> Good Afternoon, Everyone. I Am Keith Combs, Manager of Financial Empowerment With

> Good afternoon, everyone. I am Keith Combs, manager of Financial Empowerment with National Disability Institute. Thank you for joining us today. We are excited about the topic that we are going to be discussing and on the benefits of establishing and living within a monthly spending plan. This is a series for our REI network and today's webinar is sponsored by Acorda Therapeutics, Bank of America, and Walmart. Nakia Matthews, the NDI technology and the manager will provide us with some basic housekeeping tips. Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. Actually, this is Elizabeth Jennings providing support for Nakia Matthews today. So, I'm going to be sharing with you some housekeeping tips. Please bear with me one moment while I operate this. So, listening to the webinar, the audio for today's webinar is been broadcast through your computer. Please make sure that your speakers are turned on your headphones are plugged in. You can control the audio broadcast via the audio broadcast panel . If you accidentally close the panel, you can reopen it from the top menu item , communicate, and then click join audio broadcast.

If you are already listening to the webinar, then you are all set. If you do not have sound capabilities on your computer or you decide that you prefer to listen by phone, please tell in. The number is posted for you there. It is 1-855-244-8681 . That is the toll-free number. The meeting code is 661395082 . You do not need to enter an attendee ID. Real-time captioning is provided during this webinar for those who are deaf, hard of hearing or for whom English is a second language or for anyone who just prefer to read along. Captions can be found on the media of your panel which appears in the lower right-hand corner of the webinar platform. If you want to make the media viewer panel larger, you can maximize other panels like chat, -- I'm sorry, you can minimize other panels like chat, question-and-answer and/or participants. We hope that you will submit questions to a string that it webinar. Please use the chat box or question-and-answer box to send any questions you have during the webinar to Keith Combs or to Nakia Matthews, and we will select the questions accordingly during the question-and-answer portion which will take this at the end of the webinar. If you are listening by phone and you're not logged into the webinar platform, you can also ask questions by e-mailing your questions to Keith Combs at . This webinar is being recorded and materials will be placed on the National Disability Institute website at .

If you experience any technical difficulties during the webinar, please use the chat box to send a message to myself. It will show up as Nakia Matthews, or you can also e-mail in , and I apologize, let's change that e-mail address for today to . I will post my e-mail address in the chat box so that if you do have any technical difficulties during the presentation, you can e-mail me, Elizabeth Jennings, today's post, and I will be happy to assist you.

Hank you, Elizabeth, very much. Again, we would like to thank our sponsors today, including Walmart, Bank of America, Acorda Therapeutics, the Burton Blatt Institute and IRS who without their sponsorship and support, we would not be able to provide the webinar such as we do today. And we would also like to extend a special thank you to Acorda Therapeutics today as well.

If you are not familiar with National Disability Institute, we are a national research and government organization with the mission to promote income preservation and asset development for persons with disabilities and to build a better economic future for America's with disabilities. The NDI Real Economic Impact Network is an alliance of organizations and individuals dedicated to advancing the economic empowerment of the people with disabilities . The network consists of more than 900 partners and more than 100 cities in the United States . The network includes nonprofits, community tax coalitions, asset development organizations , financial education initiatives, corporations and private sector businesses, federal, state and local governments and individuals living with disabilities. All of the partners join forces to embrace, promote and pursue access to and inclusion of people with disabilities in the economic mainstream. On today's agenda, we are going to start with welcomes and introductions. We are going to move into the benefits of establishing and living with a monthly spending plan. Have a discussion of why spending plans are important. Introduce you to a zero balance budget and how to use that zero balance budget plan. Tips to reduce expenses we will have time at the end for questions. The outcomes that we hope everyone in attendance today will have a better understanding of the webinar is the definition of a balance spending plan, the importance of living within a monthly spending plan, how to identify and change spending habits, the importance of setting and working toward goals, and how to make sound financial decisions.

The presenter for today is Marlene Ware, and she is the director of financial stability with the National Foundation for Debt Management . Marlene has been a certified credit counselor with NFDM 40 serves as the financial Director. of stability. Her areas of expertise are financial coaching, development of financial curriculum and delivery of financial literacy presentations. She teaches financial education courses for Habitat for Humanity and is also a certified debt counselor. She also travels to yellow ribbon events and speak to regarding death returning guard and reserve members that directly impact their military careers. We are so very excited to have her teaching with us on this topic today and with that, I'm going to turn that over to you.

I'm pretty excited to be here today because a little transparency, I love [ Indiscernible ] so thank goodness this is the career area that I am in. And I do go all over and speak to many people . But I will tell you the majority of the folks I work with are low to moderate income folks. I have not had the pleasure or opportunity to do marketing with anyone that is higher income. So, most of what I'm going to talk about today will have everything to do with low to moderate income people. And it will maybe, hopefully, impact the way you work , the folks at you work with. But before we begin, let me ask you what compels you. Why are you even here today? Why would anybody want to hear anybody talk about budgets unless for transparency reasons you love budgets. But, are you working with people who have given up on their current method of money management? Are they hounded by collection companies? Are they unable to get credit? Is there some reason other than just an intrinsic reason? They look for a different way to control their cash flow? Do they come to you and do they lament about not having enough money ? Do they lament that the creditors are after them? Even if they are feeling that they're really not ready for personal accountability or that they really are ready, are they talk about goals that they want to accomplish ? Do they sound like they have a good reason to begin some level of money management? If you're talking to anyone about and they have not got in, they're not going to stick around for the final result and that happens all the time to do there appear to make money management and ongoing effort? A commitment to themselves and ? Will it will install them up front but it is a forever deal. Kind of like eating a healthy diet. If you start eating a healthy diet and you get all tremendously mean feeling good, and stop taking the medication, that does not mean to start eating ice cream and , same thing with managing money or using a budget. Once you're in, you're in for a long time.

So, here we are. We are ready to mitigate your clients interested in doing a budget and why would you even get them involved? Maybe because they realize that they do have control over their spending. Their budgets bob and weave and they have ups and downs and they are updated with every change in their life. It's not static. A budget is not static. They control it. Nobody is going to tell them what to do, they have the reins. It's their budget, it's their life, it's their money. They will discover their personal spending sabotage and I see this all the time. People disappear. I start working with somebody, I'm excited, they are excited, we start the budget, and then they go away. And I don't see them for some time. And then they come back again. But, the whole thing with budgeting is at first, there's a little bit of pain. It's like hiding the potato chips under the bed. Only to bring them out later when nobody is looking or eating the candy bar in the closet when nobody can see you. It's the same thing with spending sabotage. Like, going to the grocery store and getting your groceries with your debit card and then going ahead and taking that extra $40 home with you when the question pops up, do you want to take money home with you? Putting it in your pocket and, you know, not letting it actually be what it is. You're taking money, you're not spending money on groceries. Or maybe it's a simple thing like wandering around in the, you know, Walmart until you actually find something to spend your money on. There is a lot of sabotage. I see sabotage a lot. A spending plan or a budget or whatever you want to call it isn't going to work until you are ready. Just like a diet. If you're not ready to lose weight, if you're not ready to get healthy, it's not going to happen. There will be ready set priorities based on their needs, not wants which comes from really closely looking at their bank statements , they will want to weed out the things that they don't really need, but some people don't even look at bank statements, they just look at the bottom line, how much is left. They don't look at where the money is going. So, using a budget, they actually get to look at where the money is going because they're looking at their bank statements. They are writing things down. Here's another reason. It takes 21 days to change a habit. 21 days. If they can stick with it for a month, if they can do a budget for a whole month and see results and I'll tell you, I was just speaking to a group of women last night and I have not been there for a month and as soon as I sat down, one of the women said, I did it. I saved money last month. I wanted to save $200 but I managed to save $150. And she was one of those women who never had money. But it took her a whole month of going through all of her spending to realize that she did have money left over. They will be able to keep Opel from the door. That's a big one is working with low to moderate income people. There's always the fear of not being able to pay something. If there is no more calls from creditors, if there is no minute last-minute calls to the electric company before the service is shut off, they're going to see the merit in a budget. And also, they're going to learn that money is a tool. It's just a tool, that's all it is. It's not a punishment, it's not something that you should be ashamed of. Everybody does it. Warren Buffett doesn't, for heaven's sake. And it should not be scary. It's not the enemy. They will find themselves planning to spend money, not spontaneously spending money. That's the difference. Once you plan, that is kind of a zero balance budgeting is about. You plan where you're going to spend your money. You can still have fun, but you are in control and that is the part of budgeting that I like. We give ourselves a little bit of control, a little bit of power.

If other -- if any of you have ever taken the Dave Ramsey class, I think it is called peace University or something like that , I took it to go because I wanted to see what everything was about with Dave Ramsey and his spending plans and he does the zero balance budget. And I happen to believe in the zero balance budget because that means every penny is accounted for. There is never an opportunity where you have money left over at the end of the month that to spend. You will anyway with a zero balance budget, but it's not like, oh, great, I've got $200 left over, where can it go? What do you want to do and where do you want to spend the money? That's not a deal with a budget. A budget is possible. Dave Ramsey came up with this idea and maybe he's not the only one but the zero balance budget . He has lots of other theories I don't necessarily agree with but this one I do. And it's basically putting a name to every single dollar of your income. It involves your clients become intimately involved with her spending. They have control. The money differently their hands without them knowing where it is going. It's a choice. There is no miscellaneous category, and a lot of us do that. They say, well, just in case I need money, I will say about $200. There is no miscellaneous. This is thoughtful. You plan where your money is going to go. So they use their bank statements and if you have ever looked at your bank statements, he cuts we use debit cards now, you get a real good feel for where your money is going. So, they look at their bank statements and they plan where their money is going. It's already going. So, now they are going to see where it is going and plan for it.

And that means is if you go to Starbucks every day on your way to work that fit your budget, go for it, go to Starbucks every day your budget. If you go to Starbucks every day but now you realize that your $10 short on pain when you need to pay every week, okay, maybe you can go to Starbucks. But, that's a choice you make. There budget is fluid. It moves with their wants, needs, goals, it's always changing because our lives are not static. Today everything is good, tomorrow we need tires on the car. So, it's fluid. You can't have a master plan. You can't have some kind of a budget that you stick inside the cupboard door and look at that and that is your money Bible for the year. That's not the way it happened it's a month-to-month ongoing in touch with your money type of deal. So, they have to stay in touch with their budget. They have to make tweaks. They have to look at their bank statements, they have to know what is going on, and that is kind of cool. That's kind of cool because, especially with some of the young women that I work with, you do see the power that you get.

You see. Nothing is going to happen. Without some kind of a goal. I can't lose weight unless there is a reason to. I also can't work the budget unless I have a goal. If I have a goal, 20 make it a whole lot easier. If I'm going to set a budget intrinsically just because today I feel like I want to do a budget and it's going to be a short-term event, there has to be something outside of me that makes me do a budget. The goal, you're has to be a goal. I work with families a lot. I also work with individuals. I also work with couples. But, that's a really good time when you start to do a budget. That's a really good time to sit down and have a kitchen table dialog. Where do you want to take this? If we are going to budget our money, how do we want to do it? What things are important to us? What reason do we have to watch our money besides just paying the electric bill and having enough money for groceries? What is another reason? So, give everybody a family in the chance to contribute and narrowed our collective goals or individual goals to one or two that might be accomplished within the confines of their budget. That means short-term. Because you want them to succeed. Success is the key. Give them a chance to succeed. So, if they set a short-term goal , and this is how I would do it, this is where I have done it, and this is really probably the most fun of the budget because people get involved. So, you give everybody in the family who is to participate in the budget a piece of paper. And you tell each of them, write down three goals. Three goals that could be accomplished in the next three months. What is it that you want? Do you want to go to the zoo? Do you want to buy new outfits you have been looking for? Do you want to take the family for a movie night? What is it you want to do that because David for over the next three months? So everybody write it down.