CFPB FinEX Webinar
Financial Caregivers Tools and Resources
February 25, 2016
1:00 pm CT

Welcome and thank you all for standing by. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session of today’s call. At that time you can press star 1 to ask a question.

I would also like to inform all parties that this call is being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn today’s call over to Irene Skricki. Thank you. Please begin.

Great, well thank you everyone for joining this Webinar today of the CFPB Financial Education Exchange or CFPB FinEX. Today we’ll be talking about financial caregivers and tools to help people who are working in that area.

If you could just go to the next slide, thank you (Dubis), hmm. And just a quick disclaimer that this Webinar is not intended to give legal or other advice from the speakers. Great, okay, so just a quick word about the CFPB for those of you who don’t know us.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a relatively new federal agency whose purpose is to help consumer finance markets work by making rules more effective and enforcing those rules and empowering consumers to take control of their economic lives.

And so we both educate consumers, enforce rules and study so we can better understand financial markets and consumers and their needs as well. Just so you know who is sponsoring this call, we are on the consumer-facing side of the Bureau, the Consumer Education and Engagement Division.

We have several special population officers that work with students, with service members, with economically vulnerable consumers, the financial empowerment office and also older Americans office who is our partner today in offering this call, consumer engagement which does our Website and digital offerings and then financial education.

We educate and empower consumers broadly to make informed financial decisions so this call/Webinar is fun for me. We have been mostly doing these Webinars in the past for people who have already signed-up for CFPB FinEX or financial education exchange.

This time for the first time we did a much broader outreach so there may be a number of you on the call who had not heard of FinEX before because you’ve heard about this Webinar through other ways. I just want to let you know what FinEX in case you are interested in participating.

It’s an online and in some cases in-person information exchange where the Bureau shares its information to CFPB for financial educators. We learn back from financial educators what they’re learning about issues, challenges, effective practices and then help people connect with each other in the financial education field.

So we have a number of things that people can participate in. If you want to join you can send an e-mail to cfpb_finex@cfpb.gov and just say you want to sign-up and then you’ll get regular newsletters and things like that.

On the next slide, thank you, we launched the financial education exchange almost a year ago, 10 months ago. We have almost 1400 people who are signed-up now. We’ve had some regional convenings. We do monthly e-newsletters with updates on new educational materials or other content.

We have a LinkedIn site that I’ll show you a slide on in a minute and we have had nine Webinars thus far. This is the 10th so this is our 10th Webinar anniversary. I’ve listed the nine up there.

They were on a range of topics that may interest you around consumer complaints or on credit reports, financial well-being and all of them with the exception of the students one have been recorded and you can view them all if you want to watch them or listen to them on your own time.

They’re all available on our resources for financial educators’ page. This Webinar will also be up there in a couple of weeks probably and on the next slide, sorry, we have a slow-moving slideshow, this is just a screenshot of that Webpage, resources for financial educators.

The URL is at the bottom, consumerfinance.gov/adult-financial-education and on that page this is just the top part of the page but you can see we always list the next Webinar in the series because we do have them every month and there’s a little box there that says view past Webinars. If you click there, you will see a place where you can go and watch any of those previous Webinars.

Further down the screen - you can’t see it here - there’s lots of other resources and tools for financial educators and consumers who are interested in financial education so just a few more words about FinEX before we go into our main topic.

We also have put all of our resources and tools for educators and/or consumers into one document that is also available on that Webpage you just saw on the slide before.

And it lists both reports and resources we have about understanding financial education, understanding consumers and some of the issues that they face, tools that financial educators can use in working with their clients and then tools for consumers who are actually trying to buy a house who are dealing with debt issues or other things.

It’s all available free on our Website so we encourage any of you who are interested to go ahead to that Website and access any of those things and again for those of you who are in a financial education role, we do encourage you to sign-up for FinEX and so you’ll get regular updates on this type of material. The FinEX e-mail address is also on the Webpage that I showed you.

The URL again is up top there as well and just one other thing I’ll note for those of you who like to share your own resources and thoughts or if you want to see what other people are doing in financial education, we have a discussion group on LinkedIn, financial education discussion group that you can join. Again it’s free and open to anyone and we post our new resources.

We encourage other organizations and people to put up, you know, new things they’ve been doing around financial education so you’re also all welcome to join that so again for any of you who are not already a part of the LinkedIn group or the FinEX group, feel free to join those and now we will go to our featured presentation.

I am very excited to have a great presentation today by Naomi Karp with the Office of Older Americans talking about financial caregivers and other resources for older adults so Naomi I will turn it over to you. Thank you.

Great, thank you so much Irene and thanks to all of you for tuning in. I’m really excited to be reaching quite a few people here, this is terrific. I’m going to start-out telling you just very briefly, Irene gave you an overview of our division consumer education and engagement but I’m going to tell you just a little bit about the Office for Older Americans.

And I could mention so the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created in the Dodd-Frank Act which passed sort of after the height of the financial crisis.

And Congress specifically put in the Dodd-Frank Act that we should have these special population offices because they felt that these populations needed a little bit of extra attention as far as financial education and protection out in the marketplace so our Office for Older Americans was created, we have one page in the statute.

Older Americans is defined as aged 62 and over. We, you know, are not sticklers about that. We’re really just looking at the older population generally as well as their family members, their caregivers, and all of the various service providers and industries and so forth that work with older adults.

Our mission is to help this population get the financial education and training they need and there are really two kind of buckets of issues that we deal with. The first as is stated in the law is to prevent unfair, deceptive and abusive practices aimed at seniors.

We interpret this very broadly to really mean every kind of elder financial exploitation, scams, fraud, any really bad practices that result in the loss of money or property or threats to those things of older people and we do a lot of work in this area and that’s kind of the box that today’s presentation fits into.

The second is to help older people make sound financial decisions as they age and achieve what we like to call later life economic security and that can include everything from choosing whether they should take a reverse mortgage which is a product that’s only for older adults 62 and over.

Another example would be what age should you claim Social Security and I know we did another FinEX Webinar on our new retirement tool that focuses on that, whether you should take a lump-sum payout of your pension, things like that so we deal with a lot of retirement and financial decision-making issues.

We like to say we’re the only office in the federal government specifically dedicated to the financial health of older consumers. There are a lot of other agencies that are doing related work but we are the ones with really that targeted mission and it’s very exciting. I’ve been here almost since we opened our doors.

So moving on, what I’m going to talk about today is our managing someone else’s money initiative and just to set the stage for why we started this initiative, many older adults especially as they get up into their 70s, 80s, 90s and now we see lots of people even living until they’re over 100 start developing some declining capacity to handle their finances and this can make them vulnerable.

When we talk about capacity or cognitive issues, there are many different kinds of capacity, you know, capacity to manage your money and property, capacity to make healthcare decisions and they’re all a little bit different.

Now what research has shown is that financial capacity is the first type of capacity to go in many cases so even for people who haven’t gotten to the point of developing dementia, Alzheimer’s disease or some other type of dementia, even people with what we call mild cognitive impairment, they may already have pretty seriously impaired ability to handle their own money and property.

One study showed that about 22% of people over age 70 have mild cognitive impairment so you can see that would impact a lot of people. We also obviously have other adults not necessarily older adults, people with disabilities, developmental disabilities, mental illness and so forth who also may lack capacity to manage money and property.

And so the product - the managing someone else’s money guides - that I’m going to talk about today really applies to that population as well so it’s the people who are caring for people with disabilities and older people so that should give you some perspective in terms of the people you deal with.

Another thing to note about declining financial capacity is that people often lose or have declining judgment in their ability to detect frauds and scams and that’s why they really become very vulnerable to a variety of predators so you’ll see in the managing someone else’s money guide we also do deal with the issue of financial exploitation and scams, it’s very important.

So people who have this declining capacity often need a surrogate to handle their money and here you see the phrase lay-fiduciaries. When we first began working on this project, we called it the lay-fiduciary guide. How many people know what the heck a lay-fiduciary means so we knew because we wanted everything to be in very plain language we didn’t want to use that term.

But what it really means is family members, friends, people who are not professionals who are in a position to have actual legal responsibility to handle someone else’s money and I’ll go into the different roles and types of fiduciaries they are.

But these family members’ friends, lay people are critically important to the older person or the person with disabilities but this is a huge responsibility that is dumped on them in some cases or that they take on or they transition into and they often don’t have any training, they don’t necessarily have skills.

We like to sometimes they’re not even good at managing their own money and here all of a sudden not only are they doing that but they’re managing someone else’s money and they have really important responsibilities there. We know that some of them do commit fraud. They’re in a position to have access to money.

These booklets that we’re going to talk about really were not aimed at the person who was a really bad actor who is like aha, I’m going to abuse my power of attorney and I’m going to steal the money. We are not unto the illusion that by putting-out some guides we’re going to stop people with really bad intent.

But it was really meant more as a help, how do you do this job and where might you be kind of getting close to the line where you’re not doing the right thing and how can we explain to you how to do the right thing?

Naomi, since the term lay-fiduciary is a handful, a mouthful, is financial caregivers, it’s a nice term. Is that kind of a plain-language substitute?

That is kind of a substitute with one caveat. There are people who are informally providing care, you know, you may go over to your mom’s house, you know, once a month and help her go through her bank statement or her online banking. You might help write some checks or you might be an informal financial caregiver.

These guides are more for the formal ones who actually do have formal responsibility but that’s a good question. We have used the term financial caregiver because it’s a little bit more accessible to people.

And I assume some of the general tips as opposed to the legal specific legal ones about the legal role people would be anyone could use in terms of how to help somebody manage?

Yes, many of the tips in the guide that we’re going to talk about would be applicable to those informal caregivers too but some of them really are very specific to those roles so just a couple of real people who we’ve run into in releasing our guide to give this a little bit of life and I’ll just tell you about them briefly.

(Kristen) in Virginia was someone who actually helped us launch our Virginia-specific guide that I will talk about in a little while. (Kristen)’s brother - this was a younger individual with a disability - he was in a car accident, a really terrible car accident. He had many, many surgeries but he had traumatic brain injury.

Within a year his marriage fell apart and his sister which is (Kristen) had to step-in and take over for him. It was a very emotional situation. She was also dealing with his healthcare issues but on top of that she had to become a Social Security representative payee and in other ways take on fiduciary responsibilities.

(Kristen) was actually a vice president of a credit union so she obviously is a sophisticated person, and what she told us was that it was very overwhelming - and as you can see here she said, “Even though I’m a financially savvy individual, I had no idea where to get help.”

If only I had had these guides when I first took that on so that was one perspective. We also talked to (Hector) in Florida. His situation was a little different. His elderly mother had been financially abused by a niece. He had been living separately but when that happened to his mother and she lost a lot of her money, he had to move-in with her.

He himself had a disability but he still took-on this role for this mother. She named him as her agent under power of attorney and she later went into a nursing home but he continued to maintain her home and handle her money and make her payments.

And (Hector) we were pleased to hear really understood that this was a heavy responsibility and he said when you have to take care of someone else’s finances you feel even more responsible for their affairs than you do for your own.

It was great that he had that perspective. I don’t think that everyone does but we hope that after they read these guides perhaps they will so moving on to the initiative, we released that of what we call national guides because they would be applicable to people in every state called managing someone else’s money.

Now almost 2-1/2 years ago in 2013, we originally were going to create one guide but we decided because there were differences between these types of fiduciaries that we would actually create four so the guides are for four types of fiduciaries that we name here.

And I’m in the next few slides I’m actually going to run through what each of those are so you have a basic understanding of them because this can be very confusing and people don’t really understand the basics and how people become those. This is just a picture of what our original guides looked like.

As you can see, they’re all green which was all of the Bureau’s publications were green. This became very confusing because they all looked the same and we would take the guides to conferences and people would think it was one publication so you’ll see in the screenshot later, we now have some in four different colors which is great.

Also we’ll mention this later but all of the publications that are connected with the managing someone else’s money series you can reach them on a landing page and the URL is later in the slide presentation but you can link to all of the national guides to the PDFs that are online, to the information about ordering hard copies to the state guides that I’ll describe and so forth so we are trying to make it easy for you to access that and to get them.

Okay, so what is a fiduciary? In simple terms it’s anyone named to manage money or property for someone else so the first type is the agent under a power of attorney and the power of attorney is one of two of the types of fiduciaries.

That is something that people put in place themselves, we call it a private arrangement. You plan for your future, you create a legal document that gives someone else authority and you’ve made the plan whereas the other two types that you’ll see someone else, a government agency or a court comes in and appoints the person so the power of attorney is a legal document.

Typically people will get some help from a lawyer to draw them up although people have sometimes done it themselves, not necessarily advisable because there are certain ways that you want to do it and witnessing requirements and so forth and by the way the guides are not about how to create powers of attorney or trusts or any of these, it’s more once you’re in that role how to do the role.

So I’m going to use Mom in this case so Mom made a power of attorney to give her daughter legal authority to make decisions about her money and property and her daughters can then step-in to make decisions if the Mom become cognitively impaired or otherwise injured and can’t do it, that we call the daughter the agent.

You may have heard about healthcare powers of attorney or healthcare proxies or healthcare advanced directives, same or partially the same name, it’s different. Those are about healthcare decisions and the one we’re talking about now today is about financial decisions.

So moving on to representative payees or rep payees and VA fiduciaries we lump these together in a category we can call government fiduciaries. These are where a government benefit-paying agency appoints someone to manage Mom’s benefit if she needs to.

So the most common ones are Social Security calls that a representative payee so Social Security would have to determine that the person cannot manage their own benefit check or actually people aren’t literally getting a check. It’s usually going directly deposit it into an account or it could be going onto a direct express card.

The Department of Veterans’ Affairs calls that person a VA fiduciary. The key thing to know about that is these people only manage those benefit checks, that amount of money. They don’t have authority to manage all the other property. Mom might own a house. Mom might also have a pension.

Some people might actually be getting Social Security and VA benefits and so forth so in that case they probably would actually have more than one fiduciary. It could be the same person. It could be the daughter or the son serving all of those roles but the government fiduciary has to only manage those benefit amounts and manage them to meet the basic needs of the person.

So what is a guardian of property? That’s the term where different states have different names. It could be called a conservator. It could be called a guardian of the estate. Those are all basically the same thing. That’s a case where probably someone didn’t make a plan in advance.

They didn’t appoint an agent. They didn’t setup a trust but something happens and it’s clear that someone has to take care of their property so someone will petition the court and the court will name the person to manage Mom’s money and property if the court finds that she can’t manage it.

If Mom also can’t make other kinds of personal decisions like her healthcare decisions or even her day-to-day living decisions, she might also have a guardian of the person that could be a different person or it could be the same person so that’s kind of the basics of what a guardian of property is and then finally what is a trustee?

There are different kinds of trusts. The kind that we’re talking about is called a revocable living trust so these are a little bit more complicated. Mom again likes the power of attorney. She signs a legal document called a living trust and let’s say in this case she makes her son her trustee.

Mom has to transfer ownership of money and/or property to the trust so the property is then owned by this legal thing called a trust and the trustee is the person who manages it. The trustee can then pay the bills or make other financial decisions using the money that’s in the trust and then there are these third parties called beneficiaries.

Mom would be a beneficiary. There could be other beneficiaries and when Mom dies the beneficiaries would probably be the ones to then get the remaining money that’s in the trust so it’s a little bit more complicated but it’s while Mom is alive, the function is very similar using the money for her benefit according to the rules of the trust and according to the law.

This is just a heads-up because I’m giving an overview of the project that we have a second phase of this project that we’re quite a good ways into now. Because a lot of the rules and laws and practices and resources for this area vary quite a bit from state to state, we also wanted to create some state-specific guides that would go beyond the general rules that are in the national guides.

The national guides are still fine and great for everyone but this just can get even down to a little bit of a deeper level with some specifics so we created or are in the process of creating state-specific guides for six states.

We’ve picked these states because they’re states that either have a large percentage of older people, a large number of older people and we also wanted to get some geographic diversity around the country so you can see on the slide, these are Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Oregon and Virginia and then I’ll tell you a little bit later about the templates and tips.

That’s for the other 44 states and the territories. We launched the Virginia guides last summer and the Florida guides last September and we’re getting ready to launch the Oregon guides this spring and then the other three will roll-out.

And in the next slide you can see the nice colors that we now have on the guides so all of the guides now even the national guides as we publish new versions and as you’ll see on the Website the electronic forms are in these colors so you can tell them apart a little bit and know that TL is for powers of attorney.

Okay, so what is in the guides and this is true of all of the guides both the national versions and the state guides, they really do three things. First they walk these fiduciaries through their duties and I’ll go into that a little bit more. We try to make them simple and understandable and actionable.

Secondly as I mentioned before, financial exploitation and scams is a big problem these days for older adults and people with disabilities too I think so we use this as an opportunity to educate these financial caregivers on how to watch out for scams and financial exploitation and how they can protect Mom or their loved one, their person on whose behalf they’re acting and what to do if that person is a victim and then finally we give them resources.

We have a where to go for help section so let’s talk about the duties of the fiduciary. We’ve divided them into four duties. We’ve gone away from using legalese here because it doesn’t really help people so for example the third duty here you see keep Mom’s money and property separate.	In legalese that would be do not comingle funds.

Well, people don’t really know what that means so we’re trying to use plain English here so the first duty is act only in Mom’s interest and a lot of this is really about avoiding conflictive interests and we try to give some real-life examples so people might be able to think through as they’re taking-on this role what’s okay for me to do and what might be a conflict of interest?

Where might I be putting my own interests or possibly putting my own interests or the interests of someone else close to me above Mom’s interests and maybe making decisions that aren’t completely in hers so we give two examples. One is let’s say you’re the agent under power of attorney and you take Mom’s money and you buy a car with it.

Well, every month you drive Mom to the doctor and maybe once in a while you take her shopping but for the most part you’re using that car on a day-to-day basis for yourself. Is that a conflict of interest? Well, maybe it is. Maybe you shouldn’t have used Mom’s money to buy that car. Should you do business with family?

Let’s say Mom owns a house and it’s in some disrepair. Her porch is falling apart, she needs some carpentry work. Well, your son does carpentry so you hire your son and you pay your son to do the work but maybe your son isn’t really a very good carpenter and maybe he’s charging more than someone else who, you know, you might find in your neighborhood or, you know, online.

So maybe you shouldn’t be throwing that business to your son. Maybe you should but maybe you should think about it so that’s an example of what we talk about in the first duty. The second is the duty of care, managing Mom’s money and property carefully.

There are a lot of things we go into in the guides on this so for example when you’re first taking-on the responsibilities you want to take an inventory. You want to list all of Mom’s assets and don’t forget about her debts because you’re going to be responsible for paying those or managing the debts as well.

We point-out something that, you know, you might not see in typical legal literature and that is think about how you might maximize the benefits that Mom is getting. Maybe there’s some public benefits or some programs out there that Mom is not benefiting from.

We talk about, you know, making sure you explore that and we refer people for example to the national council on aging has a benefits checkup program where you can actually put in Mom’s information and see whether maybe there’s a federal or a state benefit that she’s not getting.

And then investments, if Mom is lucky enough to have enough money to invest, you want to invest carefully. You want to make sure that if you’re hiring a financial professional, you’re hiring a good one who can act in Mom’s interest. Third we have keeping the money and property separate. It’s fairly obvious but some of these are things people might not think about.

Joint bank accounts are very common and perhaps the fiduciary was on a joint account with Mom before this arrangement came out. They’re not really a great idea when you’re managing someone else’s money because you want to really be able to distinguish what is Mom’s money, what is your money and spending her money for her so we tell people to avoid joint bank accounts.

Keep the money in an account in Mom’s name and then you need to know how to do things like how to title the account so for example if you’re one of the government benefit fiduciaries there are very specific rules on how you want to go to the bank and title that account and we have a little chart in there that tells you how to title the account.

And also know how to sign so for example if you’re an agent under power of attorney we might say you should sign just using fictional name John Doe as Agent for Martina Rowe. You don’t ever want to sign your Mom’s name. You want to make clear it’s you but you’re signing on your Mom’s behalf.

And then finally keeping good records. Again it seems obvious but it’s really important and especially for something like guardians or the government fiduciaries where you are actually going to have to file reports or accountings with the court or with the agency. It’s extremely important to keep your receipts, to keep a list of expenditures.

You want to avoid doing cash transactions if possible because you’d want to have a record. Even I know we all use ATMs today. It’s very convenient. You don’t necessarily want to be withdrawing a lot of Mom’s money from an ATM in cash.

I guess you could keep the little receipts you can get out of an ATM but it’s just a lot cleaner to be paying bills in a way that you can keep a record so those are just some examples of the very down-to-earth actionable kinds of tips that we give people so moving on, we talked a little bit about how we want to prepare people to look out for financial exploitation.

On this slide we have some common signs that are in the guide so that people know what to look for. The chunk in the middle that says sudden changes in Mom’s spending or savings, examples of what we could call transactions or transactional signs that there might be something going on here, you know, using the ATM a lot, making unusual gifts to a new person.

Even though you’re managing Mom’s money, Mom might still be managing some of her money, you know, in some cases she might have a small amount she’s managing or whatever. These things could still be going on so you want to look-out for them.

And then the things on the bottom are more like behavioral or things that you might see in interactions between people, Mom seems afraid when a certain relative or a paid caregiver is around. Someone’s trying to isolate Mom or control her decisions, those are, kind of, behavioral signs of financial exploitation.

These signs just to be clear are not specific to your role as anyone who sees those signs should...

Absolutely, those are kind of drastic signs and there are many other red flags that may signal abuse that we try to give a short list of kind of some of the key ones but we as you’ll hear if I leave any time for it but we have some other publications that go into those a little bit more.

So what can fiduciaries do if they think Mom has been exploited which is the next slide, what fiduciaries, yes, so these are just some of the different actions that fiduciaries should do, everything from calling adult protective services which is your state social service agency that can investigate and intervene, law enforcement, you know, long-term care ombudsman if they’re in a facility, possibly considering civil legal action to get money or property back.

Those are just a few actions and then moving on to the next slide, how can fiduciaries protect Mom from scams and these are just some basic tips, again these are not limited to financial caregivers. These are good for anyone to know. Some of these are the hallmarks for something that kind of reeks of being a scam, you know, high pressure or something that seems like it’s too good to be true. If it seems that way, it probably is.

Not paying up-front for a promised price, we hear over and over again about these lottery scams. You’ve won a million dollars. You just need to pay your $5000 taxes and fees and then you’ll get the money but people pay and of course no prize ever comes through.

So moving on just getting back to the state guides that I mentioned before, how are they different and as I said unique laws and practices and here are a couple of examples of things we would put in a state guide that’s different so for example if you’re in Virginia, a guardian of property is called a conservator.

We would use that terminology. We mention in the guide that they have to file annual reports and in Virginia there’s something special called a commissioner of accounts so you’re not filing with the court clerk which you might do in other states you’re filing with these commissioner’s account. That’s a useful thing for a conservator in Virginia to know.

In Florida this is actually a favorite provision of mine because people have a lot of problems often getting banks to honor a power of attorney so we mention that under Florida law a bank cannot refuse to honor a power of attorney just because it’s not on the bank’s form.

Many times we hear banks want it to be on their own forms so they can be sure it conforms to what they think is proper but if the person has made a power of attorney that’s not on their form and then becomes incapacitated, they can’t do a new one on the form so this is an important provision.

So moving to the next slide, I mentioned the other 44 states and the territories. How can they get state guides? We don’t have the capacity ourselves to create all of the state guides because it requires expert knowledge of all of the state laws and so forth but we want to encourage people to create them - experts in the state - to work together and create them.

So we put together a TIF brochure which is a replication guide on how to take our guides and adapt them for other states. Because the guides are government publications, they’re not copyrighted. They’re in the public domain. You can use our content.

We would love it if you would use our content. We have templates which are Word versions of the guides that highlight where you might want to put in state-specific information and by putting those Word templates on our Website we hope it will make it easier for people to take this on as a project.

The only thing you can’t do is make it look like CFPB published it or use our logo but you can say it was based on our guide and use it and we’re already starting to see some activity on this. I had a call with folks in Texas that are creating Texas guides.

I hear Minnesota’s going to do one so if you are interested in your state, it would be great contact elder law attorneys, your state bar association, your state unit on aging, other groups that might have some expertise and get together and get one of these efforts going and if you do, I would love to hear about it so please contact me.

You’ll see my contact information at the end of the deck. This is just a fun fact. This is something that was great for us. Every year Dear Abby does a promotion of some government publications.

Two years ago Dear Abby included our managing someone else’s money guide in what she called a family caregiver tips. This was the page of the Website on the day they promoted that in 2014.

When Dear Abby gets the word out to over 110 million people around the world, people really want what she promotes and so we were told to have 50,000 of them ready and then went out the door in a day or two so we got promoted by her again the next year which was just a double bonus and we are very grateful to Dear Abby so the guides have been a hit.

Finally how you can get the guides and tips and templates are here on the slide. Like all of our publications, they’re available for download on our Website. We also have hard copies.

We know that frequently people actually like to have this as a hard copy so they can keep and refer to many older people really do prefer to have hard copies of things so we do keep on printing them and if you are a financial educator or a service providers, you can order them in bulk.

You can link to all of that information on this landing page consumerfinance.gov/managing-someone-elses-money with no apostrophes. We also found that we got some newspaper coverage and there were some people who wanted hard copies and they don’t have the Internet so there was actually a reporter in Virginia who kept hounding us and saying you need to have a way that people can call and get the guides.

They can’t go online so we set it up with our consumer response line and they have a way now that if people call wanting either one of the state guides or the national guides, they know about them so this is the number that you can give to people to call so on the next slide I was going to kind of walk you through all of these but in the interest of time I think Irene do you agree...

Sure, I mean, just to note that there are other resources that the older Americans...

...so these are some other resources - I’ll just flag, you know, on a related note - money smart for older adults, the full name. There’s a whole money smart series that you may be familiar with that it’s an FDIC brand but we got together with the FDIC and created one called money smart for older adults prevent financial exploitation.

It has it uses a train-the-trainer model. It has an instructor guide, a participant guide and a PowerPoint so that’s something that you could get a hold of. These are some other related things we have a manual for assisted living in nursing facilities on protecting their residents and it does talk have a section on educating staff residents and families.

Know your financial advisor is some easy questions for consumers to help guide their choice of a financial advisor and make sure that they’re not misled by credentials that aren’t very robust and then considering a reverse mortgage, basic questions and answers to help older consumers decide whether a reverse mortgage is right for them and more and I believe that Irene on the...

...in the resource inventory I mentioned early on and I would just note for example the last two listed here - know your financial advisor and considering a reverse mortgage - are actually just two-page fact sheets really intended for consumers so it’s something that people may want to look over and financial educators a really nice thing to share with consumers, something they can take away.

Some of the others are aimed a little more potentially at a financial educator like protecting residents from financial exploitation or in the same deck, assisted living in nursing facilities so some of the materials are very aimed at consumers. Others are aimed at people working with consumers but all are available for anyone who would like to access them.

Right, right, and then on the next slide again I don’t really want to take-up the time but just for you to note some of the other kinds of things that we’re working on. We also very much want to work with the industries that the Bureau has jurisdiction over and so bankers and credit unions really can play a big role in preventing and responding to elder financial exploitation.

We flagged that problem on this Webinar so just wanted you to know that we’re putting together a set of best practices for those institutions and some of the topics that we’ll cover on here and we are planning to launch that also this spring so if that’s something that interests you, stay tuned. That will be launched with a press call and a press release and we’re very excited about that.

Finally this is me and this is our Website and I would be happy if any of you would like to reach-out to me with questions about either the managing someone else’s money initiative or any of our other products or I can connect you with other people in the Bureau on other questions so with that I think we’ll stop and take some questions.

Thank you, Naomi. I think next time we should put photos up so people can see who Naomi is. That was terrific. Thank you so much so we have a little more than 10 or 15 minutes for questions.

You have two options. You can either send a question through the chat function which if you’re in the Webinar it’s someone over on the right or near the top is the thing that says chat and you’re monitoring that so if you want to e-mail a question that way via the chat function, make sure you send it to host and presenters, right, do this and it comes to us as opposed to panelists.

Or you can send it to everybody and it will get to us and then if you want to ask a voice question, we’re now going to ask the operator to open up phone lines and explain to you how to ask a question so that we can actually hear you so start e-mailing questions if you have them and operator can you talk about how to ask a question over the phone line?

Yes, certainly. If you would like to ask a question, please unmute your phone first, press star 1 and record your name. I do require a name to introduce your question. If you’d like to withdraw your question from the queue, you can press star 2 but again to ask a question, please unmute your phone first, press star 1 and record your name. It does take a few moments for the first questions to come through however so please standby.

Okay, so we already have one coming-in through the chat function, again feel free to send those if you prefer that to getting on the phone and the question is do you handle financial complaints against exploitation to older people or do they need to go through their local state agencies? Excellent question.

That’s a really great question so we have a very robust consumer complaint function. The kinds of complaints that we take through that function relate to the consumer financial products and services over which the Bureau has jurisdiction so that is everything from credit cards to, you know, bank accounts, debt collections, student loans, credit reporting, mortgages, a whole variety.

So I guess I’m going to say potentially we could handle some complaints if they relate to one of those consumer financial product and service providers. If they have in some way scammed or exploited a person, we would take a complaint or if for example if a person was a victim of financial exploitation and they feel that their bank did not handle it properly, they could complain to the Bureau about that.

But by and large most complaints about financial exploitation would be more appropriate to go through state and local agencies. The primary one being your state or county or local adult protective services office. That would be the social service side of it or law enforcement.

In some cases they might go some complaints about scams might go to other federal agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC or federal law enforcement and actually if you look in the where to go for help section and in the section of the guides about scams and exploitation, it will give you some of those resources and how to contact them with phone numbers and links to their Websites.

Unfortunately it’s very hard to give a one-size-fits-all answer because it depends on the type of scam or exploitation and where it happens but by and large it wouldn’t be through us. It would typically be through your state agencies or law enforcement or at least that’s a good place to start and if they can’t help you, they’ll send you somewhere else.

Right, because we take complaints if a financial institution is doing some wrong, we take those complaints but if an individual person like a relative were stealing Mom’s money through the fiduciary role or just in general, that’s not something the Bureau could do something about because we don’t look at what people are doing, we look at what institutions, financial institutions but there are these other options that Naomi has laid out.

Right, and I always hate to send people down blind alleys so generally as Irene said it probably wouldn’t be us.

Right, so the question is is it a financial company or a person and we do the financial companies for the most part but not the people.

Yes, right.

Okay, do we have any phone questions, operator?

Yes, we do. We have a couple and just a reminder that is star 1 and record your name if you’d like to ask a question. This first one comes from (Michael). Go ahead, sir, your line is open.

Hi, I actually submitted in writing but I figure-out it’s better to ask the question, mine is two-part. The first one is I’m of age 57 and I’m just wondering if this applies to me in any way? I am living with Alzheimer’s disease and I fit the bill in many ways of what you’re describing.

The second question that I have is does your organization get involved with for example a judge may take the rights away for somebody who is living with Alzheimer’s just because they’ve been given the diagnosis, not necessarily that they actually have problems financially.

Okay, (Michael), thank you for those two questions so the first question about does this apply to you, if you are below the age of 62 but you have Alzheimer’s disease, you have something that would potentially impact your ability to manage your money, yes, definitely these guides could be helpful to anyone who was helping manage your money if you have a fiduciary or, you know, if you plan to name someone who could play that role.

And actually we’ve been hearing that people often for example we had a call with law school clinics yesterday and they said they helped the person write the power of attorney to give someone else authority to be their financial caregiver and they will give our guides to the person who wrote the power of attorney to then give it to their son, daughter, spouse, whoever they named to handle things for them.

So the guide very much doesn’t go by age. It could be anyone who needs some help managing their finances. The second question it sounded like you were talking about a judge perhaps in a guardianship case, naming the guardian and in that way taking away the person’s rights, we don’t get involved in those guardianship cases.

Those are state court cases. They’re based in states and that’s not something we do on an individual basis. We don’t actually represent individual people but we do try to provide information to older people and vulnerable people that would be helpful to them. Thank you for that question.

Great, thanks Naomi. Operator, do we have did you say we have another voice question?

Yes, we do, we have one from (Christy Johnson). Go ahead, (Christy), your line is open.

Hi, I don’t have access to unfortunately the Webinar so I’m only listening by phone. Can you give me a way to download those slides through the Website?

Sure, I’ll answer that question so you won’t be able to download the slides as a whole deck but this whole Webinar, all the visuals, all the slides will be posted so that you’ll be able to see the slides.

It will be at our consumerfinance.gov\adult-financial-education. Sorry about the clunky URL but that adult financial education site has all the past Webinars so you’ll see near the top when you go there, there’ll be something that says missed past Webinars.

This will go up in usually about a week and at that point you will be able to view the Webinar so then you can see all the slides that unfortunately you didn’t see today and that’s technically it’s on a YouTube channel so even if you couldn’t get into the WebEx today you should be able to view the Webinar because it’s on a much more or easily accessible kind of venue so...

We could also if you e-mail us, we could send you the slides.

Okay, and Naomi is willing to send the slides so you want to tell her your e-mail address?

Sure, it’s Naomi N-A-O-M-I dot Karp K-A-R-P at cfpb.gov.

Great, okay, thank you.

Okay, I’m now going to read another - we just got a - some people are sending questions logically to the Q&A box, there’s both a Q&A box and a chat box and so they’ve been coming in both so we just discovered this little batch of questions.

One is what about convenience accounts for banking? It’s not a joint account but a financial caregiver have signatory authority on this non-joint account. Does this meet the keep Mom’s funds separate standard?

And that is a great question and actually convenience accounts are really something we think are a great idea. They don’t have some of the problems that joint accounts can have. Joint accounts can be problematic because someone might put someone on a joint account just to be a helper but that person actually withdraws the money for themselves.

So convenient accounts are great because the helper’s really just a helper. I would say that the convenience accounts are a way to be a little bit more of an informal caregiver. You could use a convenience account as a way to help manage someone’s money without necessarily that authority under a power of attorney or a trust.

In all honestly I haven’t really thought about this question in terms of does it meet our standards of, you know, keeping the money separate but we do think that they’re a great way because it’s very clear that the ownership of the money in that account is for example the Mom’s and not the helper’s.

So I think that would certainly be a good practice to use a convenience account.

Great, and actually it was the second question on just that same topic generally saying what is the does the guide outline other types of bank accounts or outline bank account setups generally for assisting an older person?

So you’re saying convenience accounts. Did the guides address that issue of what’s the right type of account or...

They don’t really, so that would be a good thing for us to think about if we revised the guides that perhaps we can give a little bit more. I think typically what we’re saying is keep it the money in the account in the name of the person but because of fiduciary that has authority to manage the fund.

So let’s say you’re an agent under a power of attorney. You should be able to go into the bank and say here’s the document, you know, take a copy of it. I have the authority, the bank can look it over, make sure it looks okay and complies with the law and then you should be able to transact business.

But in actuality some of these other accounts like convenience accounts are probably more convenient so but that’s a good question and it’s one I’ll pass along to the team and we’ll think more about what kind of advice we might be able to give.

Great, I know we’re almost right at time but there’s two other quick questions. One was can you order the guides in orders of smaller than 25?

You can. There’s actually a separate part of that, the ordering Website for smaller accounts and I mean, for smaller orders. I think that the link that’s on that landing page may just go directly to the bulk one.

But if you get to that Website which is from the General Services Administration that does our distribution, if there’s a search box and you just put in the name of the thing, it should be able to come up to the single order page as well. There’s a page where you can order I think it takes one to five...

Okay, so you can do smaller orders so you should be able to...

Or if you have any trouble with finding that, please contact me and I can send you a link to those. They may be on that landing page. I just don’t remember off the top of my head.

One other quick question, what protections are available to the caregiver if the senior has diminished capacity?

And I’m not entirely sure that I understand what that question means. Are you talking about whether the caregiver might have any liability if they do something wrong? I’m not sure.

Feel free to e-mail me offline if you want to elaborate a little bit on that question and I will definitely try to answer.

Great, okay, well we’re at 3:01 so hopefully there weren’t other phone questions but if so again you can feel free to reach-out to Naomi, naomi.karp@cfpb.gov. Also the FinEX inbox, cfpb_finex.cfpb.gov.

Also any questions that I get in that box I will forward to the appropriate person so again if you want to sign-up for FinEX, e-mail that, send an e-mail or go to the adult financial education Website on cfpb.gov or consumerfinance.gov and you’ll see more information.

So thank you so much, thank you Naomi. Thank you everyone for joining us and thanks especially to any new folks who have not been part of FinEX before, we’re glad you were able to join us today and we hope we will have you on future Webinars. We will continue to have Webinars the fourth Thursday of every month.

Thanks, everybody.

Thank you very much.

Bye.

That does conclude the call for today. Thank you all for participating. You may disconnect at this time.


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