s where the dealer says that victory is my destiny and then you get an ending video so let me show you this quick ending video so that you can see what the young person would experience from going through an entire lesson module. >>Man: You okay, man? >>Man: Yes. >>Man: You kind of look like I just punched you in the gut. Sorry but you need a new car and they cost a lot of money. >>Man: Yes, I can see that. >>Man: The next day. >>Woman: Sandwich. >>Man: Thanks. >>Woman: I thought you were going to make money in the military and that you were demonstrating some kind of practicality and savvy that your peer group lacked? Yet buying a car without situational awareness of sales tactics is like I don’t know what the right word is, super dumb. Now you’re like car poor. >>Man: But this car is really cool. >>Woman: If you spent too much on it, no, it’s not. Hey Reggy. Hey, I haven’t talked to you in a while. What's going on? >>Man: And so it came to pass in his 18th year, our hero lost against the sales tactics. He spent too much on his car and his life briefly took a step back. Let’s try this again. >>Mechel Glass: So as you can see at the end of the mission, you know, we encourage them to try it again or they can pick the different objectives that they want to correct. If you do that, this is what the menu looks like so the checkmarks will show you what you got right and then the red Xs will show you what you got wrong and so they can go-in and just fix those, go through the lesson and figure-out what was the correct answer. In the tips section, remember I was telling you about hearting [favorites] those, there are tips in each of the different lesson objectives and if you heart those it’ll just take you immediately to those tips so that you can find more information so it’s easy for them to find it. Let’s say that they didn’t heart those but they want to, they can still do that from here, not necessarily going back through the whole entire lesson but these links will then take them to more information. Again it’s easy to kind of navigate yourself through it. When you’re done you go back to the menu and now you can go to another character. Now all of the characters are laid-out differently for example I’m going to show you Sonya’s but we’re not going to play the video. I just want to show you how hers is laid-out differently so I’m going to skip the video when it plays here. So in Sonya’s narrative she’s coming back home after being in the military for a couple of years and she’s on leave for 30 days and she noticed that her town is very gray and she wants to do something to brighten it up. The reason why the town is gray is because people have been making bad financial choices and Sonia’s been handling her money very well in the military and, you know, she’s seen a PFM which is a Personal Financial Manager and she wants to share that good news with her town. So in this particular scenario when she goes to a particular spot and she helps them, then color will come to the town so that’s how this one plays-out so when you started, the only person who was in color is actually Sonia but all the characters and everything in the town is in black and white or gray. But once she solves the problem, then the town, that scenario and that person becomes in color so that’s how that one works and then as you go back to the mission, it’ll tell you okay, pick another part of the town so you can pick another part of the town and you’ll see how it lights-up with color. Another scenario that we did for each of these characters, everything is different. As you could see with the Cruz, it was more like mortal combat. With Miya it’s a time traveler. With Angela it’s more like she’s a warrior and her instructor is teaching her that saving for the future, you know, you need to start small and plant that seed so that your money can grow. Xavier is... he’s trying to save the world from an alien invasion and he is getting calls from a debt collector while he’s trying to save the world so it’s very embarrassing for him and he’s trying to figure-out how to stop the phone calls and address the issue but also finish his mission. Dirk is another one that has a really good page or a landing page because after you make a decision for Dirk, his whole world changes a bit so I’ll show you that and then after that I will end the presentation so let me go through this really quickly to show you how this one works. So let’s say that I make some bad decisions and leverage most of my pay for the next 5 years to own the car of my dreams so when I return to see the outcome of that decision, you can see that at age 25 it says that you chose to purchase a car that you could barely afford for the first couple of years you felt like the coolest guy in the world and you loved all the attention but you couldn’t shake the feeling that the well was running dry. At 25 years old that’s when the bills start piling-up and the car is 5 years old now so it’s not as shiny as you want but when he’s 30 years old and he has two kids, it’s no longer the car of your dreams. It wasn’t practical for the kids. You had it towed to the lot to trade-in for a super nice minivan and you spent the next decade trying to recover your credit. So a lot of our audience say that they like this character because every time they do a lesson objective, they come back to this scene and we can see what happens to Dirk at each age in his life so now with that, I am going to stop sharing my screen and I’m going to turn it back over to Dr. Brown and see if we have any questions. >>Heather Brown: Thank you, Mechel. I do see a question that came-in from (April) that says would you please identify what PFM stands for? I’m not sure what she’s referring to. Mechel, do you know? >>Mechel Glass: Yes, I do, Personal Financial Manager, it’s for in the civilian world it would be like the equivalent of going to a credit counseling agency to have them, you know, look at your budget and give you tips on the best way to pay down your debt, things like that and at the military they usually have one PFM at least a minimum of one PFM at many of the bases around the country. >>Heather Brown: Thank you and I should know that because I spoke at a conference for financial readiness to 300 PFMs but for some reason (unintelligible) it didn’t strike me but okay, great, that’s a good question. Let’s see, I don’t see any other questions, wait a minute. Oh here it goes, let’s see. This is from (Maria), what has the reaction been from civilians? I’m working on a (thin lit) program for incarcerated soon-to-be-released students and I think this might be a good fit. >>Mechel Glass: (Maria), that’s a great question and I agree with you. I think it would be an excellent fit. The reaction from civilians has been wow, when are you going to have just the civilian version so that we don’t talk about things like S-C-R-A or M-L-A, you know, the things that are specifically related to military and I’m happy to say that we’re actually working-on putting through our clearance process a version for the family members of service members. And that will be a version that civilians can use and we’re going to be stripping-out all of the really military-specific things out of that curricula and we’re hoping to have that rolled-out this year actually so we’re looking at possibly maybe in three months or so, three to four months I would say. It just all depends on, you know, the approvals that we get with the script that we’re sending through and if everything goes as well as we’re planning, I would say in three or four months you’ll see a civilian version out there for the family members of service members and you could actually have this available for those students and let them take six of those characters. And I could even work with you to figure-out which characters, you know, would work best and make sure that they get that specific set of characters, depending upon, you know, what their age is because the one that we’re doing for family members, we’re creating a new character right now which is addressing marriage and having children, buying a house and all those things so that’s for our service members that are down the road in their career. And we have a civilian version and a military version for that and then we do have characters that are more on the younger end so thinking about getting their first credit card, buying their first car, those kinds of things so I can work with you (Maria) to talk about which characters would be a good fit for your students. >>Heather Brown: That’s great and we also have a question from (Deb) online but before we ask it, I wanted to ask the operator if she would go ahead and give instructions to open the line in case there’s somebody that wants to queue-up a question and after she gives the instructions, then I’ll read (Deb)’s question. >>Coordinator: We will now begin our question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 from your phone, unmute your line and speak your name clearly when prompted. Your name is required to introduce your question. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star 2. Again if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1. One moment as we wait for any question. >>Heather Brown: Thank you so much, (Shauna). >>Coordinator: You’re welcome. >>Heather Brown: Okay, so (Deb) asked actually a couple of questions, it says looks like a great tool. How do you get members to actually participate? >>Mechel Glass: Okay, so that’s a great question. Since we’re dealing with the military population, what we do is we work with the military leadership. As I showed you on our last page on the MiMM page where we had video testimonials from the Sergeant Major of the Army, we’ve worked with military leadership. So the senior enlisted Sergeant Major of the Army came-out with us and did a roll-out of the active-duty portion of the program and then he told his leadership listen, let’s get this out into the hands of service members and tell them to play it. I think it’s cool, play the game so working with leadership is one way. Another way is we work with the recruiters and so we send recruiters out shipments of comic books and push cards and flyers so that when they’re working with a young person and that young person has signed-up to go into the military, they can give them that card as a reminder to make sure they take MiMM as part of their in-processing. In addition there’s a site called www.futuresoldiers.com where any new Army person that comes into the military, they have to go through that Website to complete the training that they need before they go off to basic training and Misadventures in Money Management is listed on that site. In addition we work with (tray doc command) which is the United States Army training and doctrine command and they are responsible for any training that goes-out to Army people who are like let’s say going from a specialist to a sergeant or going from a sergeant to a master sergeant, those types of trainings. We’ve worked with them and I’ve actually done the training for them and they have embraced the Misadventures in Money Management program and then we encourage them to take it. One of the things that we wanted to do was to try to make it a required training for like ROTC or for active-duty Army or for delayed entry but it’s very difficult to make a program a required training unless it fits with their mission of what they’re supposed to do in the military so it doesn’t fit that pattern. So what we have to do is just work with leadership to encourage them to take it. We have encouraged notifications to go-out to Army ROTC and Navy ROTC. They have sent e-mails out to all of the folks who are in the ROTC program but they can’t require it. They can just encourage them to take it and then we’ve also included it in their lesson plan. So they get a picture of the information to access mimm.gov and then we encourage them to take the program and after they finish it, they get a certificate of completion and from inside the program they can e-mail that certificate of completion to their instructor, commander or to their recruiter so we’ve built that in there as another incentive to get them to go finish the program. I hope that answers your question. >>Heather Brown: That’s awesome. Sounds like a really comprehensive marketing program that you’ve put together. (Deb) also asked she said it looks like our job is to market the program and encourage participation and I’m certain that you would agree that any help that we can get from our field areas to push this tool and the Website... >>Mechel Glass: Absolutely. >>Heather Brown: . ..would be nice and I think you also mentioned that you were open to hearing ideas on other spins that we can put on this tool to help other populations such as the example for some previously-incarcerated students that somebody else mentioned so is there anything else you want to add about what you’d like this audience to do? >>Mechel Glass: Basically everything that you’ve mentioned Heather is excellent, right on track with what we are desiring in addition to, you know, if this is a tool like if you have a program and you just want to supplement it with something or, you know, you test-out the characters and you say you know, this Miya character actually addresses a lot of issues that I see on a daily basis. You can recommend that they go-in and take that Miya character just to learn something because whenever you’re talking about financial information people need to hear it a couple of different ways. They need to hear it more than once. You know, you can’t just say make sure you save 10%. You have to talk about it over and over, get them to set these things up automatically and sometimes hearing it in a different way is another way to encourage them to do it so I would encourage all of the people on the Webinar today to just play around with the MiMM program and then if you see something that you’re interested or that would work for your clients, please encourage them to take it. Just make sure that you are mindful that you tell them that this particular version was built for a military audience to there may be some phrasing in there that they may not understand or that doesn’t apply to them but that’s okay. The overall goal of this is to teach them about money management and I think it does a really good job of doing that through the comic book and through the videos. >>Heather Brown: Excellent, I agree with you. (Deb) had also asked about what programs were for civilian employees but you covered that really well and you’re welcome, (Deb). I see your thank you. Operator, did we get any questions in the queue? Coordinator: There are no questions in queue at this time. >>Heather Brown: Okay, great. I guess we have somebody that said playing so maybe they’re saying that they are playing the game now. I’m not sure what that means (Erin) if you want to add something to the comment but... >>Mechel Glass: That’s good. I love to see that people are playing it now. Heather Brown: ...so it looks like we’ve covered, oh no, there she just, no let’s see, she wants to expand on that. Has anyone tried playing this during a class? I’m wondering if we can pull this up during financial trainings with first-term members to introduce concepts in a fresh way and maybe get them excited to explore further. >>Mechel Glass: That is a great question and I will tell you that I have the pleasure of going-out to joint base San Antonio and to a company our director and the Sergeant Major of the Army and we actually played the game live with an audience of over 800 people. Yes, you can play it in the classroom. I love to play this as a group and what I did was I had given them a card ahead of time. We sat a card on the chairs. One side of the card was green, one side of the card was white and when I brought-up the questions after they would look through the scenarios, I would say okay, one should we choose, the first one, that’s white. The second option, that’s green and so they would raise their card and either flip it green or white and then the majority would win and we would select that decision and we did the entire character with that huge audience of over 800 service members and their family members. There were some family members there as well and it was so much fun. They were laughing, they were giggling, it was hilarious and it’s very enjoyable and it’s great for the instructor too because you’re sitting there letting them drive the learning and it was wonderful so I would encourage you to definitely do it as a group and have them choose which options they should go. And it’s okay if there’s a disagreement of which path to take. You can always go back and see what happens. >>Heather Brown: Sounds great, thank you for sharing that. It does sound like a lot of fun and that’s a lot, that’s a huge audience for something like that to do an interaction with. It’s not easy to come-up with something so that’s a great tip. I’m going to have to use that myself at some point. Okay, operator, did any other questions come-in the queue before we wrap-up? >>Coordinator: I do not have any questions over the phone at this time. >>Heather Brown: Okay, thank you so much. Well thank you all and a special thank you to you Mechel. This was a wonderful and fun presentation and I learned more things about Misadventures in Money Management than I already knew. I did not know about some of those metrics that you had the different branches of the military competing so I think that’s really cool. So thank you for sharing this information and I would like to have you back sometime next year because I know there are other new characters that are coming and some things that we can’t even discuss at this point but once we get releases on that, I would like you to come and update the audience about what’s new with the tool. >>Mechel Glass: I would love to do that, Dr. Brown. Thank you very much for having me. >>Heather Brown: Okay, operator, we’re going to conclude now. Can you give the instructions? >>Coordinator: Thank you for your participation in today’s conference. You may disconnect at this time. >>Heather Brown: Take care, everyone; have a great day! Bye!