Transcript CFPB FinEx Webinar: CFPB Resources for Servicemembers and Veterans Thursday, February 25, 2021 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. ET Presenter: Anthony Camilli, CFPB; and Mechel Glass, CFPB Facilitator: Heather Brown, Ed.D., CFPB FinEx Lead >>Ms. Susan Funk: Good afternoon. My name is Susan, and I'm with CFPB Events Management Team. I want to go over some logistics before we begin. If you are having any issues with your audio, please click the audio button near the bottom of the middle of your screen. There you have the option to have the WebEx platform to dial your telephone number so you can receive audio for this WebEx presentation. The closed captioning link is available in the chat box to the bottom lower right. Please open the chat box if you would like to closed-captioning link. During this event, if you have any technical issues, please send me a message in the chat box to the right of your screen, and if you have any questions, we're doing questions and answers at the end of this webinar presentation. So please put all your questions in the chat box, and I will now turn this over to Heather Brown. >>Dr. Heather Brown: Thank you, Susan. I appreciate it so much. Welcome, everybody. My name is Heather Brown, and I am the CFPB Financial Education Exchange program lead, and our WebEx hosts today are Susan Funk with help from Tracey Wade and Isabel Bailey. I want to thank them for all they do because the technical challenges are probably the hardest part of this, and it's so nice to have their support. We appreciate you joining the CFPB FinEx webinar on "CFPB Resources fork Servicemembers and Veterans." This webinar is scheduled to run from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. I'd like to take a minute and introduce you to our speakers today. Before I do, I'm going to switch back over there—there we go—and get my notes up so you can see the names of those that will be speaking. First, we're going to have Tony Camilli, and Tony is a policy analyst and outreach specialist for the CFPB. He's been with CFPB for 6 years. Tony served on active duty for more than 7 years as a judge advocate in the Air Force JAG Corps. Tony continues to serve in the Air Force Reserve, where he holds the rank of lieutenant colonel. We'd like to welcome Tony. And Mechel Glass is the program manager for CFPB's Misadventures in Money Management, and we call it MiMM, and you can find it at www.mimm.gov, and she'll show you the link to that later. But she manages the program. She's an expert in gamification, and that is what she's going to talk to you about today in her presentation, the gamification program that we have for servicemembers, ROTC personnel, and even veterans sometimes take advantage of it. 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. Michel began teaching financial literacy after inventing and educational finance board game and card game under her own company, which she sold to a consumer credit counseling service in 2007. She's been with the Bureau for 6 years as well, and she is also an Army veterans. So a warm welcome to both Tony and Mechel. I have a few preliminary slides that I need to cover before we hand it over to them. First, our standard disclaimer. This presentation is being made by a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau representative. We have three representatives today. It does not constitute legal interpretation, guidance, or any advice of the Bureau. Any opinions or views stated by the presenter are the presenter's own and may not represent the Bureau's views. The inclusion of links and references to third-party sites does not necessarily reflect the Bureau's endorsement of third-party sites. I don't believe there are any third-party sites in this deck. So we don't have to be too concerned with that. Also, we'd just like to make people aware that this document is in use for a live discussion, and as such, people that you might hand it off to that haven't seen the discussion, they might not get the full expression of the entirety of the contents. I'd just like to go over our mission quickly. I know many of you already heard it, but there's always new people on the line. The CFPB regulates the offering and provision of consumer financial products and services under Federal consumer financial laws and educates and empowers consumers to make better informed financial decisions. I'd also like to call your attention to our coronavirus page. It may look just slightly different right now because we've just made some changes, but actually, this URL, this link will get you straight to that page, and we have lots of information. And it can be a one-stop shop because also link to CDC and the White House, HHS, I believe, other prominent—HUD—other prominent websites that provide information on how to cope with issues relating to coronavirus, and for us specifically, financial issues. This is our landing page for our Adult Education page, and you can actually see the link below there. You're welcome to visit that, look at past webinars. On the right, in the middle of the column, it says "Email Address," sign up. If you're not already receiving the announcements for these webinars on your own, if you go to that page and enter your email, you'll automatically start receiving all of the resources that we provide, and it's normally about two to three a month. We have a few extra because we're getting a lot more announcements around the coronavirus, but I think most people value those, and it's good information, so they don't mind. At any rate, you can always unsubscribe at any time. So, if you're not a member, I encourage you to join. At the very bottom on the right of that screen print, you can see "Join Financial Education Discussion Group." That's our LinkedIn page, and if you join that, you're free to post announcements and things as you'd like. We just ask that you try to limit any hard selling. We don't mind if you post a webinar or something that you may be charging a little for, but just remember that we're trying to make sure that all financial practitioners have access, and some don't have huge budgets for those kinds of things. So that's our landing page and the information on where to join. I'll also have these links at the end of the presentation as well. Here they are now. Actually, I may have to come back to this page if you need it, but I will do that at the end. Okay. So that's all of the items that I wanted to share with you. Next, we're going to have Tony Camilli present on the new "Your Money, Your Goals" servicemembers companion guide. Tony, are you all set? >>Mr. Anthony Camilli: Hi, Heather. I think I am all set. Thank you very much. >>Dr. Brown: Let me hand that control over to you real quick and get you going. >>Mr. Camilli: Wonderful. Well, good afternoon to everybody. Thank you very much for taking the time to be with us today to talk a little about some resources for the military population that we have developed at the Office of Servicemember Affairs. I wish I could share with you a photograph—or I wish I could run the video in the background, but we've been having some bandwidth issues. So the official position is we're preserving bandwidth, and the unofficial position on my part is that I haven't had a haircut in 6 months. So I'm afraid of what I might look like on camera. So that being said, Heather, I think your mic might be on, just FYI. Here is the agenda for the things that we're going to cover today, and I have the pleasure and the privilege to talk to you a little bit about the Office of Servicemember Affairs, where Mechel and I both work, and talk a little about the work of the office itself, and then I'm going to transition over to "Your Money, Your Goals" and our brand-new companion guide called "Focus on Military Communities" and talk to you a little bit about what companion guides are and how it fits into the "Your Money, Your Goals" suite of products. Then I get to turn it over to my colleague and buddy, Mechel, to talk about Misadventures in Money Management. You don't want to miss anything about that because Misadventures in Money Management is frankly, probably our best product we've ever built in Servicemember Affairs. Michele spent a lot of time and energy in making it better and constantly reengineering it and making it more useful to our stakeholders. That being said, a little bit about the Office of Servicemember Affairs. For some people, people who have been around a while probably have hear of us, know what we do, but for the uninitiated, I'd just like to sort of summarize. We kind of have three major tasks or we like to call "missions." We are, after all, a military-serving organization. So mission number one is that we have—and these missions are laid out by Congress, by the way. We didn't just make these up. As laid out by law that created the Office of Servicemember Affairs, our first mission is financial education. So we try to help military families, military servicemembers, and dependents and pretty much the community in which those people live and work overcome their unique financial challenges, and we try to do that through creating educational resources. These, what you see on the screen, are just some samples, some images from some of the consumer-facing resources we have created, and the goal here is education and empowerment to help military consumers, whether they're in the military, whether they're a veteran, or whether they're in the family or in the community. So that's the primary goal, and we do that through a number of ways. The brochures, of course, are one, but webinars like this, presentations, town hall events at military installations or other ways we do that. The great thing about this stuff is that everything you see available, everything we create at the Bureau is all available for free for all consumers to order at that website right there on the screen, and if you happen to work in a community where you serve either military consumers or just ordinary Americans and need content and need materials in order to try and help serve your population, all of that is available at that website right there, free of charge. This is all stuff that's accurate. It's heavily vetted, and of course, since we're a government agency, we've got nothing to sell you. All right. So moving on to our next mission, our second mission in Servicemember Affairs is to monitor complaints from consumers, from military consumers. For those of you who know the Bureau well, we receive complaints on all sorts of financial products and services, and inside of our little team of Servicemember Affairs, we have people dedicated and focused to monitoring the complaints we receive from the military population, and we review every single complaint we get form military consumers. We're reviewing them for a number of reasons, really, but the primary reason we're looking is to try and find patterns or practices or trends, because sometimes those things lead to discoveries of problems in the marketplace. And the Bureau is trying to seek out and root out those problems and correct those problems before they blow up and be something bigger. So, historically, we tend to get the most complaints from the veteran population. It makes sense because veterans comprise almost 10 times the size of those in uniform population, and most of our complaints come from where we have the largest veterans living. Those are the Sunshine States of California and Texas and Florida, and historically, our largest category of complaints has been debt collection. But the past couple years, credit and consumer reporting have been the highest volume of complaints we've received from military consumers. So our third sort of mission in Servicemember Affairs is to coordinate with other agencies. We're required by law to coordinate with other Federal, State, and even local government agencies sometimes on consumer protection measures. Some of the ways we've done that in the past is we highlight problems about student loan servicing for deployed servicemembers, and that's something we raised at the Department of Education. We worked with the Department of Defense to make policy changes to make sure that troops are not getting solicited to buy stuff through a process known as an allotment, which is kind of an antiquated way of purchasing things that the military still has available to them. We often provide technical assistance to agencies like the Department of Defense or the Federal Trade Commission. We've partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, for example. We've done coauthoring blogs. All of this goes towards the larger mission here of coordination with other agencies on consumer protection measures. So that's kind of a rundown of the Office of Servicemember Affairs. At this point, I'm going to transition over to "Your Money, Your Goals," which is really what we're here to talk about most. "Your Money, Your Goals" is one of the Bureau's signature financial education and empowerment products. It's been around for quite a few years now, and really, this is a whole set of empowerment materials for organizations that want to help people meet their financial goals by increasing their knowledge and their skills and their resources. So whether you're helping someone get a job or helping them find a place to live or helping them deal with a legal problem, money always tends to come up. So the tools that are inside of "Your Money, Your Goals" and are new "Focus on Military Communities" companion guide, the tools are designed to help you start the conversation to help figure out how to help someone, in this case, a military consumer, whether they're in the military or a veteran, figure out what steps to take next and to come up with actionable steps to complete. So one of our "Your Money, Your Goals" tools are the companion guides themselves. The companion guides support the main toolkit, as we call it, by helping to contextualize the money conversation, to meet the unique needs of specific populations. We also have companion guides that are focused on Native communities as well as on people with disabilities, and today what I'm going to do is preview a few of the specialized tools and handouts that we created as part of the "Your Money, Your Goals" "Focus on Military Communities" companion guide. So next slide here. This is a little bit of background about how the toolkit is organized. It has nine modules, and the goal here is to improve outcomes of people to make them more financially empowered. The toolkit is not really a curriculum that people have to follow. The idea behind the toolkit is to provide the right content and the right tools at the right time. So when people who work in social service organizations or people that have clients are meeting with them, they can reach into this toolkit and find a tool or find a module that really kind of addresses the situation that they are encountering at that moment with that particular client. The goal here again is the right content, right tools at the right time, and inside the main body of the toolkit, there are 43 different handouts and tools. And I'm going to show you some of those, show you the layout of those right now. I apologize if this is a little bit like an eye chart, but this is just showing modules 1 through 5 and the introduction and the various tools or handouts there. Then over here, this is the modules 6 through 9 of the main toolkit and all the various tools and handouts there, and I'm going to try and get through the eye chart as fast as possible here and kind of get into more of the meat. Inside the toolkit, each module begins with the section called "At a glance," and the idea here is it kind of tells you right up front, here's what's in this module. These are the tools. These are the handouts that are included at the end of this module. So, for example, here in the toolkit, module 1 is about setting goals, and at a glance, these are the tools and handouts that are available to you for sort of trying to get help on this particular topic. One thing I want to note here is that the words "tool" and "handout" aren't really used much in the toolkit itself. In fact, they do not appear, from what I've been told, at all. The words do not appear. Instead, we use iconography or "icons," as it's often called, to indicate whether something is a tool or a handout. You can see one on the left side there is the tool, and on the right side is what a handout looks like. Inside the modules themselves, we have a "What's inside" section. This is the last part of the content section before the tools and the handout show up. This section provides a short explanation of the purpose of the tool and handout. It also provides guidelines for what tools to use, depending on how much time you have to dedicate to the financial empowerment topics during your appointment. I see there's some questions coming into the chat. I'm going to try and address those, I think, towards the end, but I will get to them. Inside the modules themselves, one other thing that we want to share is that each tool then begins with a "Getting Started" section, which is intended to provide whether the caseworker or the person who's serving the client with information to read before using the tool with them. The Getting Started page offers background context for the tool. There's also a "What to Do" section with brief instructions, and then at the end of it, there's what's called the "Step Further" section with suggestions on what someone could tackle next after completing this tool. At the bottom of every one of the Getting Started pages, you'll see a link here that is highlighted or circled there in red to show you where you can download the tool by itself, and the great thing about all our tools is they are all compliant under 508 of the Rehab Act, and so all the tools allow you do—they all have alternate text, and they're all fillable in a PDF format. So you can go to that website. You can download the tool, and you can use it on the spot. That's located in each one of those. All right. Next, I'm going to transition over to a little bit about the tools and handouts that we created for the "Focus on Military Communities" companion guide. We have created 18 new different tools and handouts that are designed specifically for the military population, and the idea here was we wanted to create tools that complemented the main toolkit but tools that are really specific to the military. For example, if you're buying a home and you want to use a VA home loan, that's something that's not available to the general population. So that's not really covered in the main toolkit. So we wanted to create a special handout about VA home loans explaining how to use them. So that slide shows modules 1 through 5. The next one here are the tools and handouts for modules 6 through 9, and I'm not going to read through those because they'll be in the slide deck that everyone will be able to see after the webinar. At this point here, I'm just going to talk a little bit about—or I'm going to give you a preview on some of the specific tools and handouts we created just for the military and veteran population. So this first one is actually, I would say, important for anyone, not just servicemembers or veterans, but it's called "Planning for Important Money Conversations," and as we all know, anybody that works in this community knows, conversations about money can be stressful. They can be difficult. Conversations may involve important life decisions, life events. They involve talking about values, about goals, and so preparing in advance to have these conversations can often lead to more informed and more productive conversations, especially when it's involving family. We created a tool to kind of focus people in the military community about here's some money conversations that you might want to consider having with the client, and so then what might be a little hard to see here, but we have sort of a fillable box in here to say here's the conversation. Do you need to have this conversation? Do you think you should? That's in the second middle column, like what your decision is, and then in a third column is what are actions steps that you need to take then. So you put a check to those conversations you think you need to have if you're working with a client who needs to have those conversations, and then write down what the next steps are under action steps, which is the third column. The next slide is going to pull up a preview of our VA home loans handout. We have tools in the companion guide, but we also have handouts. This is a handout specifically focused on the VA home loans. Tools are designed to be interactive and to be useful between the social services representative and the client, whereas the handouts are supposed to be—they're more asymmetrical in the sense of just providing one-way information so that you can hand that to the client to give them more information about a specific piece of information that might be relevant to their lives. This is an example of one of the many handouts we created. This one is focused on VA home loans. This has basic information in it, but it also has some very, very more detailed information that I couldn't capture here in the screenshot, but also, like I said, more detailed information about not just what is a VA home loan, but what is the process like that you have to go through to get a VA home loan versus a traditional home loan. On the next slide here, this here is a handout that we created about teaching people in the military how to understand their military pay statement. I will tell you in my experience, having served in the military now for over 20 years, I have never received an explanation of my military pay statement in over 20 years of time that I've been in the military. It was just sort of assumed that the pay statement came to me, and I was kind of left to my own devices to figure out what everything was. The good news is that the Department of Defense created some handouts to try and explain this to the troops, how to read their military pay statement. The bad news is we looked at this and we didn't think it was done very well, and we thought there was a better way to do it. We thought we could maybe try to simplify it a little bit. So this is just one handout that we created for people who had military clients. They can give this handout to show it to their clients and say, "If you ever have any questions about your pay statement, just take a look at this quick little front-and-back handout, and it will explain to you kind of what all the details are in all of those various boxes." All right. Next one I'm going to go over to is our Spending Tracker. In module 4 of the military communities companion guide, we have a Spending Tracker. As anyone who works in this field knows, budgeting and controlling your spending or monitoring your spending or tracking it is very important, and so this is kind of a tool we created. This one is not necessarily groundbreaking because a lot of our—we already had a Spending Tracker inside the main toolkit. What we did is we created separate categories that are kind of focused on the types of expenses for secondary income that people in the military might have or veterans might have that you wouldn't have normally in the normal population. So, for example, you can't really see it here in this screenshot, but for veterans who happen to receive disability compensation for the VA, that's an income item. So, in the income section, we have a line item for that if you're collecting a disability check for the VA, or for servicemembers, one area they have to spend money that other people in the normal population don't are on uniform items. That's a regular expense that people in the military have to spend money on to keep up with, and for those who are more seasoned and know, in the military, some people get a regular uniform allowance and some people don't. So there is a tracking of income if you get a uniform allowance. Then there is also a tracking of expenditure if you don't get a uniform allowance and you need to buy a uniform. All right. I'm going to move on here to the next one, and I think this is our last sample of one of the tools. There's a special law there called the SCRA, or the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, and in that particular law, there is a benefit that's provided by law to the troops. It says if you have a loan that you took out prior to the start of your active-duty service, you can ask the lender to lower the interest rate, no matter what the interest rate is, down to a maximum of 6 percent. It's not optional, actually. It's actually—it's mandatory. It's required of lenders. If they receive a notification from somebody who had some loans then went in the military, the key is that you had the loans before you entered service, and then you went into active military service. That can mean somebody who is active duty or somebody who even just is in the guard or reserve and gets activated for more than 30 days at a time. You can send a letter. So we created a template letter here for troops, for people to send this to their lenders to say, "Hey, it's fillable. You can fill in your name and address, the lender's name and address, and it has all the information prefilled in. All you got to say is when you went on active duty and where you got assigned at," and then you can send the letter off to your lenders to get that request for 6 percent reduction of all of your outstanding loans that happened pre-service. The goal here today was to give you kind of a flavor for the different types of handouts and tools we created in the new "Your Money, Your Goals" focus on military communities companion guide. Having said that, as my final slide here, I just want to alert you to the website. "Your Money, Your Goals" has its own landing page at the Bureau's main website, and when you get to this site, there is so much material here available to you. I didn't want to try and cover it all because I thought it was too much, but the important thing is you can download the toolkits. You can download individual tools and handouts. You can download companion guides for special populations, like I talked about today. There's also booklets that can help enable you to have the money conversation with your clients or whoever it is you're serving, and then most importantly, I think, is there's links to order print copies, because as I said, everywhere you go on that website, you'll have the ability to click on a link to take you to our warehouse ordering system where you can order print copies and have them sent anywhere you want free of charge in mass quantities for you and your colleagues or even your clients to have available. All right. I just want to check in real quick with my team here on the webinar to ask, should I address questions now, or should I save them until the end of the webinar? >>Dr. Brown: Let's save them until the end of the webinar, just to make sure that we can give Mechel all the time she needs, and then we'll just do them all together, if that's okay with you. >>Mr. Camilli: That sounds wonderful. Okay. At this point, I am happy to turn over the slides and the controller to my colleague, Mechel, who is going to talk about Misadventures in Money Management. >>Ms. Mechel Glass: Thank you, Tony. Hi, everybody. My name is Mechel Glass, and I am very excited to talk to you about Misadventures in Money Management. I just want to make sure my slide changed over. Did that change for you, Tony and Heather? >>Dr. Brown: Yes, it did. Thank you. >>Ms. Glass: Okay. Thank you very much. Well, Misadventures in Money Management, as Tony had mentioned before, it is our office's flagship online education tool. It's designed to immerse servicemembers in real-live financial scenarios like marriage, deployment, permanent change of station, and any consequence of various financial choices that they make in a choose-your-own adventure format, and it offers that interactive training on topics like building their savings, avoiding impulse purchases, learning how debt will impact a military career, and of course, protections under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. But one thing that I want to make clear is that Misadventures does not take the place of your current programs. We want to enforce to you that MiMM is a supplemental tool that you can use in addition to your current program that you offer to servicemember populations. It was designed to be just enough, just-in-time training so that you could assign a character or you can assign an activity related to what they come to you to talk about. So if one of their questions is they're looking at a contract about an auto loan, well, you can address that by saying, "In addition to the things that we talked about today, I would recommend that you take the Cruise character, which talks about sales tactics and the best way to research buying a car." So it will supplement the things that you're already doing and just provide them with additional information where we're going to cover some of those consumer protections related to services and products. Now, why is MiMM important to servicemembers? Well, we know that dealing with financial issues can be stressful, and it can be confusing, and while most of us know that we need to plan ahead to take action on certain things, learning about financial issues, it's hard, but especially if you're in the field training or if you're deployed thousands of miles from home in a combat zone or if you're PCS-ing with a family. Military life can be very challenging, but MiMM was designed to help servicemembers, young servicemembers, overcome those. And some of the financial topics and scenarios that are covered by MiMM were developed to address those top financial challenges that servicemembers face, such as dealing with debt collectors or cell phone expenses or looking at cell phone plans, credit card debt, some of the things that Tony had mentioned earlier, and of course, buying a car, because that's a lot of the things that young servicemembers do after they leave their basic training and their additional training. They get to their first duty station, and then the first thing they want to do is buy a car. So one of the things that we show in Misadventures is the characters. Each of the characters goes through different scenarios, and it's up to the participant who is taking the course to make those financial choices for that character, and then when they're choosing their way through the course, they'll get an outcome that's either a positive, very good outcome, like in this example where Miya has over $16,000 built in her savings, or if they make different choices, then Miya could have a negative balance, indicating that she's made some purchases on her credit card. So that's some of the things that we talk about. In addition, this is James, our character which talks about making sure that you're making the right choices and spending money on the right things and that you're not being influenced by peer pressure. So that's where you will see the program format in this Graphic Novel format, and I'll talk about a little bit later all the different formats that we've designed the course. This is your mission map. So the goal is to complete all the character origin stories, clear all the obstacles, and build your team so that you can defeat financial chaos, which you see on the screen in the back. Once you've completed all six characters, then at that time, you'll be eligible to get your certificate of completion, but to get started, you must first go through a self-selection process. So, on this screen, this shows you that Misadventures is available to all different audience members, meaning people who haven't even gone into the military yet. Maybe they've talked with a recruiter, and they've signed a contract to go into the military, so they're in the Delayed Entry Program. The program is available for them. Maybe they're in high school, and they're in the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps. Well, the program is available for them as well. RTOC, active duty, National Guard, reserve, and now we also have the program available for the servicemember families and their dependents. So we are very excited to offer this to a variety of audiences. But does MiMM work? Well, we've gotten over 40,000 servicemembers who have shown dramatic improvement over MiMM. Ninety percent of those who have taken the program and completed the entire program have shown knowledge improvement in one or more topics once they're finished, and one of the things we'd love to share with you is that MiMM has won multiple awards for its gamification experience, for how things have been set up. We've won The Communicator Award, and we've also appeared in Training magazine. We do have classroom activities available for Misadventures in Money Management. As you can see on this screen, we have all types of different activities that can be used for you to assign to your participants who come to you, or if you have teachers in the Junior ROTC or ROTC, they can use these as well. We have student activities and teacher guides, and this is an example of one for Angela, where it's showing how Angela built her credit. So you can assign this as a group format for the classroom, or it can be assigned as individual homework. And then once the participant completes the information, they can immediately send you their certificate of completion to show that they've finished the entire MiMM program. And that's build into the program. All they have to do is have an email address, and they can send that to their PFM, to their counselor, or to their commanding officer. Remember earlier I was talking about MiMM being versatile and very flexible? Well, what we've done here is MiMM is able to show the content in different formats. One of the things that our younger audiences, like ours folks that are in the Delayed Entry and Junior ROTC, they love that Graphic Novel format. So all of their character content is in that Graphic Novel format for them to read like a comic book and go through the scenarios that way, and they do have video outcomes to show exactly what happens to that character. But we learned with our older audience, those who are reaching their first duty station—they're around 23, 24 years old—they said, "You know what, Mechel? We love this format, but we'd rather have it all video so we don't have to read," and we said, "Okay. We will take that note, and we will make some changes." So we now have the Live Action, which is none of the reading. It's just someone is acting out the entire thing, and you still choose the different pathways that the character will take, but it's actual actors that are doing those scenarios. Then another version we have is a combination of both. It is the actual Graphic Novel, and the actor who portrays that, they will read the story to you in a storybook format. So you can get a variety of experiences as you actually take the MiMM course, which is very exciting. So it's not only giving them the content that they need, but we're delivering the content in the format that they want. Now, this, I'm excited about because we just recently launched some new features on Misadventures in Money Management. If you look up here on the screen, you'll see the leader board. We've had that before where the services compete with each other to see how many people have finished the course before others, such as have the Marines completed it more than the Coast Guard, or is the Coast Guard's completion scores higher than the Marines? So we have that on a leader board. When you look at the mission progress—I showed you that before—of defeating financial chaos, that lets you know where you are in that process. But one of the new things we have is the updates to the certificate of completion. Now you have the ability to show your score on the certificate of completion or not show your score, and the reason we add that is because our audience asked us to. The folks that are in ROTC and JROTC, they need to show their score to their instructors. So we have a feature when they get ready to type in the teacher's name to send their certificate, they can actually say, "I want to show my score." However, when we talked to our active-duty personnel, they said, "No. We just want to show our commanders that we finished it. We don't want to show them any score." So that's why we put that option on there. A second thing that we've done is—many of you are familiar with our Financial Well-Being Survey. Well, we've incorporated the Financial Well-Being Survey into Misadventures in Money Management. So once you have completed all six of the characters, you will then get the Financial Well-Being questions, and it's, of course, shown in a gamified format where you are basically trying to rescue one of your team members from a monster that has captured them. And it's your ability—you have to basically break them out of a tube so that they can be free. Once you answer those Financial Well-Being questions, not only do you get extra characters that are not normally in your view here, you can view those additional characters, if you like, but you also then get your Financial Well-Being score, and you get access to your certificate of completion. So that's a new feature that we've added. And then in addition to that, we've also added some short, little questions about where you are on the military life cycle. So, if you are an active-duty person and you take this, once you complete at least one of the characters, we will ask you where you are in the military life cycle, and then we'll follow that up by asking you if any life events have happened to you, such as have you gotten married or have you had a child or have you been injured, something like that, and the reason we're asking those questions is because we want to make sure that we are crafting the courses related to who needs it. Depending upon where they are in the military life cycle and what challenges they're facing, we want to make sure we have content that speaks to those things. Then finally, the last button here, which is "Share," this is something we just added, and it's for those people that we get that send us information about how much they love MiMM. Well, now you can share it with a friend. So that's just a cute little button we added to help us out by having people share the experience with friends or family members that they think should also use the tool. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can go to mimm.gov, and if you are a servicemember family or dependent, you can go to mimm.gov/family. Then if you want to reach anyone on the Office of Servicemember Affairs team, you can email us at military@cfpb.gov, or you can go to our website at the URL listed above. And now at this time, I believe we want to open it up for question and answer. Is that correct, Heather? >>Dr. Brown: That is correct, and we did have a couple of questions come in for Tony. I'm sure there are some in t he process of coming in for you as well now. Tony, did you have a chance to review those, or do you want me to read them out to you? >>Mr. Camilli: Hi. I can take those. I think I'm okay. >>Dr. Brown: Okay, great. Thank you. >>Mr. Camilli: Great. So Janet asks the question here, are there problems that specifically target military surviving spouses? I would say to that I don't have any data on that specifically, but one thing I'll note is that surviving spouses—and this is true of people in the military as well as not in the military. Surviving spouses sometimes and especially in the military often have access to enhanced benefits or enhanced resources, financial resources, and so anyone who has kind of a windfall financially, whether it's proceeds from a life insurance policy or access to a regular pension check, is always going to be a target in some way in the financial marketplace. I can share that we have seen that at the Bureau. We in fact have taken official enforcement actions against some of these purveyors or predators who are going after pensions of people, specifically pensioners, military pensioners as well as veteran pensioners. So, yeah, there are problems that target surviving spouses for the reasons that I just discussed. Another question—actually, this is a comment about no one explaining military pay to us. Yep. Like I said, 20 years, I don't think I ever saw any explanation of that in my entire time. And there's also a question here, when will the recording be available? I'll leave that to my other colleagues. I think it's pretty closely after, but I think, C. Delione [phonetic], if you want to send this recording to some veterans that couldn't attend, I would also encourage you to order copies of our new "Focus on Military Communities" companion guide and send it to those veterans. Like I said, it's free of charge. All they really need is their address, where to send things to. So you can access that on the landing page that I have there in the slides. I think that's all I got, Heather. >>Dr. Brown: Okay. Thank you. I think we also have a question that came. Somebody just asked for a slide to reshow. Let me just peak at it. It's from Y. Norton. Will you please reshow the previous slide that provided points of contact? There you go. Thank you. Regarding the questions, I did answer the questions about the slides and being notified when the recording is up. We're actually working on a batch of those, and we're planning to get up several of them that are sort of backlogged because of some other priorities that took precedent, but as soon as those are up, we're going to send a note to the subscriber list. Hopefully, we'll be able to do a few of them at a time, but at least we'll notify you when the new recordings are up. And those will be the recordings, the slide, the transcript. So those are available. If you urgently need the slides now for some reason, feel free to just email either the box that you see up there or the CFPB FinEx box, and we'll be glad to take care of that for you. Let's see if any other questions came in. I don't think they did. I want to make sure. I didn't want to miss anything. Okay. I think that's everything. If there's no further questions, we're going to wrap up. I want to give again a special thank-you to our presenters, Mechel and Tony, for the great information. Every time I see your presentations, I learn something new. So I'm sure everyone else and some of the people have already comments that they find it very valuable, and thank you for our Events Team as well for making this a success and working through challenges. Let's see. It looks—no. I just got another private message. Okay. I think that's everything. So I appreciate everybody coming. We had a good audience today, and we have a couple of webinars coming up in March as well. So stay tuned, and keep an eye out for your emails as we get those finalized. Everybody take care, and have a good rest of your week and a good weekend. [End of recorded session.]