Transcript
CFPB FinEx Webinar:  Understanding the Women's Wealth Gap
Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Presenter:  Sonya Passi, FreeFrom; Cindy Hounsell, WISER; and Annamaria Lusardi, Ph.D., George Washington University
Facilitator:  Heather Brown, Ed.D., CFPB FinEx Lead

 >>Ms. Susan Funk:   Hello, everybody, and welcome.  Thank you for attending "Understanding the Women's Wealth Gap."  I'm Susan from CFPB Events Team, and I'll be going through a quick housekeeping slide before I turn it over.

If you are having any issues with audio, click the audio button near the bottom middle of your screen.  There, you have the option of having the WebEx platform dial your phone number and receiving the audio through your cell phone or desk phone.  The closed captioning is available by opening up the chat box at the bottom right-hand corner of your screen and clicking on the closed captioning link.  During this event, if you are having any technical issues, please send us a chat through the chat box by selecting "Host."  We thank you for attending today ,and I'm going to turn the event over to CFPB's Heather Brown.

>>Dr. Heather Brown:  Thank you so much, Susan.  I appreciate that and all of your help getting us started and set up.  Welcome, everybody, to the CFPB's Financial Education Exchange.  Our webinar today is on "Understanding the Women's Wealth Gap."  We hope it will provide you information to keep you focused on this topic throughout the year.  As you will hear today, the pandemic has impacted women's employment disproportionately, and we wanted to squeeze this in, even though it's the final day of Women's History Month.

I'm going to introduce our speakers, and then I'm going to run through a few preliminary slides.  It will take about 5 to 8 minutes, and then we'll get started with our three very interesting, exciting, and experienced speakers, presenters on this topic.  First, I'd like to introduce to you our first speaker who is Sonya Passi.  Sonya is the founder of FreeFrom, a national organization on a mission to create pathways to financial security and long-term safety for survivors of gender-based violence.  FreeFrom believes that each survivor must achieve financial independence and build communities that support individual, intergenerational, and collective healing.  They also believe that intimate partner violence is a systemic problem in our society, which we are severely lacking the infrastructure to address.  Sonya has been an antiviolence activist since she was 16 years old.  Her work has been featured in The New York Times "Market Watch" and CNN, and she is also a member of the Forbes 30 Under Class of 2017.  So we welcome Sonya and look forward to her presentation.

Our second speaker is Cindy Hounsell.  Cindy Hounsell is the president and founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Women's Institute for Secure Retirement, otherwise known as WISER.  She's an attorney and a retirement expert.  She has been widely quoted in various media and publications.  She has testified before Congress and served as a delegate for a number of White House summits and conferences.  She has authored many chapters, columns, articles, op-eds, papers, and booklets focused on women's retirement issues.  Ms. Hounsell was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Plan Sponsor Council of America, and she was also named an influencer in aging by PBS "Next Avenue."  We welcome Cindy, and I happen to see that you had also written something on retirement for the FDIC recently and was glad to see that go out.

Our third speaker is last but certainly not least.  Annamaria Lusardi is a university professor of Economics and Accountancy at the George Washington University School of Business.  She is a founder and academic director of the school's Financial Literacy Excellence Center.  Previously, she was a Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College, where she taught for 20 years.  She has also taught at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.  She's also taught at Columbia Business School and was a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School.  She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University, and she was also included on the Forbes List of 100 Successful Women in Italy.  She has served in several policy roles, and she worked for the Office of Financial Education at the Department of Treasury, the United States Department of Treasury, and she also was appointed, at one point, director of the Financial Education Committee in charge of designating the national strategy for financial literacy in Italy.  So we also welcome Annamaria very much, and I have to struggle not to call her "Doctor" because she prefers not to use that, but she's so esteemed, and her background is excellent.  And all three of our speakers, we're so excited to have today, and we thank them for their time.

Okay.  I am going to go through some preliminary slides quickly, and then we're going to hand the presentation off to our first speaker, Sonya Passi.  Disclaimer.  This presentation is made by a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau representative and other representatives.  It does not constitute legal interpretation, guidance, or advice of the Bureau.  Any opinions or views stated by any of the presenters are the presenter's own and may not represent the Bureau's views.  The inclusion of links or references to third-party sites does not necessarily reflect the Bureau's endorsement of the third-party sites, the views expressed on the third-party sites, or products ore services offered on the third-party sites.  The Bureau has not vetted these third parties, their content, or any products or services they may offer.  There may be other possible entities or resources that are not listed that may also serve your needs.

The mission of the Bureau, for those of you that are new to FinEx webinars, is that the CFPB is a 21st century agency helping consumer finance markets work by making rules more effective by consistently and fairly enforcing those rules and by empowering consumers to take more control over their economic lives.

The program that is providing this today is the CFPB Financial Education Exchange, which is a network of over 20,000 financial educators, financial coaches, teachers, and others that educate adults on financial literacy topics.  This is the landing page for our website, and you will see we have the webinar posted that's happening today, and we will be updating that shortly with the next webinar that will occur on April 29th.  So that's a good place to check if you have not got your mailing and you're curious if something is coming up.

On the right, you'll see in the middle, there's an email address box where anybody that may have had this announcement forwarded to them from someone else but would like to get on the mailing list themselves can enter their email address into that box and will receive a welcome notice, and then in the future, you'll get all announcements, notices, and any other information on new releases of resources.

Near the bottom, you will see "Connect With Others."  We do have a LinkedIn page where you can put up a post for new research you're putting out, if you have a new training program.  Anything that is related to adult financial practitioners, we welcome you to put there.  You can also ask questions or try to communicate with others in that network.  We have about 3,000 on the LinkedIn group, and so if you're not on the LinkedIn group, I encourage you to sign up for that.  At some point, we may in the future try to put more announcements in there without having to maybe send out as many emails.  So we encourage you to try to get on that list as well if that's something you're interested in.  All you have to do is check that you want to join, and we will bring you in.

These are the key links that you should be aware of.  The first link is our consumerfinance.gov/coronavirus page.  It's updated regularly, and there's new stuff on there weekly.  We have a link there to housing issues, and it's in conjunction with the Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Housing and Urban Development, and it's very highly visited and full of wonderful information.  I actually go there to answer questions I get.  We also have lots of other information about protecting your finances during coronavirus.

The second bullet is for free bulk copies of our publications.  We have beautifully printed publications that are bound.  If you want to order some for a small group you're working with or a class, if you're having in-person sessions, feel free to order these free of charge and have them delivered to the site you're training or your office or whatever is convenient.  Most of the stuff that is there is also downloadable on our website.  So, if you prefer to do this paperless or if you're still not fully open and seeing customers, you're free to email the documents to individuals from our website as well, but it's just nice to know you can get bulk copies of these publications, and some people keep a stock in their office so they have them available for walk-ins when people come in.

Then we talked about the third bullet.  You can sign up either on the front page.  You can also email that third bullet for anything you need, if you have questions about this webinar, to get a copy of the slides.  I will let you know that we are in the process of cleaning up a backlog of some of the presentations that have happened previously, and so you're going to start seeing those pop up, and we will send a notification when we get them all up.

The second-to-the-last bullet is the LinkedIn group, and the final bullet is just the general web page that I showed you, the landing page.  If you have a picture of this, you can pretty much access any of the resources we have for financial practitioners through something on this page.

Okay.  This is a picture of the coronavirus page.  It looks different than it was.  It was redesigned, and I just wanted to make sure that people knew if they landed on this, they were in the right place, and notice that we also have student loans, avoiding scams which are a big issue because everybody is doing so much on line now that some hackers have taken advantage of that and scammers as well, and managing your finances, of course, in general.

All right.  With that, we are going to hand it over to our next speaker, Sonya Passi, and, Sonya, are you all set?

>>Ms. Sonya Passi:  Hi. 

>>Dr. Brown:  Great.  Thank you, Sonya.  Have a great session.

>>Ms. Passi:  Hi, everyone.  I'm just waiting to be given slide moving privileges, but I guess I'll just start by saying my name is Sonya Passi.  I'm the founder and CEO of FreeFrom, and FreeFrom is a national organization working at the intersection of intimate partner violence and financial security.  We are a national org, about 4 years old, based in L.A, and today I'm going to be talking about our work with banks and other financial institutions.

So, to set the scene for you, one in four women and one in two trans folks in the U.S. will experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime, and the number one obstacle to safety for survivors is financial insecurity.  When I am talking about the nexus between intimate partner violence and financial insecurity, it's a very tight nexus.  This is the number one reason that folks are not able to get safe and stay safe.

Why is this?  So two reasons.  First is the CDC estimates that intimate partner violence will cost a female survivor an average of $104,000.  So it is incredibly expensive to be a survivor, and these costs include everything from medical bills to damaged property to relocation costs and much more.  But on top of that, economic abuse, which briefly is using money to exert power and control and harm, occurs in 99 percent of all cases, and that can look like anything from not being allowed to work to working but having your paycheck taken from you, having money stolen from your bank account, having loans taken out in your name that you do not know about, and damaging your credit score as a result, and it can also look like all of the above.  Combining those two, the cost of intimate partner violence and the prevalence of economic abuse, we surveyed 1,300 survivors last year, and they shared that on average, survivors have $1,300 stolen from them each month by their harm-doer.  And they have approximately $16,000 in coerced or fraudulent debt in their name accumulated each year, and so you very quickly start to see just how expensive it is to be a survivor.  So often in our society, we ask the question, "Well, why didn't they just leave?"  When you correctly understand this as an economic problem, then you really start to see that what you're talking about is why didn't somebody leave becomes how could they leave when they had six figures in costs, potentially no job, potentially no savings, potentially a damaged credit score, and the obstacles to leaving and the obstacles to safety start to make a lot more sense.

I wanted to share a couple stores with you to really bring this to life, what we're talking about here when we're talking about economic abuse and economic abuse as it pertains to bank accounts and other financial accounts.  This is a survivor called Tammy.  We talked to Tammy and many other survivors in the drafting of our banking guidelines.  Tammy said, "We had a savings account, a checking account, and a business account.  And I had opened all three accounts myself.  He," her harm-doer, "went to the bank to sign the paperwork, but I opened the accounts, and I did all of the admin stuff for our business.  I never signed any papers that would have removed me from the accounts, but somehow, he had taken me off.  And in the midst of the divorce and trying to hide and find somewhere to live, I didn't have time to deal with it."

Another story from a survivor that we talked to, she fled from one State to another to get to safety, set up her life again, found housing, found a job, and then went into the branch of her bank.  She had a solo checking account with the bank and said, "This is my new address.  Can you please have a new debit card sent to my new address?" and the bank, kind of following the usual protocol, sent a letter to her old address with her new address on it, confirming that she had meant to change her address.  And you can see why in a lot of circumstances, that's exactly what the bank should do, but understanding the nuances of domestic violence, she got a copy of the letter.  She saw that her harm-doer had gotten a copy of the letter, and after 2 years of running, she packed up her bags and started running again because she knew that as soon as he got that letter, he was going to come after her.

We know that the impact of intimate partner violence and the danger to survivors has increased as a result of COVID.  Domestic violence-related homicides have gone up.  We know that the UN is predicting that progress towards ending gender-based violence globally will go down 30 percent in the next 10 years as a result of the pandemic.  I mentioned earlier that we had interviewed, surveyed 1,300 survivors last year, and one of the questions that we asked was "How has COVID impacted your situation?"  And folks fairly overwhelmingly said it had resulted in escalated violence.  It had resulted in fewer financial resources, which made getting safe or staying safe much harder.  A lot of folks reported either having to go back to a harm-doer or stay longer with a harm-doer than they had intended to.  Slow court proceedings meant that getting things like a restraining order were that much harder, and a significant percentage of survivors reported theft of their stimulus checks by their harm-doer.  So what you start to see is what was already such a strong financial issue has also become that much more pronounced as a result of COVID.

What all of this led us to learn is that survivors don't have a safe way to save their money and access their money, and so we really have an access problem here, and we feel like banks and financial institutions are best placed to be part of the solution to that problem.  The survivors we surveyed, only 52 percent have access to a safe bank account.  Thirty percent had money stolen from their account by a harm-doer.  Twenty-nine percent had their bank account monitored by a harm-doer, and sort of making another link here—we've already talked about IPV being an economic issue, a COVID issue—it's also a racial equity issue.  Survivors of color, Black, indigenous, and POC survivors are three times more likely than White survivors to report that they do not have a bank account that is safe.

We estimate that there are 28.4 million survivors in the U.S. who have bank accounts but do not have safe access to those bank accounts.  So there's a tremendous opportunity here to reach more customers and provide better customer service.

Just to chat quickly about some of the impacts of abuse on survivors' banking experience, not being able to safely save the money they need to get to safety and that they need to support themselves on an ongoing basis, harm-doers being able to use their banks to locate survivors after they leave and to access and monitor their online bank accounts.  The process of talking to bank employees about some of these issues, survivors were reporting often leads to inconsistent information because they're talking to a different person every time, and folks are not trained in how to deal with this issue.  Survivors often leaves abuse without their ID or a permanent address, which makes opening a new bank account more difficult.  Harm-doers incurring debt in a survivor's name.  And survivors, as a result of these debts, needing time to recover without enduring further damage to their credit and their financial profile.

As I mentioned, we see a huge opportunity here for banks to implement supportive systems, products, and trainings, and we talked to survivors about would they actually want to work with a bank, would they want to seek support from a bank.  Seventy-five percent of survivors said they had never sought support from a bank, but 51 percent said they would seek support from a bank if they knew that banks offered their support.

I'm going to take you very briefly through the 11 guidelines that FreeFrom has created, and I am available anytime to talk more about these.  We base these guidelines both on work that has happened in other countries as well as conversations with 1,300 survivors about their banking experiences and their needs, and I'm going to run through the guidelines.  But you'll see on the right-hand side of my slide, these percentages are how many survivors said that implementing this guideline would help them.  So offering accounts that meet Bank On's National Standards, keeping survivors' contact information confidential and secure, implementing enhanced fraud protections on survivors' accounts, offering safety accounts for survivors that are not visible or accessible online, designating an internal team to handle survivor accounts, training bank staff to detect, prevent, and respond to economic abuse, allowing survivors to open accounts with ID and address alternatives, offering interest-free deferred payment emergency loans to survivors, refraining from reporting defaults on coerced and fraudulent debt to credit reporting agencies for a period of time to allow survivors to recover, offering flexible repayment plans for survivors in default, and providing survivor paid leave and other resources to bank employees who have experienced or might experience intimate partner violence.

You may be familiar with a lot of these recommendations because a lot of this work has been done in the context of elder abuse, and elder financial abuse has a tremendous amount of overlap, though some differences and nuances from intimate partner violence, financial abuse, but 88 percent of banks are already requiring training for all frontline and customer service staff on how to detect and report elder financial abuse.  Eighty percent of banks are already placing holds on suspicious transactions in elder customer service accounts.  Sixty-two percent have dedicated staff to manage elder customer programs and so on and so forth.  So you'll see that there's a lot of precedent and also a lot of internal bank knowledge already about how to extend some of these offerings to support survivors and address the issue of intimate partner violence.

I wanted to share very quickly with you—I mentioned that we followed the examples of other countries—Australia, New Zealand, and the UK have already spent several years kind of taking ownership and having their banks be part of the solution to the problem.  Each country has sort of national guidelines for banks through their version of the ABA, and a number of banks are actually taking measures to address the issue, get trained, and so on and so forth.  There's also global precedent here for doing this.

That's everything I wanted to share.  Please feel free to reach out to us if you would like to learn more about the guidelines, talk about them in more detail, or just more broadly learn about the issue.  I am very excited to talk to anyone who's interested and also, of course, available during this webinar to answer any questions that you have right now.  Thank you so much.

>>Dr. Brown:  Thank you so much, Sonya.  Thank you.  That was an excellent presentation.  I'll admit it's the second time I've seen it.  I still learned from it, and I still felt it was as moving as the first time I saw it.  You do a great job of demonstrating the challenges that these women face in trying to get some independence, and we'll come back to you at the end for questions.  For those that are listening, if you would like to put a question in the chat, if you want to direct it to one of the speakers, you can just use their first name, otherwise we'll just kind of channel it to where we think is best.  At the end, we'll cover as many questions as we can.  Wonderful!

Next, we're going to have—Cindy Hounsell is going to speak, and she is from WISER.  We just need to get the control to her.  It looks like it went to Annamaria.  Susan, can you help with that?  Thank you so much, Susan.  Okay, Cindy.  You should have the control now.

>>Ms. Cindy Hounsell:  Okay.  Whoops.  Sorry.  I'm going the wrong way. 

>>Dr. Brown:  Oh, that's all right.  I do that quite a bit myself.

>>Ms. Hounsell:  On the road to retirement, I took the wrong exit.

>>Dr. Brown:  You're all set there.

>>Ms. Hounsell:  Anyway, good afternoon.  It's great to be here with all of you.  I'm the president and founder of WISER.  I have the address where you can write to us and get questions answered or find tools and information maybe that you haven't been able to find easily on the website, which has got a ton of information on all of the topics that are sort of listed there, and those are the topics that most people write to us about or are looking for information, and a lot of them, they need the information quickly, caregiving especially, divorce, widowhood.  A lot of the things that actually Sonya was talking about, we've also heard those stories in the same way.  So it's great to know that there's an organization that covers all of these things.

WISER is 25 years old.  We're dedicated to improving the long-term financial quality of life for women.  That's our basic mission—and I have to get in the swing of this.  A lot of the work that we do is through the National Resource Center on Women and Retirement, and the goal under that project is to advance the financial knowledge of the aging network, which is a group of aging service organizations where we deliver programs, best practices, resources to help underserved and hard-to-reach women to help them by making better financial decisions and learning about where to find programs and things that will help them.

One of the questions that we get all the time is "Why women?"  Like, why are we just focused on women?  So the issue is that there are so many more older women than men, and this has been true for a long time.  It's what got me interested in starting WISER because, in my own situation, I had worked for a company for a long time and then had the pension frozen, which made it virtually not worthless but about a tenth of what it would have been.  So no one could really explain that to me.  I kept seeking out information about this retirement thing.  When we started, there was hardly any information around.  Now it's wonderful.  There's millions of pages on the internet about women and retirement.

Women make up a big part of the population over 65, almost 6 million, as you can see I'm rounding up, but they also make up a large proportion of the 85+, and that's the aging—the group that's expected to double, even triple, as we're turning into an aging society.  It's also the group that's most likely to end up living in poverty, and that's sort of the bad news of all of this, which also wakes me up in the morning is that many women who have also never been poor end up in poverty in old age, and for many reasons, but one of the biggest changes I've seen is in longevity and since I started working on this issue.  Anyway, we hope to change all of that, but with that, people say, well, is the pandemic affecting women and their retirement?  Of course, because women were already close to jeopardy in many ways before the pandemic, and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on working women really continues to be scary.  When you look at the numbers especially for minority women, Black, Latina, compared with White women who often are in jobs that allow you to work at home, whereas there are fewer of those jobs for Black and Latina women. 

And so one of the things that I'd like to say is that over the years, you see where women work makes a big difference in what they're earning and whether they have benefits at the workplace.  If you look at these numbers, it's close to 80 percent are in occupations that require close contact or in person, and they can't be done remotely.  A lot of the health care support, personal in service can't be done if you're at home.  So that's been the biggest problem. 

The other thing is that the gains that women have made in the workforce and in their own financial independence are now at risk for a lot more women, and that's because of the disproportionate impact, as I mentioned, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a pretty frightening number, which is that 80 percent of the little over 1 million workers who left the workforce in September were women, and that's four times the rate as men.  That's in large part a real retirement shakeup.  If you look at when you drop out of the workforce, that 1 year can lead to a 39 percent reduction in annual earnings, and if you spend 4 years out of the workforce, that's up to 65 percent reduction.  That's a study that was done that the statistic came out of a special report in The Wall Street Journal, and I have these statistics if anybody is interested in learning more.

Anyway, the other issue, of course, is the pandemic and mothers.  We all have heard those stories.  We all have friends who are in that situation, and when you look at the impact on women and mothers in particular, because of the dependence on child care facilities or school, and single mothers of color have higher unemployment rates, and many have left the workforce and have given up on work entirely.  And of the mothers, that's about 705,000 women, which is enormous.

Enough with the terrible statistics.  We're going to switch over, and we're going to talk a little bit about what are some of the things that you can be doing all along, maybe not this year, but you can get information about your retirement.  One of the things we tell people all the time is if you think, "Well, I'm not doing anything for retirement.  I don't have income.  I don't have anything at the workplace," you still need to get a Social Security account.  You can sign up my Social Security account and sort of learn how that website works, and you'll be able to get information, make sure that your earnings are showing what you actually earned and that there aren't any mistakes that need to be corrected.  So that's one thing that people like, "if there's something I can do," that's what you can do.

The other thing is you can look at this list, and I'm going to go over them quickly, but what's interesting is that—someone told me this once, and it's really true—every decision, big decision that you make in your lifetime, like where you go to school, how much your debt is, when you get married, who you marry and all of that, knowing about the finances of that person, a lot of the things that Sonya is talking about, those things happen because people also don't know a lot of the information about maybe the other person and what they're capable of.  We've heard so many of those stories as well.  But knowing that you need to have all this information and you need to be sharing it all the time with your partner or your spouse—I mean, the divorce rate has gone down.  So many people are in relationships that we're not talking about, but they need the information to know what's going on.  If one person is maybe contributing to a retirement account and the other isn't, that needs to be part of the financial discussion, not the week before retirement, but while you're earning and in those good earning years before you get to retirement age.

Some of the things that need to happen is to avoid credit card debt so that you have a good credit rating, but if you don't, then there's lots of help around.  This is an especially good time for calling up and getting better payment plans or getting certain things reduced.  There's a lot of help out there, and we also have great information to send as well as the CFPB, I'm sure, has great information about where to get counseling and real help.

Then the other thing is if you do have a job or whenever you have a job that has benefits, to pay attention to them and make sure that you're taking advantage of all of it and also to make sure that you're signed up for retirement because not every job offers an automatic sign-up.  So you have to make sure that you're signed up for the things that you care about and want to make sure that you have.  Then, as I said, learn about Social Security and all of that, and I'm just glossing over because I can only tell you so much in my 15 minutes or 20 minutes here.

Then the other big shocks that come along that I just want to list and make people aware of, because there are a lot of people that talk about this and they have no idea that their parents may need caregiving in the future, a mother who is a widow or a mother who is taking care of her grandchildren for some reason or another, the death of a spouse, divorce, an economic crisis, like the last economic crisis.  Everyone says, "Well, it wasn't as bad for women," except that a lot of people lost a lot of money, and so it does affect everyone.  So learning how to protect yourself and family, I myself have lived through a number of these crises that I never expected to happen, but of course, I'm like I live in—you know, "retirement" is my favorite word.

The big challenges that everybody talks about are the challenges that affect a lot of women, which is that earning less over a lifetime, time away from work—9 years is the average—becoming a part-time worker because you're trying to accommodate families like women are doing today, having less in savings and retirement plans because of that, and then living longer, living alone in retirement, which these are all factors that sort of get you in trouble later on.

One of the things, I have a lot of women, especially after they have their first child, and then they'll say to me, "I never knew that it was going to be like this.  Well, I know.  None of us did.  So women need to realize that when we see all these living to 100 or 107, that that's going to take more income to pay for all those extra retirement years.  There have been these proposals, which I think will probably have to happen at some point, which is that at a certain age, you get a bump-up.  You get a bump-up maybe at 85 in your Social Security benefit.  You get another bump-up at 95 or whatever to keep people from living in poverty, and it happens to men too.  It's just that there are more women that tend to live longer.  We're sympathetic to the men that live that long too because many of them are not as prepared either, but it's the women that usually live out their spouses, and a lot of times, they live up to 15 years longer than a spouse.  So that's clearly not planned for by the majority of people.

The point is you need to know what you have, the basic rules, signing up at the workplace.  I mean, I've heard stories from people that went to Ivy League schools that never knew they were supposed to sign up and missed out on benefits at their job, like it doesn't matter.  People from all walks of life don't have this information.  So, at age 65, women on average can expect to live 22 more years, and that's why I think it's important for people to consider if you're in good health.  I have friend who call me up and say, "You know, I just want to take this benefit early," and you say, "No.  You'll wish you didn't when you live 25 or 30 more years."  Thinking about where the income comes from, there's like not a lot of places that it comes from.  It comes from Social Security, which is the foundation, especially for a lot of minority and low-wage women.  That is especially what they rely on.  So that's why it's also important for people to make sure that they're in jobs where their employer reports their income.

At the workplace, if you're lucky, you may have a retirement plan, and there may be a match.  That really helps, and then everybody is supposed to—aside from those other two pieces of retirement income, you're supposed to have your own savings, which is not easy, I know, for everyone.  So I'm just telling you how the expectation is and what you need to do as long as you can try to do something.  I was a late bloomer myself, believe me.  So I understand the problems with all of this.

Anyway, there is one good program that is about to be expanded, I think, within the next year or two, and that's something called the Savers Tax Credit, which a lot of people don't know about, but if you don't have a match at the workplace and you save money, you also get a tax credit that can help you.  A couple making a deposit into retirement accounts, you can get up to 50 percent credit and get a refund on your taxes, but if you don't pay taxes, that doesn't apply.  The proposals are to make this helpful for everyone so that everyone has the opportunity to save and make it fully refundable.

The one other thing my friends don't like to hear, as I said, is that working longer does help and especially getting to the full retirement age so that your Social Security isn't reduced, and I have a slide on that later, which I'll probably have to go through very quickly.

Then portability is something else that has been made easier and will keep becoming easier, that when you're at a job and you leave to go take another job and maybe you have some money in a retirement account and they want you to take it out, not cashing it out, which is like what a lot of people do, especially we work—we've done a number of reports on Latinas because we have partners that we've worked with for a long, long time, and they have the highest cash-out rates.  Seventy-five percent of Latina women end up cashing out their retirement, and I  understand why, but sometimes there are other choices.

Whoops!  I don't know how that happened. Sorry.  Whoops!

Okay.  So now, anyway, we'll talk a little bit about women and pay equity, and you can see that that those are the numbers.  They're depressing.  So we're not going to mull on them, but you have the numbers if you want to look at them at a later time.  I'm not going to read them all, but one of the startling statistics—and that's from a report that the Institute for Women's Police Research has done—to show that with the rate that we've been going to reach pay equality, that it's going to take until 2059, or if you break it out by White women, Black women, Hispanic women, you can see what those numbers are.  So that clearly is depression.  So we want to get away from that.  We know there are a lot of good bills out there, and hopefully, something will happen and make those numbers not relevant.

What else can women do that really helps?  There's research showing that if you have an emergency savings, then you're less likely to sort of need to go into your retirement account and cash it out, which a lot of people had to do.  The stories are pretty clear.  If you're going to lose your house, but you have some retirement money, you're going to take that retirement money and use the money to not lose your house or your apartment or whatever else you may need it for, for whatever those reasons are.  The rule is that you shouldn't be taking out your retirement money, but most people don't have—and a lot of them don't have emergency savings accounts. 

The numbers you can see here, almost half of women can't afford a $400 emergency expense compared with about a third of men, and so that means that they pay a lot more for their credit cards to cover those emergency expenses, and they pay it over time, or they have to turn to payday loans, bank loans, or lines of credit more frequently.  One of the things that I know is that especially with the payday loans, that I've seen some of the research, which is private, but that it's middle-aged women that are the majority of users of payday loans consistently, and that's no surprise because of all the things we've already talked about.  I'm just giving you some of the facts here.  So women tend to carry more credit card debt, and then Latina women, Latinx folks end up carrying more than everyone else, but that's no surprise because they have the lowest salaries.

One of the reasons for having emergency savings, which the financial industry is making a big push to having the opportunity for employers to be able to offer emergency savings, which I think will make a big change for all of us, so that you can actually have money taken out of your paycheck for an emergency account, and if the employers want to, they will also have—this is in the future; it's not true today—they will be able to provide you a match, just like they would for a retirement account.  So that's something that I think will make a big difference for everyone, especially that doesn't have access to an emergency savings account.

Then what the experts recommend is 3 to 6 months worth of living expenses, but as we all know, the pandemic has lasted already over a year.  So it would help, but it clearly isn't—that's why we needed the bill that came up that has a lot of good funding to help people, like the last bill that just came out, the ARP.

Anyway, I am going to talk about the stimulus check.  So getting organized, making sure that you get what you're supposed to get, that you understand what they are, what these benefits are, the tax credits, the earned income tax credit, and help other people that may be in a more precarious financial situation than you are to really make sure that you can help other people because there are a lot of things that are complicated about some of these tax credits that people are just unfamiliar with and need help.  As I said, we have great partners that also are willing to help and do counseling and all of that, just like there are people on the CFPB website.  These are just some of the things to be thinking about and making sure that you use the stimulus in the best way possible.

I've already sort of gone over this part of it.  As I said, like sharing the information and knowing what you both have, especially if you're in a couple, looking at how it's invested, and knowing that you're the beneficiary and that your spouse is your beneficiary if something happens and one of you dies, because a lot of the stories that we get are from people who had someone else as a beneficiary, never changed it, never really thought about it, and then something happens.  Especially during these pandemic times, you want to make sure that that's one of the places that you've paid attention to is like the beneficiary of all your accounts.  So I want to try to be very gentle when I move this.

Then knowing what your retirement will cost, figuring out how much income am I going to need, and we even have a back-of-the-envelope task that you can do, because most people know where their money goes, especially people that don't have a lot of money.  I mean, people with a lot of money know it too, but I find that working with a lot of the people that we work with, they can tell you how much goes out of their pocket every week.  So I think thinking about that is what—you have to think about income when you eventually retire because you're going to have to make up whatever it was you were earning that paid for those bills or you're going to have to eliminate those bills.

Here are some calculators that are helpful.  We have a great one on our website too called "Your Future Paycheck Calculator."  It has very few questions that you need, and if you say, well, I'll need a thousand dollars a month, it will tell you in today's date what you would need to get a thousand dollars a month, how much money it would cost you to buy, say, even a product, a very basic product that costs that.  You don't have to buy any products.  All you have to do is just think about really to get a thousand a month for the rest of my life, this is what I need to be saving.  It's just an exercise to do.

I mentioned these already, the tax tips and saver incentives.  That's one of the biggest pieces, I think, of retirement is it's complicated.  You need to know a lot.  You also need to beware of scams.  Sonya even mentioned a number of the tax scams that target or that eventually harm older adults, and it's taken the national groups like probably 25 or 30 years to even get funding.  Finally, Adult Protective Services got funding for the first time, $77 million in this last big stimulus bill in the ARP.  So it takes a long time to get these things going, and I actually am looking forward to connecting Sonya with some people that I know because they will love what she has done. 

Check out WISER's Tax Update Fact Sheet—we have that—so that you learn more about what's available and what can really make a difference if you do start saving for retirement in the near future.

IRAs.  If you don't have anything at the workplace and you need to start saving in some kind of a retirement plan, most of the academic literature will say that the Roth IRA is probably the best thing that you can do because you can contribute to it, and then if you happen to need it, which I'm telling you don't take it out, but if you had to do that, the Roth IRA is the easiest way to do that.  Individual retirement accounts, a lot of them have minimums that they charge before you can even get into it, but the credit unions are a little bit better.  But you really have to shop around if you're looking to do that.  None of it is easy.  I wish it was easier.  I wish I could recommend exactly some place to go to, but if you're a member of a credit union, there may be other rules that allow you to open an IRA account without having to have too much money to put in it before you even get started saving.  But those are the rules that you can put up to $6,000 if you're under 50 into a retirement account, an individual retirement account, and if you're 50 or older, $7,000.  A lot of times, what stops people from doing anything is if you find someplace where you don't need a minimum, you can put in $50 or $25.  You don't need to have those huge amounts, whereas people often think that that's the case.

Again, as I said, we'll—I'm really bad at fixing the slides here.  I apologize.  Now looking at the type of benefits that you can get—and I have to stop right now, which I will—retirement, spousal, survivor, disability, these are all the benefits that Social Security gives.  You should know exactly what your retirement date is.  Somehow I've screwed this up.  I apologize.  I don't know how to get this.  I clicked on the wrong—no, maybe—oh, there it is.  It's moved.  Knowing what the full retirement age is is key.  So it's like somebody saying, "What's your full retirement age?" and you don't know.  Well, you should know, and that's easy if you get on that website, as I mentioned.  Then look at the difference if you wait until your full retirement age to take your retirement.  It makes a huge difference.

I don't know what's happening.  I just apologize.  What can I say?  Thank you.  It's the end, and somehow I made it go too big.  I don't know what happened.

>>Dr. Brown:  That's okay.  It may have just been the system.  It was a wonderful presentation, and the technology did not take away from it, and I learned a lot.  You actually motivated me to go look into more things as well, so thank you.

>>Ms. Hounsell:  Okay.

>>Dr. Brown:  If we have extra time at the end, we can come back and cover some of those slides if you'd like to.

>>Ms. Hounsell:  All right.  At least I moved the ball to Annamaria.  Thank you.

>>Ms. Annamaria Lusardi:  Thank you.

>>Ms. Hounsell:  Thank you.  Sorry.

>>Dr. Brown:  Well done.  All right.  Annamaria, it's all yours.

>>Ms. Lusardi:  Thank you very much for inviting me to give this presentation.  I'm really delighted to be here and particularly to speak after Cindy and Sonya who have highlighted some of the points I'm also going to make in my presentation.

The first thing I really would like to say, I'm going to present some data, and on purpose, this data is before the pandemic.  It was collected in January 2020, and the reason why I want to do so is that the pandemic has given us this insight about how much women have been hit, how much women have been affected by the pandemic disproportionately, but I also wanted to show you, echoing what other speakers before me have said, that women were already fragile before the pandemic.  So, as we think of going back, we really need to go back to not the normal but a new normal because the normal before the pandemic was not good enough.

The second thing I want to mention in a presentation which has to do with wealth gaps is try to keep the attention, as Cindy has done really so beautifully, on the fact that when we look at wealth, we need to take a holistic view of wealth, meaning we can't just look at net worth, but it's really important, first of all, to look at the balance sheet of families, to look at the many, in fact, financial decisions that people make, and as Cindy has indicated, people need to be savvy about taking advantage of the benefit in the workplace, try to save for their retirement, but also have precautionary savings.  Also, be careful how they manage that, how they manage credit cards.  So there are all of those decisions, and they're all consequential for net worth, for wealth, and this is also the approach I'm going to try to take today, with the idea, by the way, keeping in mind that wealth is not the final objective of individuals.  It's a means to an objective, and I'd like to call this objective "financial well-being."  That's why the title of my presentation literally focuses on financial well-being, and here, I'm trying to follow the pioneering work that the CFPB has been doing in the past few years, trying to keep our attention on this important variable, which is how can we measure and how can we make sure that women are financially well, that women, in other words, are financially secure, are free to make choices, are not too much constrained by debt and other limitations.  So this is one of the views I'm going to take in my presentation.

And third, I want to mention that when we talk about women, one of the things I want to say today is we need to look more granular and look at the many different groups that we should study when we look at women.  My focus today in particular is going to look across race and ethnicity, and the reason is we have seen how disproportionately the pandemic has affected, for example, African American and Hispanic women, and yet again, they were already much more fragile and much more vulnerable before the pandemic.  This is again something to take into consideration, and there are wide differences when we look across race and ethnicity.  So we need also to make sure we focus on the groups that are more vulnerable and particularly because we might, therefore, be able to do better policies.

Let me now turn.  The data I'm going to show, the data I'm going to utilize is part of a project that we started several years ago with the TIAA Institute, and it's called the Personal Finance Index.  Each January, starting in 2017, we have been collecting data to basically measure what we call "personal finance knowledge and management."  In fact, another way to define this is like almost a financial checkup.  We look at indicators of knowledge and indicators of financial well-being.  In other words, it's a financial checkup of financial health, and each year, we have collected data, not just on a representative sample of the U.S. population, but we have also zoomed in, in some specific group.  In 2017, we looked at Hispanics, then millennials, African Americans, and in 2020, women.  So I'm going to focus in particular on this last report we brought last year focusing on women but also with an attention to African American and Hispanic women.

The first thing I would like to emphasize is that we have been able to measure financial knowledge or better personal finance knowledge with as many as 28 questions.  We have a very detailed and granular analysis of personal financial knowledge; for example, covering the topics that Cindy had just indicated, how much women know about debt, how much women know about saving, earning, ensuring, go-to sources of information.  The first thing I would like to emphasize is that we see a very clear gender gap in financial literacy.  Women know less than men in many of these topics, even though as previous speakers have indicated, women have to make some very complex financial decisions because, for example, by earning less, they have to make their money work even harder.  We live longer.  We take care of children.  We might face difficult challenges, violence within the households, and so some of the skills can be particularly important.

In fact, we know less than men when it comes to some of these topics, and then when we turn to the African Americans and the Hispanic women, we see that the knowledge is in fact substantially lower for those groups.

We have been able, because we have so many questions, to also be able to disaggregate the type of knowledge that women have, and as what I report here is the eight topics that compose this Personal Finance Index.  There are in this picture two worrisome results.  One is how little women know about some of the most important topics to deal with during the pandemic, which is managing race, ensuring.  This is an area where the knowledge of women is substantially low.  By the way, it's also low among the population, but this is critically important.  The second thing is it's particularly low among some of these race and ethnic groups.  If you think not only that women have a lower knowledge—and by the way, the knowledge of women is low in each of these eight areas when we compare to men, and it is substantially lower when we look at the African American and Hispanic women.

This is important because, for example, when we look at proxies for financial well-being—and here, I'm going to try to proxy wealth with some important indicators that are actually good proxy for wealth, but in particular of well-being.  If we look at the difficulties that people have in making ends meet, of not being constrained by debt, of being able to face a shock, that fragility, financial fragility, we call this variable, very similar to having $400, but here we say, "Can you come up with $2,000 in a month's time if you were to face an unexpected expense?"  Saving for retirement on a regular basis or planning for retirement, and both saving regularly and planning for retirement, we know are very, very strong predictors of wealth close to retirement.

As you can see here, women—and by the way, before the pandemic—and I want to remind you, this is a period of economic expansion, and it was 10 years after the previous crisis.  So, in a time where the economy was doing well and families were supposed to do well, when we focused on women, we see that not even half of the women are planning for retirement.  Many of them, in fact, 40 percent are not savings regularly for retirement, going back to some of the recommendations that Cindy was providing.  Many of them feel constrained by debt and also have difficulty making ends meet, but when we look at the specific group of women, for example, the African American and the Hispanic ones, then the differences are even stronger.  And the difficulties of planning every precautionary savings, being able to face a shock, being able to make decisions and not being constrained by debt is a lot more difficult for these families, and so yet again, I think it is important to consider just that this financial checkup is revealing in a time of economic expansions, in fact, a lot of vulnerability and particularly among some specific group.

When we try to link knowledge with behavior, what we found—and this is what we have found in many other works, and this is also why we are trying to emphasize knowledge—it's not that knowledge is the only, of course, determinant of behavior, and certainly, it is not when we look at some specific group.  For African American and Hispanic women, there are so many constraints that we can consider, but when we try to link the two with knowledge useful for behavior, we see that it is.  Confirming the findings of many of our other studies, we find that women which have higher knowledge, that knowledge is also associated with being able to make ends meet, be less constraints by debt, be less likely to be financially fragile, be more likely to save for retirement, and plan for retirement.  This holds even when we control or even when we compare women of similar characteristics, meaning similar income, similar level of education.  So it's not that these other economic characteristics are responsible for this, but we want to show that link, this link exists, and it might provide a suggestion for how we can help women, all woman, be potentially more financially secure, both in the short term and in the long term.

I want to show you next another proxy or another indicator that we have tried to use to see and provide some back-of-the-envelope calculation about what should we do or potentially what are the costs of not being financially well.  We have asked respondents in our sample how many hours per week they spend dealing with issues and problems related to personal finance.  The number is staggering.  On average, while women spend 7 hours a week, it's almost an entire day thinking about and worrying about personal finance issues, but those which have lower financial literacy spend 2 full days just thinking about and worrying and dealing with personal finance issues.   I think this provided to us some back-of-the-envelope calculation on potentially the cost of programs to help women or potentially the advantages of employer.  We haver asked also how many hours at work people spend worrying about personal finance issues, and potentially, there are cost benefits in addition to cost of helping employees and particularly in this case helping women deal with the personal finance issues.  Again, these numbers are quite staggering, and they are even a lot more when we look at African American and Hispanic women.  They, again, as we had expected, spend so much more and are so much more worried and exposed potentially to these problems, so much so that, again, I think if we are designing programs, I think it's very important that we take into consideration that women are not just a homogenous group, but we need to take into consideration the specific need preferences and also different circumstances that women face.

If I had to propose like Cindy very nicely said, what can we do, it's clear that we need to boost financial wellness and particularly among women.  This financial checkup before the pandemic had unveiled the many vulnerabilities of women, and I have to say there is a lot of areas of concern.  I know that sometimes we love to focus or we have focused a lot on retirement savings, but in fact, if we look at it more granularly, we see that there are lots of difficulties with managing that, and there are lots of issues with carrying that at a very high interest rate, for example.  There is the fact that people often do not have precautionary savings, and as a result, they might also carry more debt.  And there is the fact that we spend a lot of time as well worrying about some of those issues, and this also affects our financial well-being.  One size here doesn't fit all.  Personal finance is truly personal, and there are very wide differences, even when we look just across women alone.  I have not even counted the data across age or education group, and I think we would probably learn a lot more by doing so.  I think what is critically important to do prevention, to try to make sure that people are more financially well, I think some of the costs we have seen, including the hours that we spend every day worrying and dealing about personal finance issues, are a cost not just for the individual but potentially to society as well.  As we know, preventing is much better and much less expensive and much more advantageous than the cure.

If I had to give an example, an association, about how do I think of financial literacy, in here, I've mentioned financial literacy of personal finance as this knowledge of the many decisions that we make every day, the decision connected with these eight areas, managing debt, managing savings, earning, consuming, sources of information.  The way I would think about this is like the water in an ecosystem.  I think we need an ecosystem that works better for women, certainly that works particularly better for African American and Hispanic women, and there are lots of things that I think should be put in place, but I also think that financial literacy is necessary for the ecosystem to grow and flourish and particularly in a moment in which we face such complex financial decisions.  I was listening to Cindy speaking about Social Security, the rules about Social Security, and what you should do and be careful not to withdraw your Social Security to early at age 62 or be sure that you take advantage of all of the opportunities of the employer.  We need that basic knowledge to navigate the financial system, literally, to grow and flourish.

I would like to say that we have also reported this on our website.  So I'm going to refer to the website for that.  We really need to provide some of these best practices so that women can be more financially healthy in the same way in which doctors that told us, for example, what we need to do so we can be healthier, so, for example, eating well, exercise, sleep a certain amount of hours, keep ourself as healthy as possible.  I think we need to do the same for our financial health.  How can we provide some of those practices, some of those suggestions as provided before, and how can also the financial system really provide this help and practices so that we can all do better?  I think just by looking at the amount of hours in which we spend dealing instead with the problems, our expectation, our calculation is that the benefit of financial education can easily be greater than the cost.

Let me conclude here also by telling you that the new report looking at the 2021 data—so, finally, we are going to have data after the pandemic—is coming up on Monday, April 5th.  So I'll be able to report also the new results, and we are also going to talk about women as well in this new report.  Thank you very much.

>>Dr. Brown:  Thank you very much, Annamaria.  That was excellent.  I could have listened to you for another hour at least.  Your research is very interesting, and I will definitely be looking forward to seeing the upcoming report on April 5th.

It doesn't look like we have a lot of questions in there.  We have some kudos for our speakers and people saying great resources and thank you for a good job, so thank you for those that did send that.  I did have a couple of questions I thought I would throw out, and I'll start with Annamaria because she, I know, has to teach a class soon.  I just wanted to know what you think.  I've heard from other sources about the need for both women and low-income, lower socioeconomic groups to be come more adept at investing in order to build their wealth quickly.  Of course, I've heard of investment clubs and some that have become famous.  I'm just wondering if you had any thoughts on what could be done to help bridge that gap for women.

>>Ms. Lusardi:  It's a great question.  When we think of finance—and I know this because when I ask this question to my students, "What do you think are the decisions related to finance?" everybody thinks it's investing in the stock market.  Of course, it is very important to invest in the stock market, and this is the best way often in which we grow wealth, because the stock market by helping us, by allowing us to take more risk, we also can get this potentially higher return.

I think it is important that everybody can invest in the stock market, but after having looked at so much data, we also via the Personal Finance Index and other indicators.  We should not, first of all, forget that one of the ways in which you build your wealth is manage your debt well, and by the way, it's much easier to pay a very high interest rate on debt than find an asset that give this return.  For example, the average interest rate on credit cards has been from 15 or 20 percent, and it's very, very hard to find an investment which carries that interest rate.

Also, often people don't take advantage of great opportunity which really can increase your return, one of which is the employer match, if you work at a job that offers that employer match.  You have to be savvy in that many dimensions in doing so.

The other thing we have learned, by the way, from this data when we look at in particular investment, this is always the area in which people know the least, and also, they tell us they know the least.  So, clearly, investment is more complex.  It is, per se, more complex also.  I don't want people to invest in the stock market without that knowledge because the stock market has to do essentially with assuming risk.  So you have to know what you do as you invest in the stock market, and particularly now after the game stock idea, I also want to warn everybody that the stock market is not a game.  It is a way to grow the wealth, but you have to invest and being knowledgeable at least about some of the basis concepts about investing.

>>Dr. Brown:  Thank you for that.  That's a great answer, and I love the idea of thinking about how you're managing your debt and whether you're going to make, on an investment, what you're paying out in your interest.

It looks like someone has a question directed at you, and it says, "From where is the data sampled?"

>>Ms. Lusardi:  So we have a representative sample of the U.S. population.  We are using a data collection company to do this analysis, and then we oversample some of these groups, because our sample is only a thousand participants, thousand respondents.  So it's sufficient to do statistics about the total population, but it wouldn't be enough to do statistics across subgroups.

>>Dr. Brown:  Thank you very much, and that subgroup information was really interesting and helpful to see.

It doesn't look like there's any more questions.  So you are welcome to stay, and if you need to get going and get ready to teach—I know I like to have a little cushion sometimes—you're welcome to do that as well, and we just thank you so much for all that wonderful information and look forward to having you back at some point.

>>Ms. Lusardi:  Thank you.

>>Dr. Brown:  Okay.  So I also have a question for Sonya, and I just wondered if she had any advice to give women on how to accumulate enough money to leave, and I thought of that because my mother has a family friend that told her a story that she wanted to leave a bad situation, a marriage, and she basically kind of had a little extra money.  She pulled off a dollar here and a dollar there when she got groceries or ran errands, and then when that money added up to a bigger bill, like a 10 or a 20, she'd trade it in for that, and she kept it hidden in her Bible.  And by doing that, she was able to get enough money to get her and her two sons out of a bad situation.

But I think that was pretty, for her, amazingly innovative and creative, and I'm just wondering what women do when they have these risks with a bank account if somebody sees them pull out a large amount of money, and I just wondered if you had any advice that you could share quickly around that topic.

>>Ms. Passi:  Absolutely.  The first thing I would say is part of what's wrong with the way we in our society address intimate partner violence is the burden is on the survivor, and intimate partner violence is something created by our society and that thrives in our society.  So the responsibility really needs to be on our society.

One of the things that we push for is cash grants for survivors.  The Biden-Harris administration has actually pledged $5 billion in cash for survivors, and so we're working to ensure that that pledge becomes a reality.

I guess I would start by saying I would like to get to a point where survivors don't have to save that money themselves and instead have access to it, but like you said, Heather, survivor are incredibly creative and resourceful and strategic, and so there isn't really like a one-size-fits-all.  I think the situation that you just described is very common, folks saving a dollar here, a dollar there, but everybody—the harm looks different for everyone.  For some advisors, keeping it in a sock drawer is an option.  For others, it isn't.  Maybe putting money in a Bible is for some, but maybe for others, actually having a neighbor or a friend keep that money is more doable.  But it really is about understanding that having the resources to lead takes time.  It shouldn't because, of course, you're in danger while that is happening, but it does.  And so to start financial safety planning, saving money or making a plan for where you're going to put that money, making sure you know what bank accounts are in your name, making sure you know if  there are any credit cards in your name, having all of your documents, your ID, and so forth, making copies of things if you need to, maybe keeping those with a friend or a family member that you can trust.  But it really is a very gradual process, and I think the reality is there isn't one approach that will work for everyone.

>>Dr. Brown:  That sounds really good.  That's interesting, and I'm really glad to hear about that possible grant coming and hope that does work out.

Let's see.  There's a question from Catherine to all panelists—or maybe it's a statement:  "I appreciate the comparison to the survivors and elder abuse."  Okay.  It's just a statement, but thank you, Catherine, for that.

Thank you.  Let's ask Cindy.  Did you have anything you wanted to cover that you didn't get to cover?  And if you do, you have about, we'll say, 4 minutes, so I have a minute to wrap up.  If not, I had a quick question to ask you.

>>Ms. Hounsell:  Go ahead.  You can ask me.

>>Dr. Brown:  Okay.  It may not be quick, but it's a question.  The question is you mentioned about Social Security accounts and checking it.  There's a lot of women now that are self-employed and having daycare centers in their home or even other businesses not related to children, and I'm wondering, is there a way for them to pay into Social Security?

>>Ms. Hounsell:  Yes.  It's actually a pretty easy process.  I mean, I can't tell you which part of the website to go to, but there is a whole section on how to pay because it, in large part, was meant for people that hired someone and wanted to be able to make sure that they got credit for whatever their earnings were.  Maybe you had a gardener that you employed or—I don't know.  Someone to mow your lawn is more like it or something that you would—if you wanted to be able to do that, you would be able to do it easily.  So it isn't difficult at all.

>>Dr. Brown:  Thank you for that.

>>Ms. Hounsell:  I don't have it at the top of my head.

>>Dr. Brown:  No, that's fine.  You gave us the website, and you said it's something that's there.  So we can find it.  That's the power of the search engine these days, so appreciate that.  That's very helpful.

>>Ms. Hounsell:  Right.  I just want to say one other thing very quickly, and that is that Social Security has enormously changed their tools and resources.  So it gets better all the time.

>>Dr. Brown:  Okay.  That's great.  I haven't checked that site out in a while.  So I'm going to go back based on the things that you said.

Well, thank you to all of our speakers for doing a fantastic job.  This was really, really wonderful, and we hope to connect with you all in other ways in the future.  Again, for those that are on, we are recording this, and we will get it posted, and eventually, we will have an announcement go up when we have a backlog filled.  If you have an immediate need for a copy of the slides, please send your request to cfpb_finex@cfpb.gov, and that is on—can I move the slides?  Yes, I can.  That is on the next slide, and it is the third bullet.

I'd just like to also thank, besides the speakers, our Events Team, Susan Funk and Tracey Wade, that have helped out through our practices and getting things set up and also helping out during this session to cover for a couple of things that had to happen that you probably weren't aware of, so thank you both for that.  And I'd also like to thank Aaron Scheithe and Lisa Schifferle as well and also Dr. Sue Kerbel who conceived the idea to have an initiative around this or conceived the idea of this webinar and suggested it.  Thank you for those suggestions—and also to my leadership for allowing us to stretch out and do lots of different, existing, interesting, and helpful topics that need to be covered.

So that will conclude  the webinar for today, and I hope to see you all back April 29th for an upcoming webinar.  In the meantime, have a great week, and please keep in mind that there are still challenges that women face, as we know from the horrible incident that happened earlier this week, was it, or was it late last week?  I have lost track of time some.  Let's keep those women in mind and also remember to speak out when we see people being treated in the way they shouldn't.  Take care, and have a great day.

[End of recorded session.]