CFPB HQ Financial Well-Being Toolkit Webinar Presenter: Irene Skricki Moderator: Heather Brown January 31, 2019 Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. Today's call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. All participants are in a listen-only mode until the question and answer session of today's conference. At that time, you may press *1 on your phone to ask a question. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Dr. Heather Brown. Thank you. You may begin. Dr. Heather Brown: Thank you, (Sara). I wanted to welcome everybody to the webinar. Today we have a very exciting topic about a new toolkit that we have produced and a new portal to support it. Irene Skricki who is our senior financial analyst -- financial education analyst -- at the bureau is going to be making the presentation and I wanted to just let everyone know that if you gave your email address at the beginning of the call when you dialed in, I will get a list and I will send everyone on that list a copy of the slides. If you didn't, you can just email or CFPB FinEx mailbox. If anybody did not receive advance notice of this webinar, then you're probably not on our list and you might also want to email the mailbox and asked to be placed on our email list so that you'll get advance notice. That's all the announcements I have so I can leave time so you can get the information you paid for and with that, I'm going to hand it over to Irene. Thank you, Irene. Irene Skricki: Great, thank you, Heather and welcome to everybody on the webinar. It's good to be back on a FinEx webinar. I'm Irene Skricki here in the office of financial education and we have a topic I'm personally very excited about, financial well-being scale and how practitioners can use it. I know we have done webinars on this general topic of the scale before but we have some new resources to announce. We also have a special guest speaker who has been using the scale in her program, which I think will be very cool, who we'll hear from later. So let's jump in. So first as government employees, we always have to start off with the disclaimer that while this is being made on behalf of a CFPB representative, it does not constitute legal interpretation, guidance or advice and any opinions stated are our own and may not represent CFPB's views. I'm sure almost everyone on the call probably knows who we are but actually we're back now to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Our name has had a couple of changes in the last year but we're the same agency. We regulate the offering and provision of consumer financial products and services and educate and empower consumers to make better-informed financial decisions and it is of course that latter part of the sentence about educating and empowering consumers that is what our office does and what our financial well-being work is all about. Just building on what Heather said about FinEx, it is an online and in-person opportunity to get access to our tools and to learn what we're doing and to share what you're doing and so we have regular webinars, convenings and whatnot and to sign up, Heather mentioned if you're not getting a regular newsletter that says CFPB News and Updates, there's an inbox you can email, which is at the bottom of the slide, CFPB_FINEX@CFPB.gov. You can also do it directly online and I will show you that. Our kind of one-stop shop for our financial education resources, the resources for financial educators' webpage has a signup box on the right side where you can put your email address in and automatically be signed up for FinEx notifications of events and webinars. So that's a little bit of background about FinEx and why we are here today. And so today's topic is Using the CFPB Financial Well-being Scale. We have several new things we will be showing you today -- including some new benchmarks that I think will be very cool -- and we have a special surprise at the end. For anyone interested in research, I have a surprise slide at the end. So this is an incentive for all of you to stick with us on the webinar and see what my surprise is. What we will be - So I'm going to start off by just doing a very quick review of how we got here. Now those of you who have been using this scale or have been on previous webinars will know this so I will say very little but just as kind of a continuum, we started off several years ago - Oh, sorry. Actually, I'm not going to do that yet. First, I'm going to just show you what we'll be doing today is looking at the new toolkit, Getting Started With Measuring Financial Well-Being -- the pretty blue cover on the left -- and a new webpage where we have put all of our financial well-being resources -- including the toolkit -- into a digitized form all in one place so you can find things more easily and all of this just launched a week ago today. So it's all brand new and we will - We will go through it. So as I was saying we'll do a quick review, which is that we put together or developed a consumer-derived definition for financial well-being as an end goal for financial education several years ago. Again, many of you have seen this but it is a four-part definition of having control over your day-to-day, month-to-month finances -- having a capacity to absorb a financial shock, being on track to meet your financial goals and having the financial freedom to make choices to enjoy life -- those four things, which can be thought of as security and freedom of choice in the present and in the future. And again, that's something we've been kind of using as a starting point for or really an endpoint for all the financial education work that anyone is doing should help people be better off in the long run in some or all of these different elements. Once we defined it, our next task was to figure out how to measure it and that is the financial well-being scale. I'm going to put it up here quickly. Now we're going to spend more time on it later but just so you can see. It's 10 questions. This was rigorously validated with 13,000 people or so, lots of research done on how to make this actually measure people's perception, their own sense of where they are in financial well-being. So you see it doesn't have numbers. It doesn't ask your income or your credit score. It asks where you think you are on managing your money and questions are phrased in ways to kind of get at some of the underlying emotions and senses of where you are. So again we'll talk more about how to use this but that is the scale. The step we did after that was we did a large scale survey with the scale -- a nationally representative survey -- a couple of years ago and also asked a number of other questions about people's financial circumstances, behaviors, demographics and used that to get a picture of the state of the financial well-being in America. That came out about a year and a half ago or so and we found that -- I'll say more about the score itself -- but the averages on a scale of 1 to 100 is 54 and we had some basic sense of about a third of people are kind of in the middle, a third on the lower half -- under 50 -- and a third above 60. And that gave us a little sense of what the score meant, but hold that thought for a minute because we have more refined benchmarks coming up later in this webinar. But this is where we were a couple of years ago. We did one more kind of research piece, which was then to do some controlling for different variables and holding income constant to see how people's well-being varied if they had the same income or other circumstances to understand what people were doing to be in a better financial position and we came up with the Pathways Report. It's actually a complicated statistical thing but this is the shorthand for it, these four pretty boxes. This was released last fall and we basically found that financial skill, which is really how you find, process and use information along with financial confidence -- self-efficacy -- leads to financial behavior, which are the day-to-day actions you take, which leads to a better financial situation or the objective effect of your financial life, which leads to financial well-being. And nothing - You'd probably look at this and won't say, "Well, you know, that makes sense. That makes perfect sense." But I think the interesting thing really was the financial skill piece because that is something that we believe can be taught. So, you know, even if you have different circumstances or start with different incomes, financial skill is something that you can learn from a financial educator -- like the folks on this phone call -- and can then potentially apply to your life. So the last thing I'll show and we're not going to delve into this today but we did have a webinar on it in the fall is if you see financial skill, you say, "How did you measure that?" There is another scale. We're mostly talking about the Financial Well-Being scale -- we've done a lot more with that -- but there is a second scale called the Financial Skills scale also self-reported people's sense of how we're doing. So we're not actually watching them do financial tasks but - Financial Skills scale, this is also available. It's something you can use if you want. We have put out a short report on it. We hope to do more. But there's another 10 questions asking people if they think they know how to make financial decisions, if they know how to follow through on their intentions, they can recognize good financial investments. So just a tool for you to think about, read more about. We won't really talk more about it today except to say that you can find it on the hub that we will show you later. So that's kind of where we've been over the last few years. What we found is - Well, we originally developed the scale as a research tool and researchers have been using it. It's been put in some other large-scale surveys done by the federal government and other entities. But of course we also found that practitioners -- folks working with consumers like probably most of the people on this call -- are also using the scale as a tool and that people were having interesting experiences. Sometimes they were struggling with us because I would -- So we said, "Why don't we figure out how to help people use it better and help us learn how you all are using it so we can better understand, too?" So that was what led us to create this toolkit that we're going to talk about. I will say before I start on that is that we’re still learning. So we're going to give you some tips and some ideas and some things we've heard from practitioners but we can't say the absolute best way to use it is to do this, this and this, right? It's still under development. It's also going to vary by program. So different programs are going to want to use it differently. So there's no absolute right answer. There are some things that are good to do. There are some things that, you know, are going to vary based on your program. So we don't have definitive answers but we have a starting point and I would actually love to learn from all of you who are using it or starting to use it or have been using it what experiences you're having. So hopefully, we'll have opportunities to do that in the future. So I'm going to do a quick review of how to use the scale very quick because again I know some of you are using it. But we found in some early research in creating this toolkit that quite a few people were using it in idiosyncratic ways or didn't fully understand the scoring procedure or in some cases, you didn't know why certain things were the way they were. And so we just wanted to run through that. So there's two parts to the scale and again review for some of you but there is the 10 questions -- the questionnaire -- and then you have to score it separately. We actually found a few folks who didn't realize you had to score it in part because we had the physical scale and the scoring worksheet in different documents. So we've since combined them but - So I will just - I'll show you a few things. But the questionnaire itself has the 10 questions. It also has a question about age and about the mode of administration. So for age, just to explain, we -- in our early research -- found that the definition or the way to score it was a little bit different for folks who are older probably because there's different financial goals, right? You're more likely to be in an asset deaccumulation phase. You may have different longer-term goals. So there's - The scale itself is the same. You just use a different scoring worksheet and that will make the numbers comparable between younger and older but age is one criteria. The other one that's quite intriguing is this mode of administration, which is that do you read it to yourself, do you take the quiz yourself, the questions or does somebody sit down with you like a coach and do it with you. And you might say, "Why would that matter?" Well it turns out that people actually - People's brains actually process information differently. This isn't just something we found. This is something that is a known thing with researchers that listening to a question read to you versus reading it, you just don't process it the same way. You kind of forget the earlier options so you answer it slightly differently. So to make it equivalent so that either way that you take the test, you get the same score, which is what you want, right, a single well-being score, there's a - The scoring is - It's the same process but there's a different worksheet, a different table for it. So that's the reason people are always, like, "Really? I would answer differently?" And apparently, people do. So that way, it evens out so you will get the same score how ever you do it. And then with the scoring worksheet, again, you'll end up with a score between 0 and 100. So that's that. Quickly, there is also an abbreviated well-being scale. It's 5 questions, 5 of the 10. It's scored the same way. The longer version is a little more precise and may provide some more insight but they both will be used to generate approximately the same score. So if you don't want to ask as many questions, you can use the five-question version. I'll show you where to find that later. So a couple of tips on that. We've heard from some practitioners that it's helpful to try out the scale before you actually start using it to see how people react to it. Your clients, you can even try it out on your colleagues to get a better sense of how you're going to present it to people but that can help before just, like, dropping it on everybody. We also - It's also important to allow people to interpret the questions for themselves. So even though some of them are a little - People sometimes struggle with what the question means. If you interpret it, you actually are going to change their score and that's not what you want. So we encourage people to try to, you know, tell the person taking the test, "Well, what does that mean to you? Do your best with it," and not sort of over-interpret for them or say, "I think you have a - You should answer the question this way." If it's possible, you can give people the choice to complete the questionnaire so they don't feel like they have to although that's not, you know, feasible in every program where you have data collection you need to do. But also, of course, it's important to ensure them that their responses will be kept confidential at least vis-a-vis the broader public. I mean that's, you know - People are concerned about privacy. So that will hopefully make them feel more comfortable answering. And then the scoring process is a little complicated. There is an online version I'll show you. So that is another option that may be easier for some folks. So just quickly, this is the questionnaire. Again many of you have seen it and possibly used it. This is the paper version. It's hard to see -- I know -- on the screen. Screenshots don't always look that good but it's the same 10 questions you saw earlier. At the bottom, it's a question about age and how it was administered and people check off whether they're completely very well - you know, whether these things describe them, how it applies to them. Just so you can see it, the online version, which is on our website, is here. In theory, this thing is animated but you won't actually see it move so you'll just have to take my word for it because the first screen, which is sort of at the back of this slide, is the 10 questions. You actually go and click on the boxes so people can do that. It scores it automatically for you and out pops the pretty colored bar -- again you can only see part of it -- that shows you your score against the national average with color-coding that's indicative that, you know, green is better, red is worse but it doesn't put any sort of labels on people to hopefully alleviate any concerns they may have about, you know, what the score's telling them that they're doing terribly. So that's the online version and programs - People can use it on their own but programs can also use it to do, you know, scoring immediately. It doesn't store data. It can't keep it for you but you can at least get the score right away. And you'll see the value of that when you see the next slide, which is that the next step in scoring -- in hand scoring -- is you have to take the first questionnaire that the person filled out and copy over -- circle the numbers on this little numerical thing here -- there's a sample of it, which is how you get an actual first part of a number. You have to actually say, "Oh, they answered very well and that's a one on here." If you look carefully, which you probably can't on this tiny version, but if you see the paper version, some questions are reverse coded, which means that some are phrased positively, like, "I am securing my financial future," some are intentionally phrased negatively such as "I feel like I will never be able to have the things I want." That's intentional. People react a little differently and you get more nuanced data but it means when you score it completely, it could be a very good or a very bad thing depending on how the question was worded. So you'll note the numbers in the scoring kind of change as a result. So you just have to be really attentive that you are circling the right things and adding up the numbers but you add up all the numbers on the right and you come up with a response value. That is not the well-being score. There is one more step. As you can see, this is a multistep process. And that is you have to go on step three to a look-up table. This is where there's a different table for whether it's - whether you self-administered the questionnaire or whether you -- the educator -- read it to somebody and that's where you also see the age distinction. And you actually go to total response value, you go across to the right part of the table -- it's like the old IRS tax tables if anyone still does their taxes by hand -- and find out the financial well-being score. And you can see that it's a little laborious. In the pure version of the scale in a sense, the one that's using added response theory, which is a complicated statistical thing, which most people won't be doing - A computer actually does an analysis of the pattern of answers -- questions and answers -- and gives you a score. Anyone who has access to Stata, which is a statistical package, can score it that way. This is kind of a simpler way to do it. This is sort of a shorthand but it's also - It's a little cumbersome as well. And I think the biggest challenge that a lot of people have raised is that this is harder to automate. You can use our online version -- the one I showed you where you just put in, you click on the boxes and get the number -- but if you're doing it within a data collection system, it is possible. We know people who have used different programs to automate the look-up but in some larger data systems that are already kind of - that don't have the flexibility, that's presented a challenge for the scoring and that's something that we are aware of. Hopefully in the future, there may be things that we all can do but you'll hear that it's easy to ask the questions and get the initial number. It's this look-up part that is - that takes more steps to automate. So sorry if that was getting a bit technical. So you've done all that. Great, whatever, fine. What does it all mean? So this is where the new stuff comes in that we hope you will find interesting. A lot of people have been using the score and the scale but they say, "Well, we don't know what it means." And that earlier colorful graph that showed you the average was a 54 gave a sense that, you know, below 50 isn't so good and above 60 is better, but we have now done some more detailed analysis to give us more refined benchmarks or score bands. So what I'm going to show you on the next two slides is the two new things. Again they are in the toolkit. They're also in a printable form online. I'll show you how to get there later. But this is the newest stuff we want to show you and what our contractor did was to look at financial well-being scores, plot it against other financial characteristics -- how well people were doing, were they having trouble making ends meet, were they having issues with their financial resources generally, some other kind of indicators of financial distress or success -- and when you all plot all those, of course, you know, the fewer - the higher your score, the fewer of those things you have. But there are points where there's sort of an inflection where there's a threshold. If you get above a certain score, there seems to be, you know - the slope of the line gets better. This is a very oversimplified version of some complicated statistical stuff. But we did that and came up with some new score bands that I will show you on the next slide and then we also just put distributions for people's scores by age and income because, you know, if you're 25 and just starting off in life and have a low income, you don't want to know how you compare to someone who's, you know, 59 and has been saving their whole life and even if they haven't, they just may be in a very different financial place. So people want to compare with someone like them. So there were a couple of criteria we were able to do that for and I'll show you that in a minute as well. So here we go, the big reveal. This is not the surprise that will be at the end of the webinar. This is just the new exciting benchmarks. Whoops, sorry. One more slide before that just to let you know how we got there is what I was saying. We took the data we already had from our financial well-being survey and looked at points where people seem to be actually getting over a threshold and doing better. All right so here's the big reveal. One more slide. This is our new - These are our new benchmarks. So they don't fall into such pretty little - You know, it's not like 40 to 50, 50 to 60. They fall on uneven numbers but this is what we found. We have six - one, two, three, four, five, six, yeah six -- new bands with five break points -- so very low, low, medium/low, medium/high, high and very high -- and you can see the break points are 29, 38, sorry, 37 - 29, 37, 49, 57 and 67. So you can see that 0 to 29, people are in a very low score, 30 to 37 is low, 38 to 49 is medium/low, 50 to 54, which is where the average falls is medium/high, 58 to 67 is high and 68 and above. And then what we did was we just selected some of the characteristics -- some of the average characteristics -- of people who are in that band. So just it gives you a sense that for people in the very low, only 5% are certain that they could come up with emergency, you know, money if they had an emergency, you know. In the middle group, you can see that, you know, 80% find it difficult to make ends meet some of the time. In the medium/low, you bump up a little bit. You'll find that, you know, a minority of people pay off their credit cards in full. The higher you get, you'll see different - We kind of chose a set of characteristics just so you can look at. We actually have each of these types of numbers for each group but we just picked a selection so you can kind of say, "Oh look. It looks like people in this score band have these issues. Maybe we can work with our clients on those." Now you'll know that from talking directly to the client but this just gives you a sense of where people fall. So we think this will be helpful. We hope this will be helpful for you to better understand what the numbers mean when you have people, you know, that you're working with and from the folks we've talked to, people working with clients coming in for financial education, many of whom of course are struggling, you usually - we tend to see a lot of the under 50s, right, the 38 to 49 or even lower at least from what we've heard. Now I will show you the score comparison groups. Again this is a screenshot so you can't see it very well and you can't see all of it. But what we've done is we've broken out income on the side. So the whole first chunk is people with less than $30,000. The whole second chunk is $30 to $50,000 basically, 50 and then - Again, it goes further than what you see on the screen. And then we have it broken out by age group so you can look at - The very first line is people who are age 18 to 29 and less than $30,000. You can see the average score is 45 and then it's broken down in percentiles. So you can - If you have a client who comes in and their score is a 48, you can say, "Hey, you're in the 50th percentile. You're a little above average." This gives you something to better understand where people stand relative to people of their same age and income. We looked at other factors. There's some data challenges and issues where - There were other things we were not easily able to do comparison groups for. So these are the two. Online you can also look at score by employment status -- so if you're employed, unemployed -- in the online version I showed you previously. So I'm going to now just address the $10,000 question here. People always say, "Should you scare..." Sorry, I can't say it. "Should you share the score with the people you serve?" The score's a valuable tool to measure, obviously, people's financial well-being. Most practitioners certainly up to this point have generally I think have not been sharing the score, right, partially because we didn't always know what it meant. We had some early guidance. These benchmarks will be - we think will be helpful but you don't want to tell someone they have a 42 and nobody knows what that means. Again we know more about that now. But also -- and this came up a lot when we talked to practitioners -- sharing the score could lead people to be anxious or upset. In some cases, it could motivate the person. So, you know, really what we say is before sharing the score, consider how a person might react, whether sharing the score would help or hinder a person's sense of well-being. So that's really up to you guys. Until we had these benchmarks, we don't really have - We haven't yet developed messaging for consumers. This toolkit is for practitioners. We expect you all to use it to see where your clients stand. You'll have to figure out whether or not it makes sense to share it. I mean generally, we've had practitioners say that they aren't sharing it. They're not just giving someone a number and then not having anything else to say. So over time, maybe we'll have better communications. Maybe all of you will develop things that others could use. But certainly it's something you'll want to think hard about whether to share or not and the materials in the toolkit are meant for you -- as practitioners -- to then, you know, figure out whether you want to show them that benchmark chart that I just showed you. So not a question that's completely answered yet but something I think everyone is thinking about who's been using the scale. So I'm going to just run through a few ways you can use the scale in your work. Again a lot of this, you know, hopefully will resonate or you may have tried it yourself but there are five things we'll mention. First, measuring individual well-being and progress. That kind of makes sense. People want to track their clients' scores and the answers to their scores. So you can administer the scale at intake and at regular intervals throughout your sessions if you want to see how people are doing over time. You can keep the scores and the individual question responses, too and see how those change over time. And then of course, now with these benchmarks, you can compare the scores with the people you serve to this national data, which is one of the nicest things about this scale is we do have quite a pool of national data and you can now compare different types of clients, different types of programs you can compare it to the national data. In terms of when to administer the scale, as it's mentioned here, you know, we don't have a recommendation on that. It really depends on what works for you. What we've heard from practitioners is people tend to do it approximately quarterly if they're seeing a client, you know, over a longer period of time. Again that's going to vary based on what makes sense for you. We hope to learn more about kind of best practices in that over time. But you usually want at least something early in your work with someone so you can see how it changes. So you can measure individual progress. This -- number two -- facilitate one-on-one conversations, this is probably the most common thing we hear is that people say, "Hey, great. The score, scale, whatever. You know, we never score it but we really find that the questions themselves are helpful conversation starters," because it's not about what's your credit score, which is helpful but doesn't necessarily immediately open up a dialogue. But, here, when you ask people, "You know, can you afford a birthday gift in any one month? Do you feel like your finances control you?" that can really be a way to connect with people. As we say here be prepared for people to react emotionally. Our guest speaker who will come on later told me, gosh, a year or two ago and she may repeat this when she speaks - but she said, "Everyone I ask - I administer the scale to, they all cry. They always cry." She said, "But I'm prepared to deal with that. I'm a financial coach. I want them to open up." So again be prepared for that. Some of the questions may make people feel anxious or they may not but it is an opportunity to get people in touch with their own feelings about their money and often get them talking. So that is what we found is probably the single most common reason people say that they're using the scale. So that was the second. The third is you can do the same thing in a group setting though obviously that's a little different. You probably don't want everyone to be crying in a group. I guess it depends on your group. But you can use it in a workshop setting to have people reflect on the questions and help them engage more deeply with whatever material you're teaching if you're doing group settings. And so you could ask workshop attendees to complete the scale before the workshop starts or you could do it - You know, you could link relative scale questions to particular education topics that you're dealing with but of course understand people may be hesitant to share their answers with the group. But it can help people as a group to talk about what is it, you know, what does it mean to control your money, what does it mean if you feel your finances control you, so again good potential conversation starters even in a group setting. Fourth, of course, really one of the things we really wanted to develop the scale for was to evaluate and improve programs. So, you can use the scale to design more effective programs. So, you can link your – the material you might be using in coaching or in finance education to people based on how they respond to scale questions. If they’re more concerned about longer term issues rather than shorter term, you know, again, you can use how people answer the questions to connect to the materials that you are going to work with them on or with. You can look at your materials you’re using to see how well they align to what you’re learning about the people, the financial (or the) other people you serve. And you can, of course, from a pure evaluation point of view, you can look at how many (visuals), financials being changes over time based on program activities, right. That would be really doing an evaluation to see if you well-being goes up if you do different types of interventions. And in the long run, of course, we would love it if people were doing that and we could all better learn what builds financial well-being. And the fourth one – sorry, fifth – the fifth one, and final idea on how you can use the scale is to measure and compare programs, so not just evaluate an individual program, but look across programs or look across clients. And it’s particularly useful for people, you know, who are managing programs or funders who want to see how different programs are doing or what types of clients are being served by what types of programs. And that’s where the standardization scale really helps with those comparisons. So, you can report on share scores with other programs or funders. And some funders actually are starting to ask for the scale. You can look at how your clients are doing relative to other organizations that you might work with or partner with. You can look at different scores amongst people in different programs within your own organization. And, of course, you can compare scores to other survey data that you may have or to other national well-being surveys or other types of data. So, different ways you can kind of get a sense of the types of clients are dealing with, how they compare to others at the start, how different programs are working, so a whole bunch of different things that you can do if you are scoring the scale. Alas few tips before I quickly show you the hub, and this is somewhat summing up, but if you’re integrating the scale into your other data collection that you might be doing, you’ve got to ask all the questions. You can’t pick and choose questions. You can either do the five or the ten questions, but if you change the questions, if you eliminate questions, if people skip questions, you can’t score. It will not be valid. So, there’s not flexibility there. You can always do the shorter one. But you can’t say, oh, I don’t like those ones. I’m going to choose different ones. You can if you use the fancy complicated data (statistical) package but probably most people are doing that. Second, you also can’t change the wording. It was rigorously tested as worded, and so if you make changes or if you, you know, if you kind of coach people on how to answer, that’s going to make it may no longer comparable. However, you can because this is a public resource, you can put your own logo on the scale. You can change the way it looks. But you shouldn’t change anything else and you can’t put your logo on it if it also has ours on it. So, either ours or yours, but not both. We do encourage people to calculate a score. A lot of groups use it and collect it but don’t actually score it. We hope that over time, as the benchmarks are more used, and then there’s more national data. You’ll see the value of actually doing the scoring. And then lastly, you know, you can add it into your electronic data systems you’re already using, your data collection systems, that’s great. That helps people to use it better. Again, there are some quirks about that lookup table piece that can sometimes make that challenging. But there are some people who have figured out how to kind of overcome that. So - and this slide also sums up the same thing. You’ve got to ask all the questions. Avoid judgment. Don’t make people feel there’s any right answer. Listen and be patient and supportive. This is kind of basic, you know, client interaction stuff. And doing it first, it depends, but generally you probably want some kind of baseline. And I’ll stop there. The others are kind of repeating what I’ve said. Okay, so now I’m going to quickly show you how to find everything, everything you ever wanted to know about financial well-being on our Web site. And then we will hear from our guest speaker which I’m very excited about. So, the financial well-being hub is on our Web site as of last Thursday. The URL is at the bottom will you’ll note it’s long and clunky - practitioner resources, backslash, financial well-being resources. Probably the fastest way to get there is if you just go to our homepage, consumer finance.gov. This is the screenshot. You will see where the red circle is, there is a section called practitioner resources up in the menu. That is a drop-down. If you click on that, you will see this as the next slide, note on the left, this is also how you can get to the adult financial education page which has sort of a collection of all of our different handouts and resources and such. But if you see under programs again, the big red circle shows you financial well-being resources. If you click on that, that will take you to it. So, two clicks, you can get to this without having to type in that long URL. And what you get when you do that, you will see this. Again, you won’t be able to read everything because I know this is a screenshot. So I’ll say a few words about it, but again, you can go explore it on your own. And this is only the top part of the page. This is the hub. A little bit of information up top, on the right, there are some reports that may catch your attention on financial well-being. Also, if you want to access the actual financial well-being data from our survey, you can download that. It’s in the middle. It says view the data. But there are three sections in this page. You can only see the top one right here. I’ll show you the other ones in a minute. But once you get to this page, there are three sections. And now notice in the middle, too, is a toolkit. The little blue box, pretty little blue box with the stethoscope, that’s where you can get the electronic toolkit that I’ve been walking you through. Oh, sorry, the downloadable version of the toolkit that we’ve been looking at the score ranges and all the other stuff all in one place. And then, from this page, there are three sections. There is measure and score financial well-being, integrate financial well-being scale and explore financial well-being findings. So first, this is the measure and score for financial well-being subpage, the top half of it. This is where you’ll find things on actually using the scale, just how to actually do it. So, the online questionnaire, there’s a link to that. The user guide which was the original user guide, they came up with the scale a couple of years ago, is there. There’s a few - the English and Spanish versions you can just see at the bottom of the screen, so you can actually get the paper score - paper scale, sorry, in the scoring worksheet. And then on the lower part of the page, if you were to scroll down, this is what you would see. There’s the five question scale in both English and Spanish. And then under interpret the score is where you can get single downloadable files with the score ranges so they’re 37, 38 to - whenever it was – 49 – in one place. And in that comparison, the income and age comparison, they’re all in the toolkit that you can print out just those pages. At the bottom here, you’ll see there’s a link for the ranges in the comparison groups. That’s all the measure and score financial well-being part. It’s sort of how to use it or how to actually do the scale itself. The next section of the three pages is integrate financial well-being scale into your program and this has some of the stuff, the content we just went through at the top of the page. At the bottom, there’s a link to the digest on some of the things you can do around financial well-being. It’s from a couple of years ago. And then at the bottom, see how other organizations use the scale. There are three case studies in the printed toolkit. We’re going to hear from one of those case studies today when (Annease) speaks in just a minute. We’re very close to that now. And these are the - there are couple of pages in the toolkit, but there are three case studies. One - empower the financial coaching organization in the Denver area that is using the scale in a number of ways including facilitating conversations. Second case study, organization in Chicago called Center for Changing Lives which is using it also in a number of ways directly with clients. And then the third one is an intermediate or funder, actually, the United Way of the California Capital Region. That’s Sacramento, which is requiring some of their - requiring their financial coaching grantees to report on the scale. And so there are several groups there using it. And so you can read about all that in these case studies. I won’t go into them now for time reasons and also because one of the case study participants is going to speak to us in just two more slides, I think. So that was all the sections. The third of the three subpages is explore financial well-being scale findings. And this is all of our research reports in one place. So, financial well-being in America, the pathways reports that talks about financial skill, the financial skill scale report, building blocks which was looking at youth financial capabilities tied to financial well-being, a new report on financial well-being on older Americans. And we will continue to add things as we have additional reports coming out. So, here you can kind of get all the - for people who wanted to get into data and research, here’s where you go. If you don’t want that and just want to know how to use the scale, stay off of this page. And now, my surprise slide before we go to (Annaese), and this is for any of you who are researchers, but even practitioners using the scale. And we have an upcoming call for financial well-being research papers coming out. It should be in just a couple of weeks in mid-February that this will go out, and where you can apply to receive support if you’re already collecting data. It’s not for new data collection. But if you’re already collecting financial well-being data and want to do some analysis of it, or if you want to use our existing data set that’s available or some of the other national data sets that are using the well-being scale, you can apply for support to analyze that and it will culminate in a symposium at the end of this year where all those papers will be presented. So if you or anyone you know is interested, this call for papers is coming out soon. And I will just say we would love to have some practitioners. So not just - the academic types applying, of course, doing their important, you know, analysis of data, but we would love to have folks who are using it in practice actually do some analysis of what they’re finding in terms of, you know, what interventions might change scores and how much and how it relates to different factors. So, there’ll be more information on all of this coming out but hopefully some of you or people you know will be interested in seeing that. And now, finally, you have heard enough for me, I am sure. I would love to introduce (Annaese Gonzalez Castiano) from Denver, from Lakewood, Colorado. She is a personal - a bilingual personal financial coach. She’s also a data specialist. (Annaese), I took that out of your title because I couldn’t make it all fit in one line and it just looked - it looked so sloppy when it was on one line. But she actually does amazing work, was an early adopter of the scale, both using it with clients as well as analyzing it, the scale data, and thinking about how it could apply to evaluate programs and whatnot. So, let me turn it over to (Annaese), but Heather, are there any - were there any questions that came in that we should address before we do that? Dr. Heather Brown: Yes, Irene, actually there were. We had a question about languages and this person said that - actually, (Rosalynn) said, we serve many clients who are monolingual in a wide variety of languages - Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai, and several other languages. And she wanted to know how she could account for any changes to the language that arises from translation. And I did respond and tell her that, you know, of course we have it in Spanish so it’s ready to go there, but typically assessments need to be validated after they’re translated. And so I’m not sure if we’re planning on doing that with future languages, but I know typically we don’t recommend - well, most psychometricians don’t recommend that you just translate something and then started administering it because it… ((Crosstalk)) Irene Skricki: Yes. Yes, we do actually - we have translated it into Spanish – sorry, Spanish, yes, we know, but into Chinese. But I don’t think we’ve released it yet. We’ve got a backlog of translated stuff being audited. Right now we don’t have immediate plans to do any other languages but you do raise an interesting point, Heather, that it’s - I mean, you can translate it and use it yourselves. It may not be - the comparability will be a little different, I think, because the wording was very carefully tested. So that is the downside that, you know, we’d love to do more languages over time, but right now it’s Spanish and hopefully soon the Chinese one will be released. Dr. Heather Brown: Okay, we have two more questions. One – (Rosalynn) also asked, one thing we’ve noticed doing pre-and post-surveys is the scores change only slightly before and after intervention. Do you have any info on if this is a similar experience with other programs? Irene Skricki: That is an excellent question. And actually something we are very interested in. We refer to it as what is a meaningful change, right? You know, we don’t want people to say, oh, we expect something to go up 20 points when actually that’s not, you know, realistic. So, we don’t - I don’t have - I have only anecdotal answers to that. And (Annaese) can probably address this in a minute. But, you know, the order of magnitude that we’ve heard about, so this is highly anecdotal, it is scores might go up three to five points over six months, you know, depending on - they could go up a little more. I think one of our case studies said they were seeing things going up by eight points. But it really kind of depends on who you’re working with. We’ve heard people say that it often dip initially as people dig deeper into their finances and say, oh, my gosh, you know - and then it may go up. So we would love to learn more about that but I think it’s important to realize that people aren’t going to go, you know, from the lowest score band to, like, medium-high, you know, with a few months intervention, right. These are longer-term issues. But again, that something we would love to hear from all of you about who were using the scale. Do you want to quickly ask the last one, Heather, and I really want to give the rest of the time to (Annease)? Dr. Heather Brown: Absolutely. And it sounds like that good question might be an opportunity for some research that someone might want to go after your opportunity you gave. Let’s see. The last question that we have here was from (Ann), and she said, is there experience integrating scores and/or questions with the outcome tracker? Irene Skricki: I guess I would need to know which outcome tracker. So that may be like software specific questions which I might not be able to answer especially since I’m not sure which one she’s referring to. Dr. Heather Brown: Yes, I think she’s speaking to an actual software tool called Outcome Tracker. Irene Skricki: Okay. Well, let’s hear from (Annaease). (Ann), if you want to email more details, although, I only know little bit about how the score interacts with a couple of software programs. That may be something that we need to explore and I would love to explore, like, with scale users through an informal users group going forward. So, we might not be able to answer that on this call, but feel free to send a little more via chat. So let’s see, (Annaese), are you with us? (Annaese Gonzalez Castiano): I am here. Irene Skricki: Yay. Thank you so much and I really appreciate presumably digging yourself out of the Denver snowstorm of a couple days ago enough to be able to do this. You have been an early adopter and have done a lot - I think you were the first group that ever actually sent us, like, hey, here’s what we found, you know, from using it with clients. So, I would love to give you some time to tell us about your experience with the scale. So go ahead. (Annaese Gonzalez Castiano): Sure. Thank you. So, yes, first I wanted to share a little bit about why we decided to try the scale in the first place. As Irene mentioned, I am a personal (finance) coach and the data specialist for Empowered and we’re a small nonprofit in Metro Denver providing personal-finance coaching, financial education classes and debt management plans to our community. For the 101 personal finance coaching, we really wanted to find a way to kind of get a sense of how people feel about their financial security, not just follow some of the metrics we see such as increased savings, increased credit score, reduced debt, but how does a client feel about where they are in their financial journey? Our mission is actually to empower people to transform their financial futures and we want to make sure (we honor) the client’s value and provide a positive judgment free space so that they can improve their financial circumstances. So we were really trying to find something that’s a little bit more qualitative are a little bit more focused on the person’s perception of their financial security. And we ran into their financial well-being scale in late 2016 and we thought that was a great complement to what we were already tracking, those actual financial changes. And we piloted it for a few months and found that led to some very interesting conversations with our clients that really addressed their main fears and concerns about their financial habits and financial future. So, in 2017, we were fortunate enough that we were able to add this financial well-being scale to our intake. We use an online platform called Change Machine from the financial clinic to track all of our coaching clients. And they were very helpful in allowing us to add the full scale of ten questions to our intake process. And we are trying to continue to ask our clients every three months or after every session, for example, to update how they feel about their financial security. So the scale has been a very important part of our coaching model. And we’ve noticed some very interesting correlations between decreased debt, for example, and an increase in the score. And, in fact, I just looked at our 2018 score changes for the well-being scale and we noticed that for 2018, our clients actually increase their well-being score on an average of seven points. And just put things in perspective, so it’s not – as Irene was saying, it’s not a huge shift that occurs immediately. We’re talking about fears around money and that’s a very deep, complex issue. But we’ve been able to measure that seven points in one year has been the average result from those of us that have met with us at least three times. So, yes, I don’t know if there are any specific questions that people would like for me to address or any curiosity about how we implemented it, but I’m happy to answer anything that comes along. Irene Skricki: (Annease), can you tell us a little bit about - because I did bring this up earlier about client reaction and also maybe of the reaction of the coaches and how they’ve dealt with the kind of - about how you actually do it sort of - how does the conversation go with the client? How do they react? How do you - you know, when you actually administer it in the session? Give us a little flavor for that. (Annaese Gonzalez Castiano): Sure. Actually, as you can imagine, these are very personal question and some people we find that they expressed that they have never thought about these things before. So I will say one of the most interesting reactions from clients is that they’re not even sure that that was - they didn’t even know that that was an important question. And once they asked themselves that they realize, huh, this actually does impact how I feel about my financial future. So, just that self-reflection was really powerful. But, yes, there’s a lot of emotion sometimes especially because we like to ask more probing questions around answers, so a lot of open-ended questions to see how they - if they want to share more about why they feel a certain way. So, sometimes clients share a lot about their personal lives and about any deep-seeded financial habits that they might have. You learn a lot about how their parents handled money and so on. And it really helps us as a coach, really identify what financial habits we need to address to help that clients achieve financial security, but also to understand the complexity of the client situation and honor that and work with that so that we can focus on what the client really needs to do to achieve their goals. Irene Skricki: Do you - I assume you are not sharing the scores. Is that right? Are you telling people it’s a scale or just saying, hey, we’re going to ask you these questions? How do you actually described it to the client? (Annaese Gonzalez Castiano): Great question. So, as I mentioned as part of our intake, so it is done towards the beginning of the first appointment, and then in follow-up, it depends on the coach when they feel it’s appropriate to bring it up, usually towards the end of the session after the conversation has a revved up. But generally speaking, we do not share the score with the client. We explained that these questions are just to help us understand how they’re feeling about their finances and that we will ask the questions again in the future to track any changes over time. But we are very transparent in this as we share with clients, if you do want to look at your score over time, we are happy to share that with you personally. It’s just not something that we’ve added to the coaching appointment. It’s more for us to determine is there another type of impact that we’re making as an organization that can be tracked this way besides numbers and figures. Irene Skricki: And what’s the reaction been from the other coaches? I know it’s sort of voluntary within your organization, right. I know you’ve been a proponent. Have the other coaches found it helpful? Have they had challenges? It’s very interesting to hear about how that adoption process goes. (Annaese Gonzalez Castiano): Yes, so it is no longer optional at our organization. Irene Skricki: Okay. (Annaese Gonzalez Castiano): We really like where it leads us in terms of conversations. And so are trying to do it more regularly. Like I said, we’re kind of expecting coaches to do it at least once a quarter with their clients. A lot of coaches love the conversations that result from the question because it gives us a more complete understanding of the client’s circumstances. And we noticed a lot of discrepancies, too, we’re client might say that they feel okay with their savings account but then they answer a question by saying, “I am concerned with the money I have,” or (unintelligible). They answer it in a negative way. So it helps us as coaches identify what are the discrepancies in behavior and actions? And – or sorry, in thoughts and actions that we see from clients. So, it’s - yes, it’s been challenging mostly due to the logistics of it because it’s hard for us to score it in real time. We have to kind of analyze the data on a quarterly basis because it’s a little complicated to score it at that moment. So that was - I would say that that’s the biggest obstacle, but overall positive results from both clients and coaches. Irene Skricki: Right. Right. I know one of the other groups that we did a case study on said that they, in some cases, administer - will have people answer the questions in one session and say we’ll discuss it next time and then they score, because they don’t have in the moment scoring, they scored and then discuss the overall kind of score. Maybe not a number, but at least the whole, you know, what they learned from it in a future session. So you can think, too, about kind of doing it as a two-part piece just thinking about the challenge of scoring. By the way, I noticed one question about - just one of the questions that came in through the Q&A of whether people need to register to access this questionnaire. I should have said this up front. The financial well-being scale, this is a public resource. We are federal agency. It is free. It is available to anyone who wants to use it. And I’ve said you can even, you know, put your own logo on it and make it look different. Don’t change the questions. But you can use it however you want. If you hand score it, you track the data yourself. If you use our online version, it won’t store it for you but you can just, you know, you can print out actually what you’re saying for each individual client and keep that. So, you know, this is completely open to anyone who wants to use it. That’s the advantage to being, you know, a public resource. We are almost at the top of the hour, but let’s have a quick opportunity – and (Annease), this is great. I’m sure people have a million questions and this makes me think that, at some point, we should just have a webinar where people talk about their use of the scale and the things that they’re learning. But let’s make a quick check to see if there’re any voice questions. And I know we’re basically out of time, but, operator, can you just quickly that people have the opportunity, explained to us how to – them how to do that? Coordinator: Certainly. And if you would like to ask a question, please press Star 1 from your phone and unmute your line. Speak your name clearly when prompted by the automated system. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press Star 2. Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press Star 1 and speak your name clearly when prompted. Please stand by for any phone questions. Irene Skricki: There are so many more things I would love to ask (Annaese) if I had the chance. Dr. Heather Brown: Irene, this is Heather. You might want to advance to the last slide while people are asking questions. Irene Skricki: Oh. Ah, yes, good idea. And this is just a resources slide. That’s right. I got stuck on (Annaease)’s introductory slide. But, again, the URL for the well-being resources page, and again, you can also get to it through the menu that I showed you before. The URL for our general financial educator’s page, the (FinEx’s) email address, and then a link for our financial education discussion group. Oh, there are all kinds of other interesting questions coming in, but we are getting short on time. Let’s see quickly, are there any voice questions, operator? Coordinator: We do have one question on the phone. One moment. Irene Skricki: Okay. I think this will be our last one Coordinator: The he question is from (Erica Baldwin). Your line is open. (Erica Baldwin): Yes, I was trying to find out how to get access to the scale again, the well financial - the well financial scale that was displayed in the slideshow at the beginning. Irene Skricki: Sure. Well, if you’re able to see the screen now, if so URL that’s up there, so consumer - again, not catchy, but consumer finance.gov, backslash, said practitioner, dash, resources, backslash, financial, dash, financial – sorry, financial, dash, well, dash, being, dash, resources. But if you just go to www.consumerfinance.gov, to be honest, if you just use the search bar and said financial well-being, there’s a whole page on it and the scale itself, there’s both the paper version that you can download and online version. So it’s all on that hub I showed you. And, again, all available to use it - so depending on whether you want the paper versus the online, but it is all there. (Hopefully) that answers your question. Oh, and I see lots of other questions but we really are out of time, finding we will stop here. I always love it when there’s more to be said at the end of the call. So I’m going to thank everyone for joining. Thank you so much, (Annaese). I really would have loved have heard a whole lot more from you but I think that at least gives people a little flavor for how one group is using it. And again, there are case studies in the toolkits. You can see a little bit more. It’s short, but a little bit more in the toolkit that we’ve been working through today. So, why don’t we stop there? And if you have additional questions or thoughts, you can email them to the (FinEx) inbox, CFPB, underscore, F-I-N-E-X, at CFPB_FinEx.gov which Heather monitors. You can send any questions to me or to anyone else that would be appropriate to answer them. So, why don’t we stop here? ((Crosstalk)) Irene Skricki: Oh, go ahead, Heather. Yes. Dr. Heather Brown: Could you - there’s a question about more details on the February proposal for the grant. Is there any email that we can provide them more information on that? Irene Skricki: Not until – so the - what happens in February this we put out the call for papers. That will have the criteria, all the information. And then there is a month or two before you actually apply. So, it will kind of be - it will all be announced. We’re kind of giving you an early heads-up. And, Heather, maybe we can send that call for papers out through the (FinEx) newsletter, as well. Dr. Heather Brown: Yes, that sounds like a great idea. Irene Skricki: Yes, so that’s all we can say right now. It’ll all be kind of announced, as we said, most likely in mid-February. And we do hope some practitioners will apply for that. So I think unless there’s – Heather, is there anything else we need to do before we… Dr. Heather Brown: No, but I would just like to thank you and (Annaese) for such a wonderful and interesting presentation. I’m very excited to see how others are going to be using this. And I love your idea of an entire webinar to hear how practitioners are using it’s in the future. So, hopefully that’s something we can work together on. Irene Skricki: Great. All right, thank you, everybody. Stay warm. Coordinator: Thank you for your participation in today’s conference. You may disconnect at this time. END CFPB HQ Moderator: Heather Brown 03-28-19/9:15 am CT Confirmation # 8943048 Page 1