Paying Bills 12/13/18 Presenter: Irene Skricki, CFPB NWX-CFPB HQ Moderator: Heather Brown Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. Your lines are in listen-only mode until today’s question and answer session. If you would like to enter the queue to ask a question you may do so by pressing Star and then 1. Today’s conference is being recorded if you have any objection you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to Heather Brown. You may begin. Heather Brown: Thank you operator. Welcome everybody. We really appreciate you joining us. We know everybody is in the busy pre-holiday season mode so taking some time out for this is a bit of a sacrifice from your day but I think you’ll find it well worth it. We are going to introduce our speaker in just a second but I want to let everyone on the line know that I did go ahead and put the slides up so that you all can actually download them if you want. If you go into the file section so you can download the slides. If you have any trouble with that you can just email the CFPB FinEx mailbox which we’ll give you the address at the end and ask for the slides too and I can mail them to you either way is fine. All right well it’s my pleasure to introduce Irene Skricki who is a Senior Financial Education Analyst and most of – many of you may already know her. And she’s going to be speaking today on paying bills. Irene Skricki: Great, thank you Heather. So first before we start as government employees we have to do our standard disclaimer which is that this presentation is being made by a Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection representative on behalf of the bureau but it does not constitute legal interpretation, guidance or advice. And any opinions or views stated are the presenters and may not represent the bureau’s views. We always have to say that. And so now we’ve got that out of the way. Next slide. Thank you. Again probably most of the people on this call know this but just to make sure the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection is a federal agency that regulates the offering and precision of consumer financial products and services and educates and empowers consumers to make better informed financial decisions. And it’s really that second part of that long sentence that is what we’re here about today which is to help consumers in financial decisions. Just a word of about CFPB FinEx again, probably most of you I’m hoping know what it is and hopefully you get our regular newsletter but it is a kind of vehicle for us to share our materials with all of you to learn back from all of you what your kind of finding, and seeing, and learning out of the world of financial education and for us to kind of exchange information. And so there’s assorted convening’s, and Webinars like this one that FinEx does. And if anyone does not get the FinEx News and Updates newsletter you can sign up either on our Web site -- I’ll show you the URL in a minute -- or you can send an email to the CFPB Finex inbox which is cfpb_finex F-I-N-E-X @cfpb.gov (CFPB_FinEx@cfpb.gov) and just ask to be added to the list. Again where you can either sign up directly and/or find pretty much all of our resources, and tools and things for financial educators is under Resources for Financial Educators Web page. And the URL for that is www.consumerfinance.gov\adult-financial-education. And again that’s where you can find announcements of upcoming Webinars and links to all of the different resources that we have that you can all use for free, download, order, et cetera. So today’s topic and this is actually somewhere in the high 30s, 34, 35th or so Webinar we’ve done so it’s always – it’s exciting to look back over the wide range of topics. And I think this topic that we’ve covered over the years and I think this topic is one that will interest everyone. It’s paying bills. And specifically some of the challenges and struggles that consumers have in paying bills. So this is part of a series of research studies we’ve done. We’ve done a previous one in the series on managing spending and one on managing spending related to retirement funds. So this was part of a study that we did that looked at decision making challenges faced by consumers and then designing and testing strategies to help people address those challenges. And so in this case it was looking at the struggles people have around kind of managing cash flow and bills. We worked with a contractor and also with a private sector firm a bill payment processing company that worked with us to do this research working with their consumers. So we just want to say we’re not, you know, endorsing any of the things that they do but they worked with us to help prototype and test out this idea around bill paying assistance. Next slide. Heather Brown: And yes we - well we have started I don’t know really - I’m going to go ahead write a note… Irene Skricki: You know, she won’t be able to hear you. Heather Brown: Oh she can’t hear. Irene Skricki: Sorry I was going to answer that question via the WebEx. And actually we should note -- and probably those of you have been with us before will know -- we you can as a voice - you can ask questions via the Q&A function in WebEx during the kind of presentation part. And then once that’s finished we will also open up for voice questions so feel free to send in questions via Q&A as we go or also you can wait for the voice part. So just quickly so you know what we did in the study we kind of did a quick literature review consumer challenges relating to cash flow and paying bills to know what, you know, we’ve already learned about these things. And then working with this private sector bill payment company there was a survey done of in the end it was 446 respondents ask about people’s challenges for paying bills. Just so you know this particular company served – a lot of their customers were on the low income side so nearly half of them had income below $25,000 annually and about 30% between $25,000 and $50,000. So again it’s, you know, a moderate low to moderate income group. And after this survey this company working with us then tested a online bill payment –a bill due date alignment tool. We’ll say more about that later. It was just user testing. It was not an actual prototype that was working in sort of the real world this is more of a lab setting. So this study is really testing consumer preferences, and demands and interest. It is not an impact to valuation. We did not look at the impact of this particular bill due date alignment thing relative to not having access to it. Just want to be clear about that it’s really about consumer interest. And secondly, because this is not statistically representative sample of people, you know, who work with this - who were customers of this particular company this is not meant to give us statistically significant data to be generalized to all consumers. So think of this as a general sense of what some set of consumer is interested in and since you may serve consumers like that it will, you know, give you some ideas potentially on working with people. So let’s start out with some background information that we learned in our study. I think the title of the slide will come as no surprise to anyone Managing Cash Flow and Bills is Challenging. Just first generally many consumers struggle to make ends meet. And again I don’t think this comes to a surprise to most people who are working with consumers. Just as background in the National Financial Well-Being Survey that the bureau conducted a couple years ago -- and we have done Webinars on all of that data if people are interested -- we found that 43% of consumers reported that covering expenses and bills in a typical month was somewhat already difficult. And similarly in the same survey over 1/3 of consumers reported experienced material hardships in the previous year such as running out of food not being able to afford a place to live, et cetera. And so, you know, clearly people are struggling out there in some cases due to -- can you stay on the previous slide here -- in some cases because people, you know, don’t have adequate income in some cases it’s a matter of managing the cash flow. And so I do want to address that before we dig in deeper some of the strategies I’ll talk about later around managing bills can’t directly address the underlying causes of people struggling financially such as scarcity of income, and financial reasons unpredictable income. So we want to acknowledge that reality of there - up front that some issues people are facing financial education is not going to be able to solve. But other challenges can stem from factors that can be addressed around sort of better management of money and tracking cash flow and whatnot. And so those things I think financial education can help consumers to learn new skills and use new tools. So we’ll focus more on that today. But I just want to acknowledge, you know, FinEd is not going to solve the issue of scarcity and lack of resources and whatnot. So moving on I’m going to spend just a minute on this slide which is continuing a discussion of why managing cash flow and bills is challenging. So again I’m sure this won’t be a surprise to most of you but the first factor here is lack of financial slack. And that is the fact that juggling bills can be challenging for consumers whose income just barely covers their expenses. So I’m stating the obvious but if you don’t have a lot of slack in your budget it makes financial decision making complicated and it makes the stakes higher right? You don’t have wiggle room for error if you just barely have enough money to cover your bills. And some facts to consider around that about 80% of consumers report living paycheck to paycheck, this is all research done by others that we – it’s all cited in the report that this presentation is based on. About one in four consumers say they don’t pay all their bills on time, about 1/5 of adults expect to leave some regular monthly bills at least partially unpaid. So clearly there’s an issue of people struggling and not having enough, you know, cash flow to manage bills as they come in. It gives you a sense of how common this issue is. A second factor on predictable income and expenses the term income volatility. I have been – you hear a lot about that in our field these days it makes the challenge of managing bills more acute. So other researchers found that one in three households experienced large changes in income year over year. And you think about people who work multiple jobs, have variable hours, may get overtime sometimes but not other times, they may lose a job and these and other situations people income can vary month to month. Not everybody gets a steady paycheck that’s the same amount every month. And similarly no surprise to anyone expenses very month to month. Utility bills change by the season, there can be unexpected expenses for car or home repairs, or medical bills, this time of year holiday shopping can be a significant expense. And so all of these fluctuations in income and expenses of course makes keeping on top of bills challenging. Third issue is that prioritizing bills involves complex decisions. So here’s an interesting fact that we learned while doing this study on average US households pay about 13 bills per month. In fact when we did a first round of research the number was around nine bills a month by the time this study came out it had gone up to 13 bills a month on average. And that can include obviously mortgage or rent, car payment, electricity, landline phone, mobile phone, cable, Internet, insurance, water, sewer, credit cards, student loans right lots and lots of bills that people have. If you think about that there’s also intermittent bills for expenses like, you know, medical care, home repair, vehicle and so at any one month when there’s not enough money to cover the bills or there is a mismatch timing in between bills and income consumers may have to prioritize which thing they pay. And in order to effectively prioritize you may need to compare the consequences of being late on one bill versus another and that can be quite difficult. The consequences can vary, you know, late fees, higher interest payments, credit score reductions having a service turn off like electricity, foreclosure, you know, at the more extreme end. And so for consumers having to prioritize amongst bills with different late payment consequences people may end up one having to face those consequences but two in some cases prioritizing things with more immediate consequences like getting your phone cut off over things that may have greater consequences in the long term such as eviction or foreclosure. So it’s, you know, very complicated when have to do that. Then in the further around complication for information on complication there are multiple channels to track right? Think about all the ways consumers can get bills or pay bills. Bills could come by mail, by phone, electronically, via email or on a Web site. You can pay bills through a variety of channels including cash, paper check, money orders, electronic funds transfer. So when you have all those options some are very convenient but it just means you have more things to keep track of right and that could actually make it harder to keep on top of everything. A couple more that we’ll mention here. One way that consumers could be sure that bills are paid on time is to use automatic payment services but only about 1/3 of bills nationally are paid by means of automatic or recurring payment. Our review of existing research indicates that many consumers say that it could be a hassle to enroll, they may not trust the automatic payment option, they may have a preference for paper bills or -- and this we’ve certainly heard in internally as well -- a fear of overdraft keeps people from using automatic payment. They’re worried that if the payment comes right out and something else has changed during the month they may end up, you know, the payment may end up not going through. And so paying the bill yourself you kind of keep an eye on that but you run the risk of forgetting, missing, you know, being late and so there’s challenges there. And then the last couple a kind of obvious one is people tend to not talk about their finances so they’re kind of doing this alone and may not have the help they need to juggle all of these challenges. And then again no surprise to anyone most people don’t report - they do not have a comprehensive financial plan and many don’t have a budget and so that of course makes it even harder to keep track. So actually can you go back one? Heather Brown: Sure. Irene Skricki: So before we get to the results I’ll just say that I think that everything I’ve said is probably not surprising to you but it lays the groundwork for some potential solutions. If this is what people are dealing with there’s any number of ways one could explore solutions. And so after reviewing the existing research as I mentioned earlier the Bureau worked with a project sector bill payment processing company to survey its customers to learn more about consumer experiences with paying bills and to learn about consumer interest in specific solutions. So now I’m going to say just a slide about the things we heard from the survey. So again this is a small, you know, it’s only 446 consumers lower income but it does give you - it really reinforces what I just talked about what existing research said so next slide. So what we heard from that survey again this is not representative but sort of gives you a sense of what some consumers are dealing with. So of the folks surveyed 21% reported that they always pay their bills on time that’s great, it’s only 21% though. Thirty nine percent reported mostly paying on time on time but not always. And 40% of this particular group said that they sometimes pay rarely or never pay bills on time. We grouped all those together but again showing you that there’s quite a significant number of folks in this particular group who were struggling to keep their payments on time. And we found the younger respondents and those with income below $75,000 probably not surprisingly were substantially less likely to report paying all of their bills on time so definitely an issue. Half of people whether or not they said they paid on time they reported having to juggle bills pretty much all of the time. So it’s definitely an issue that was affecting, you know, this segment of consumers quite significantly. So then we ask some reasons we’re just going to focus on the reasons that led to our solutions so next slide please. Thank you. Something that really jumped out about us - jumped out to us from this survey was that when people were asked why they fell behind on bills it was often because of a timing mismatch between the arrival of income and the date of the bills that they had to pay. So some people specifically said that 50% said that bills were due before I got paid before my paycheck came is an important reason for falling behind. And kind of in a similar vein 40% -- and people could choose more than one so these are not additive -- but 40% responded that the way I get paid does not line up with paying my bills. So these - this suggested potentially the importance for people of really lining up income sources and bills and seeing whether there could be changes made particularly to bill due dates where if that’s possible to see if it could help align the income and outflow in a way that’s, you know, makes it easier to pay the bills. So that was the solution that we kind of followed up on fairly straightforward. But what our - the groups we are working with did was they tested a prototype of a bill due date change tool. It was really a form that consumers could fill out to list out the different bills that they had, the dates, put the amounts and figure out whether requesting to move a due date might actually help them better manage the bills. So on the next slide this is what we did we prototyped a - this form that would allow people to think about their bills through a simple monthly visual planning tool, line up payment dates and income inflows. And see where they’re likely to be potential shortfalls. And then see whether consumers wanted to reach out to their billers and request a new due date. The tool we tested - we then allowed people to if they wanted to actually request that bill due date they could take the form and send it in and themselves. The tool didn’t actually do it for you at least the version we tested but and then we asked people what they thought of this. And the good news was 80% of people who tried out this prototype said they were very interested in following through on changing the due date for at least one of their bills. They thought it would be very valuable to help managing their monthly finances. The next slide. The slide doesn’t want to move. So of the consumers who participated in this user testing here is just a few things they said about the tool. They most of them reported they had never tried to change billing dates because they didn’t know that they could. They didn’t even realize that was an option. So that’s an interesting finding in and of itself that in fact if people know that it’s possible and again it varies by biller but if it’s possible that it’s something that might actually be useful to them. When going through this process most of the people participating were able to identify at least one bill that had a due date that they thought it would be helpful to change, that would help them again better manage bills. And the most common selections were utility and phone bills. They typically chose either the 1st or 17th of the month as a date they might want the bill to be due because those dates line up sort of right after on or are after a payday if they’re get - if they get paid by monthly. Some people chose other dates but those were the most common. And then this particular tool gave people the option of either printing out this form and notifying the biller directly or asked if they would have liked someone else to do it meaning if you had an app or if you had a financial educator or somebody who could actually help you request that change. And about half of the people said I’d like to do it myself and half said we would love someone to do it for me. And then this last thing I’ll note I think is quite important. For those who had it was about 1/3 of people I think who had tried to change a bills due date in the past on their own only 1/3 of those, 1/3 of 1/3 essentially succeeded. Some of them found that billers said it couldn’t be done, customer service didn’t know how to and they got frustrated their communications didn’t work out. So that just does raise the issue that it’s not possible in every case to change your bill due date but it can be done for some billers and so we just want to make sure people realize when we say this is a potential thing you can do and it’s not always possible and some consumers who in fact tried just found that it was not. But of course 1/3 of those folks did succeed which says that it, you know, it can be done in some cases. So that was where our study ended. We did not go on to actually do a more, you know, rigorous evaluation of whether these two will actually have long term impacts. We would love it if somebody else did that. But if you go to the next slide we do think there’s important lessons in just learning what consumers thought would be useful and trying it out. So the implications for the financial education field for all of you participating here is that consumers can think about their monthly inflows and outflows and assess whether changing a bill due date would be appropriate for their situation. We have a tool to show you for that in just a minute. And of course financial educating professionals like yourselves can use these findings to help consumers do that and help them figure out whether this would make sense. And then of course we would love it if billers and other private sector entities said hey this kind of flexibility can meet consumer demand because we found that 80% of at least this particular set of folks were very interested and it could potentially improve timely payment of customer bills. So certainly we hope that folks out there in the world will take these lessons and think about what could, you know, what could be done with them. So all of what you just heard is in the study Consumer Insights on Paying Bills which is on our Web site. And if you receive our newsletter you got the link to it. What we did after completing this study was we said well they tested a tool this was owned by the private sector company developed it so we wanted to develop a publicly available version of a tool that could help people think about whether it makes sense to change a bill’s due date. So that is in fact what we released when we released this study. If you want to go to the next slide actually we’re going to show you some tools and resources. The first is this new request to changing your bills due date worksheet. So just so you know it is a six page worksheet so three pages double sided. We tried really hard to make it shorter. It was very - our design people wrestled but when you see what you is in it’ll see you really can’t squeeze it into a shorter amount. I – what I’m going to show you on the slides I’ve broken it up into pieces because you wouldn’t be able to see it if I put a whole page but this is actually a six page worksheet that you can print out. Eventually hopefully we’ll get it up on our order site so you can order it but right now you can download it and print it out yourself. And it starts off with an intro just saying, you know, you may be able to avoid late fees and other consequences if you map out your monthly bills and set up a bill pay calendar. And so the sections will be organizing your bill schedule, secondly determining your monthly inflows and outflows and then consider requesting a change in due dates. So there’s a section on each of these that I will show you now. Next slide. So the first thing the worksheet does is to try to get people to think about their situation is to and partially we’ll just think about challenges they’re having with paying bills so little checkboxes. I don’t regularly check my monthly income and bills or track my monthly income and bills. I struggle to pay my bills and expenses because my paychecks are at different amounts or different times from month to month just getting an income volatility. Sometimes my bills come at times when I don’t have the money to pay them and fourth, I don’t always manage to pay all of my bills on time. So this is just meant to get people to reflect, do I do these things and then we say if you check one or more of these boxes, try out some of the steps, the tips in step one so kind of a moment of reflection. And then on the - it’s on the second half of the lower half of the page but here it’s go to the next slide. I’ll show it here. So we start off with some instructions on organizing your bill schedule. So there’s a chart which will be on the next slide I’ll show you in a second in which we, you know, we recommend that people or suggest that people gather all of their bills and fill them in on the page I’ll show you on the next slide, write down the company - no, not yet but right down the company you owe it to, the due dates, the date you would normally pay the bill, et cetera, and then keep this list where you can see it and update it regularly. So the next page next slide and then this will the – we suggest we suggest you consider signing up for bill reminder services and apps that can help you remind you when to pay things and other resources and calendars that are available. There’s a link there to another resource we have for your money or goals. But this all leads up to the next page. And this it’s truncated because I couldn’t fit it all in one page. But essentially this is a very simple little worksheet where you can write down your bill schedule. And so there’s a place for rent, mortgage, electricity, water, gas, cellphone, credit card. And there’s more lines that don’t show including some that are, you know, open-ended so for things that aren’t there and where you can write down the due date, when you usually pay it. Hopefully that’s before it’s due but it might not be. If you ever pay late you can check that off. Again it will help trigger whether that’s one of the bills that is giving you particular trouble, how you pay it. And then it’s a place for you to write down the late fee if you do pay late. So that again will help you compare, you know, which bills have higher late fees and more significant consequences. So you can organize all of your stuff here on this page. Then you go to the next page and these are the instructions for a chart you’ll see on the next slide but let me just say this first. So once you’ve done that you’ve got all your bills in one place, now you want to map out where your income falls as well to help you visualize your flow. So you take those bills from the page you just did. There was just no way to put it all on one page. We really did try. My apologies, you have to copy them over. In some other world we would love to do have one world we would love to have one where it kind of took it all, took care of it all at once but you want to copy over the bills in the week that they’re due and then also record like when your income usually comes in. And then you’ll be able to see, you know, where maybe moving a due date might make a difference or where you can see what weeks you’re having trouble. And as we note in the green box it’s important to not forget income that doesn’t come in every month like a tax refund and also on the previous worksheet at the bottom there was a place for bills that don’t come every month so, you know, bills that may be only occasional or where I live the water bill comes every three months or every third month. It’s like oh, I forgot about the bills so, you know the situations like that that you want to capture so those re the instructions. On the next page, not the previous, but here we group things by week so four, I think there’s actually you have sort of four-ish weeks. And you can put the bills due that week. We didn’t do it 31 lines because it was too complicated. We did it by week so you could put the bill, the amount and then you can put when the income comes. And so if you get a paycheck every other week you can record it. If you maybe work different hours you could try to capture that or different, you know, jobs that maybe aren’t every week or other types of occasional income. And then and you - then you can kind of see hey look, it turns out that my electric bill is coming just before, you know, the second weekend a month when I work extra hours. And maybe I could try to move that. So you can record where you might want to think about a different due date for that bill. So this is a place to kind of put all that in one place. And then on our last page of this worksheet is some instructions on consider requesting a change in bill due date. So it tells you how you can, you know, explore a company’s Web site or call to find out is a possible to change the due date. Some companies have certain requirements you have to meet. It’s going to vary by the biller. Some companies won’t let you but some will. And so you can identify due date. You can request that either through calling customer service. In some cases you can do it online. We have some sample text that you could use if you’re going to send an email or a letter and then just make sure to think through will changing the due date change the next bill? Will it make it higher if you’re asking for the due date to be later your first bill’s going to be a little higher because it’s covering a little more time, making sure you think about all that. And then the last thing we say is that if you can’t change the bill due date you can still potentially use these resources to better organize, right? So maybe if you know that you’re going to have a gap, you know, is there a time when you get a little extra income can you set it aside to cover the time when the bills are going to not line up so well? So even if you can’t request the bill due date change by just organizing your bills better you can maybe capture a windfall when you get a little extra overtime or you your client of course in this case your - who you’re working with and be better organized and prepared and know whenever things due. And just having that due date calendar when you know when each bill’s coming due alone putting up in your refrigerator although a lot of fridges these days the magnets don’t stick to anymore because they’re not the old kind of metal so however maybe tape may be helpful. So that is the bill due date worksheet. Again it’s a six page three page two-sided worksheet that you can access on our Web site. And we would love to hear how people if people find that useful in working with the people they serve. And then I’m just going to mention a few of the resources we have and then we’ll open up for questions. This is, it’s hard to tell the format, the Behind on Bills booklet. It’s actually a little booklet, sort of half of an 8 x 11 kind of sheet spiral-bound Behind on Bills. It’s got, it’s colorful, engaging. It’s kind of more fun than the worksheet I just showed you because it’s got animals and colors but it’s got multiple tools to help people manage their bills. And it’s got little foldout pages with specific tools. In fact if you could go to the next page it just it lists out thank you. These are the – this is the table of contents. There are tools that could help you build a clearer picture income and spending so where you can write down your income sources similar to our worksheet but different kind of format. You can track where your money goes. You can track where my bills are and when they’re due. So again similar to our worksheet just in a very different format and a little different type of detail. The yellow tools can help people think about what they want to change around either increasing incomes or income or planning sources, sorry, cutting expenses. Please don’t cut resources, and then red, the red tools are things to meet the immediate challenges like responding to debt collectors or how you could get additional help. So these are very, these are very popular. They, out of your, Your Money, Your Goals toolkit. And I think there’ve been assorted Webinars. We’ve done a Webinar on Your money Your Goals if you look back at the archives of FinEx Webinars. Your Money Your Goals folks who are our colleagues here at the Bureau have done webinars as well so there’s ways to learn more about these but you can order these. They don’t print so well because of their format. I think this, someone has asked if this is available in Spanish. I think this one is. Heather Brown: I thought it was too. Irene Skricki: Yes I’m not – most of our resources are available in Spanish. I believe the Behind on Bills is. So this is again a tool and a set of tools you can use to help people with bill issues. And then I’ll just go through a couple of other things and then we’ll open for questions. We have another sort of three page worksheet that we put out many years ago. It’s been very popular so it’s one of our top downloads called My New Money Goal Worksheet. And this is really place where you can say, what is my money goal? Do I want to save, you know, for an emergency fund? Do I want to save to buy a new refrigerator? And again it’s, it allows you to kind of track your - to put down your monthly expenses and think about how you could save for that goal so it’s a very simple three pager. You can only see the front page here and you can order that in bulk from our Web site as well. It’s a nice kind of budgeting, essentially a budgeting tool but it ties into of course this kind of managing bills and paying bills theme. And then a couple other things we have a worksheet on healthy people kind of setting goals on managing spending. In particular this is based on another research study, in fact the same series here of consumer insights on managing spending, the same type of research that this study did where we worked with the private sector company that tested out some of innovative ways to give people real-time feedback on their spending. So if they went into a store and were going to buy something how do you know how much is in your like left to spend for the week or the month or however you want to set it to try to get people to kind of really keep track of their budget in real-time through some innovative tools. So this worksheet just gives people some ideas and helps people create a small, you know, just a short plan on how they want to keep track of their spending and manage their spending. Again, this is a worksheet available on our Web site and there’s a whole study behind it and a webinar. If you go back you can listen to the Webinar on this one if you’re interested from I think a year or two ago. And then I think we just have one more. Another thing that’s in our Webinar archive are Rules to Live By worksheets. And I’ll just note that the theme here was that a lot of people have heard about rules of thumb for financial decisions, things like save 10% of your income or only spend so much. And that what we found in some focus groups was a lot of people said that makes great sense but, you know, I know that rule but I can’t follow it because, you know, at my stage in life I have too many other obligations or that’s too much based on my income and then people wouldn’t do anything. And so the insight was how about letting people know what the common rule is but then say why don’t you set your own that works for you and then write a plan on how you’re going to do it, again a plan being just a couple lines. And then what these worksheets did was to have you signed them – don’t see the signature line on this one but so that you kind of make a commitment to yourself that you’re going to follow through on that. And apparently the simple act of signing causes people to be more likely to do something which is so fascinating. So there’s one on spending of setting like how much you’re going to spend. That’s the one you see on the screen. And then I’m going to ask – poor Heather’s trying to answer WebEx questions, ask her to also advance the slide. There was also one on credit spending. So if you say I don’t want to spend too much on my credit card so I will not for example use my credit card for purchases of more than a certain amount, there’s also a Webinar on this one, another research study that we did. But this worksheet also. And then there’s a couple others on savings and checking a credit report. But these worksheets are all also available and maybe something that you want to use with your clients and the people you work with. So I am going to stop there so a lot of information but again the insight here is that something as simple as changing a bill due date may help the people you work with better manage their bills. And we hope that some of these tools can help you work with people to do that. Heather Brown: Wonderful, that was excellent Irene. Thank you for sharing that. It’s a very interesting study. I love that, they ask people but they also tracked what they – that some people actually did so that’s our great research method. Okay so you see our resource pages that we have up there. We have our Financial Educators Web page. We also have our mailbox where you can write. If you - somebody looks like they were having difficulty with the slides so feel free to just email the FinEx Box and I’ll send some slides out to you. And we also have our LinkedIn page and we’re trying to encourage people to post information about financial information there and ask questions and we’re generating more activity which draws more people so we encourage you to visit that as well. Let’s see, we’re going to get ready to take some calls. Operator are you there? Irene Skricki: I know she’s there. Heather Brown: While we’re waiting for the operator let me just look and see if I missed any questions that we have here. ((Crosstalk)) Coordinator: Are you able to hear me? Heather Brown: I am now. Irene Skricki: Oh there we are. Heather Brown: Thank you. Operator… Coordinator: I’m here. Heather Brown: …we’re ready. I’m going to read a couple questions from here then we’ll be ready to take calls. Irene Skricki: But why don’t we let her (unintelligible). ((Crosstalk)) Coordinator: Would you like me to tell people how to queue up first? Heather Brown: Sure yes. Irene Skricki: Yes (unintelligible) have time. Coordinator: If you would like to queue up to ask a question at this time you may press Star and then 1. You’ll be prompted to record your name which is used to introduce your question. Again that is Star and then 1 if you would like to ask a question. One moment while we see if there are any questions by phone. Heather Brown: Thank you. So the easier way would be to mark the due date on the bill and place them in a box such that the date is visible for upcoming - for the upcoming bill and pay them as they become due. Well that’s an interesting method too if you’re organized enough to do that every single time. I think the benefit of that is that, you know, it’s kind of looking at you and facing you and you have a system that’s not too complicated. I think the nice thing about the worksheet is that you can capture some of the recurring stuff and kind of get accustomed to seeing it and have it all in one place. But that’s an interesting method and it really depends on what’s best for you don’t you think Irene? Irene Skricki: Yes and this worksheet of course is one, you know, one tool you can use. So that what Heather just read is a suggestion somebody sent in through the WebEx Q&A function and it is interesting. I think that a lot of those things that we’ve learned as we’ve moved to such an electronic world is that there is still a place for the physical that like I said signing a form actually seems to change the way people think subconsciously. They actually are more committed than if they don’t sign. You would think it wouldn’t matter. Heather Brown: Right. Right. Irene Skricki: And things like having your bills visible in a box with different I guess sections or envelopes or things like that people who use different envelope methods to save or set money aside that those actually that we’re still physical beings that, you know, need a connection to those, to that. So that’s an intriguing idea and I think, you know, we would love to hear ideas like that and have all of you share that with each other as well either through our LinkedIn site or other ways because there are certainly a number of ways to do that. And I personally would love to hear more. Heather Brown: Operator I think we’re ready for some calls on the line. Thank you. Irene Skricki: Do we have any questions operator? Coordinator: Thank you. Once again if you would like to ask a question by phone please press Star and then 1. One moment for first question. The first question is from (Ann Long). Your line is open. (Ann Long): Hi. This isn’t a question. I’m sharing an experience I’ve had that has tripped me up several times and it usually has to do with credit card bills. On some of them now instead of just a due date you can’t assume that that bill is due at 11:59 on the due date. A lot of them now their past due is they don’t receive payment in their time zone within say by 5 o’clock that day, 5:00 pm. When that has happened I get to customer service it’s usually a separate call. And I tell them what happened and I didn’t realize that that time difference made a difference. And usually they will waive the late charge and I believe they’ll waive the interest that they would’ve charged for the late payment. Irene Skricki: Interesting. ((Crosstalk)) (Ann Long): Yes and that has tripped me up. But if you go and ask them to they have always been willing to waive the late charge and if they’ve charged you any interest. It might take a couple statements for that to show up but it will show up. Irene Skricki: Great. Thank you for sharing that. That’s a great strategy. Irene Skricki: And actually I wonder to the, if you are using the worksheet I had not – we hadn’t thought about that nuance of it’s not just the day it’s due, you know... Heather Brown: Yes. Irene Skricki: ...but there may be issues with time or maybe you write down that it’s due the day before so that you know that it will get there on time. But thank you for sharing that. That’s useful. (Ann Long): Thank you. Irene Skricki: And potentially for others of you who are working with consumers. Are there any other voice questions operator? Coordinator: There are no other questions on the phone line at this time. Irene Skricki: It’s a very calm and placid group. Heather Brown: Pre-holiday group. Irene Skricki: There’s quite a few of you. Heather Brown: Is - there is no charge for publications that you order. You can go to our - basically if you go to our Web site you’ll see our publishers Pueblo and you can order bulk amounts of things for your students or your clients that you coach which makes it easier. So the booklet that Irene gave you is one that’s popular to be ordered because it’s kind of be something difficult to download. But a lot of things also if you need something quick or you run out of material you can also download things from our Web site. And you can also repurpose those items when you download them. If it’s not - a couple of you had suggestions or things that you thought would be helpful you can change them and make them work for you. And you can also put them up on your Web site for your clients to use, you know, public information. So you’re welcome to do that. But that’s what we want is to kind of spread the word and spread the use of them by using you all who work with the client base that we’re trying to reach so… Irene Skricki: Yes these are federal government resources. They are free. You can order them in bulk although just so you know right now the worksheet that I’ve been talking about is not yet up on our bulk ordering site. It takes a little time for us to actually get it up there. Right now you can access it on our Web site and download it, not order it yet but hopefully that will be the case soon. But again everything is available as Heather said for you to use, repurpose and we very much welcome that. Do we have any other voice questions or feel free to shoot anything else through the Q&A? Heather Brown: While we’re waiting to see if there any last questions. I just wanted to let you all know about upcoming Webinars. We had one more Webinar in December. We figured well it’s a little - sometimes it’s a little bit of downtime for people when it gets closer to the holidays and maybe you could squeeze in another one. And that once actually going to be this coming Monday the 17th same time 2:00 to 3:00. And this one’s going to be on using credit scores and reports as a financial coaching tool. We have a guest presenter and we’re going – it’s going to be a two-part series and the second part is going to be January 10. So the first part we’re actually going to go through a credit report, you know, how - reading it and how to go about using it to integrate things. And then the second session was going to be specifics and going in deep to the actual sample credit report that will be provided and discussing it and having questions asked. So if you think those sessions will be useful for you we’d love for you to join us. And you can check back to find out about other upcoming webinars as well. So hopefully we’ll see many of you are at least virtually see your names at the Webinar on Monday. Operator are there any last questions? Coordinator: No questions on the phone line. Heather Brown: Well Irene thank you so much for coming in and sharing... Irene Skricki: Thank you. Heather Brown: ...and sharing this information with us and we really appreciate it. And for those that asked for slides I tried to capture it. If you don’t get them be sure to just email the FinEx box. So I think I got the two people that said that they wanted them in the chat. Okay well that’s it for today. Thank you for joining us. I hope you all have a good evening and look forward to having you at our next Webinar. Take care, bye-bye. Irene Skricki: Thank you. Coordinator: That concludes today’s conference. Thank you for your attendance. You may disconnect at this time. END NWX-CFPB HQ Moderator: Heather Brown 04-03-19/4:03 pm CT Confirmation # 8963385 Page 1