Taking a First Step Toward Improved Financial Wellness – Live Captioning Transcript
> Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for today's webinar, Taking a First Step Toward Improved Financial Wellness. We are very grateful to our sponsor today, Acorda Therapeutics. Today's webinar is a part of Acorda Therapeutics and National Disability Institute and as financial wellness webinar series. It is the first in this year's series and we are thrilled to have you all with us today. My name is Elizabeth Jennings, director of training and technical assistance here at National Disability Institute. We are going to provide you with several things today. We are going to go over a few housekeeping tips. I colleagues, Nakia Matthews, the lead you through those to make sure that your technology is working correctly and that you understand how to ask questions of us today. Then, we are going to give you a few slides on the overview of the financial wellness survey that we did a few years ago, and the importance of economic empowerment for all people, specifically looking at the importance of it for folks on the line with MS, individuals with disabilities in all other folks with disabilities. We are going to hear from Marlene Ware with the national foundation for debt management on steps you can take toward improved financial wellness. And then, we like to end each webinar with a few next steps that you can take, just to help you put some of what you have learned into action and give you some reminders and a timeline for moving forward.
> Nakia, I would like to ask you to provide us with housekeeping tips, please.
> Good afternoon. The audio for the webinar is being broadcast through your computer. Make sure that your speakers are turned on or your headphones are plugged in. You can control the audio broadcast via the audio broadcast panel, and if you accidentally close the panel or if the sound stops, you can reopen it back onto the top menu, communicate and join audio broadcast. If you do not have sound keep villages on your computer, or you prefer to listen to the webinar by phone, you can dial either the toll-free or toll number that you see here, and enter the meeting code. Note that you do not need to enter an attendee ID.
> Real-time captioning is provided during this webinar. The captions can be found in the media viewer panel, which appears in the lower right-hand corner of the webinar platform. If you would like to make the media viewer panel larger, you can do so by minimizing some of the other panels above, like chat or Q&A, and conversely, if you do not need the captions, you can minimize the media viewer panel. Like Elizabeth said, there will be a question and answer portion at the end of the webinar. Please send any questions that you have during the course of the webinar to either me, Nakia Matthews, or to Elizabeth Jennings and we will answer those questions for you. If you are listening by phone and not locked into the web portion, you may also ask questions by e-mailing Elizabeth directly at . Please note that this webinar is been recorded in the materials will be placed on our website at /financial wellnes..If you experience technical difficulties during the webinar, these use the chat box to send them eat, Nakia Matthews, a message or you may also e-mail me at .
> Thank you so much. So once again, welcome, everyone. I will be your moderator today. My name is Elizabeth Jennings, director of training and technical assistance at National Disability Institute. Since it is a new year, I want to take a moment to let folks on the line, if you are new to National Disability Institute, we are the first in the country, organization to focus on a better financial future for individuals with disabilities, and we provide training and technical assistance across the country to individuals with disabilities, to disability service providers, and to service providers within the asset building community, as well as providing policy suggestions at the federal level, all toward making sure that individuals have access to the kinds of services and supports they need to improve their financial wellness. We are very happy you are here to join us today, and we want to thank again our sponsor, Acorda Therapeutics, who funding makes the MS financial wellness series possible. So, what is financial wellness? We define financial wellness as the state of a person's finances with the intent of working towards financial behaviors that limit stress and the impact of stress on one's daily life. For folks on the line who are individuals with MS, you know that limiting stress in your daily life can be not only important to your mind, but also to the health of your body. And, we would argue that taking a closer look at your finances can help to eliminate some of that stress.
> When we talk about financial wellness, we talk about multiple areas of financial capabilities. Being financially literate, accessing affordable financial services, utilizing favorable tax provisions, budgeting, understanding your public benefit rules, building and maintaining assets, accessing available health care subsidies, and understanding the impact of work among long-term disability. We are going to touch on all of these things, almost all of them, throughout the series this year. So, we hope you'll join us each month over the next several months to learn more information about all of these different areas of financial wellness.
> We at National Disability Institute focus on individuals with disabilities because the poverty rate is incredibly high. For individuals without disabilities, about 12.8% of people lived below the poverty level back when the US Census Bureau to the 2010 American community survey. For individuals with disabilities, the rate was more than two times that, about 27.3%.
> For millions of working age adults with disabilities, a dependence on public benefits for income, health care, food, and housing becomes a trap their requires limiting income to remain eligible. Anyone on the line who currently receives or is working with individuals who receive means tested benefits, like supplemental security income, or Social Security SSI programs, you know that the rules can be quite confusing and can give the message that you really have to limit your income and your savings in order to remain eligible. We, at National Disability Institute, have several programs that we can offer folks to help them better understand these benefit rules, and will have a webinar on Social Security disability insurance, during this webinar series. When we launched the series a few years ago, we did a study to better understand the financial wellness of people with MS across the country. We did this with our partners at MSAA and had some great findings we want to share with you to lunch at today's event. About half of the households who responded are less than 35% annually. 16.4% earned less than 50,000, but more than 35,000 annually. So, you have a large number of the folks who responded to are all receiving earning less than $50,000 a year. When asked about the ability to pay all of their bills in a typical month, 32% reported having a very difficult time paying their bills, and almost 47% reported a somewhat difficult time. Also, 43% of respondents reported that their financial status has affected their ability to access medical care at some point during -- and perhaps in the future, we might see some shift to this with some of the new healthcare rules, but at this time, that is a pretty high percentage of people who need medical care but are having limited access due to their finances.
> We also learned that almost 72% of those who responded do not have enough savings to cover three months expenses. And, 67% reported that their finances were worth -- worsens their MS diagnosis. That is a trend we have seen throughout the few years that we have been doing this webinar , MS financial wellness webinar series, each year with the funding of Acorda Therapeutics. We have connected with a lot of people with MS across the country, and, this is a constant theme that's the challenge that finances presents once earning more money just doesn't become the sole option for maintaining finances.
> And 73% of respondents to the survey reported that they were not aware of or have not use financial stability programs, like the earned income tax credit, individual development accounts, family self-sufficiency programs, and plans to achieve self-support. You are going to learn about these in subsequent webinars, or if you're interested in more information at any point in time, these feel free to e-mail me at .
> Financial wellness is critically important, especially when you have complex medical needs, because it impacts your mental and physical health. It also plays with your self-concept. So the better your financial wellness, the more positive self-concept you will have. It changes status with other community stakeholders. And, can change how much time people are able to spend in the community because of the Gateway cost of participating in community life. And overall, directly impacts a person's quality of life.
> There are many financial wellness strategies that can be used to help support an individual's wellness. We gave you many of them, and for anybody who is having any difficulty reading this slide, I'm going to take a moment to share them with you. They include financial education, budgeting, credit repair, and getting bank. The use of Social Security work incentives and the use of tax incentives, which can be accessed through volunteer income tax assistance, including the earned income tax credit, state Medicaid buy-in programs, which can be critically important, if you're somebody who wants to earn more money, but you need to hold onto Medicaid, buy-in programs can be your answer to that very difficult challenge. Family self-sufficiency programs, individual development accounts, assistive technology loans, student loans, and retirement accounts, post secondary education, employment, self-employment, micro-enterprise and home ownership, and resources that can help you when you run into trouble accessing any of these other strategies. Like protection and advocacy services for people with disabilities, taxpayer advocates, credit counseling services, volunteer income tax assistance, and benefits planning projects. Again, we have information on all of these different strategies available. We are going to talk about several of them over the next few webinars. But if you ever want more information, please feel free to reach out to us at any point in time. It is my great honor today to introduce you to Marlene Ware, the director of financial stability with the National Foundation for Debt Management. She has been a great partner to us here at National Disability Institute, and helped us last year with a small financial coaching pilot, specifically for people with MS, supported by Acorda Therapeutics. She was able to support individuals in identifying their goals, and achieving some of them in a relatively short period of time, as people received one-on-one financial coaching with her. So, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate your time and talent.
> Thank you. I'm happy to be here. This is what I love to do. I don't necessarily always have the answers for every situation, but, my heart is certainly in it. And, I did enjoy, and have ongoing relationships with those folks that I coached a while back, and, I'm coaching another group right now, and in my mind, that is what works. I do an awful lot of work with Habitat for Humanity, and some of the people that I coached with Habitat for Humanity, I'm a coach for three years to get them where they need to be. But, it works. Eventually, it works. Because I have the buy-in, and the books I'm coaching have the by and. And, I'm a credit counselor, so that also helps. I'm a credit counselor and roll up my sleeves everyday, and sit at kitchen tables and look at credit reports and create budgets and applaud successes. And, aside from me, there's an awful lot of really smart folks out there talking about financial wellness. There are folks out there talking about how to diet and lose weight, there's folks out there talking about exercising and smoking plans to stop smoking, anything that we want to do, there is a robust group of really smart experts out there. But, if the experts have the answers, if all of those people that write the books and are on TV, if they have the answers, then why are we not prepared for our financial futures? And, why are we an obese nation? And why are we not the healthiest country in the world? And, I believe it is because the experts can't make us change our behaviors. Nobody can make us do what we are not ready to do. And, that is it, and that is what I have seen over the last nine years, when someone is ready to change a behavior, that may be causing them to not be financially as fit as they would like to be, then it works. I need to lose weight. Okay? I'm just going to throw it out there. I need to lose weight but I really like to snack at night. That's a behavior and I need to change it. I could eat carrots instead of chocolate ice cream every night, but I'm not ready to do that. I have a class reunion coming up, and I will at some point start eating carrots instead of chocolate ice cream, because my behavior needs to change because I'm going to be with a bunch of people that are probably doing the same thing and I want to look as good as they look. So, I will change my behavior. It may be brief, I may not be ready to commit for an entire change, but, I'm in charge of my behavior changes. It has to come from me. And, it's the same with all of you, it's the same with anything that you want to change. It is in your court. You have to make the decision, and I can talk all day and all night, you could read 65 books, you could watch Jim Cramer on TV, but unless there is some word that someone says, or some idea that somebody gives you that Hugo, this is it, I can make this work, then you're not going to do it. You won't buy-in. Next screen.
> Okay, so that's it. I'm not the boss of you. You are the owner of your own financial wellness. I can offer all kinds of suggestions, I can offer ideas that may work, but if you don't own them, that's just it. I'm not going to talk eating chocolate ice cream until it's important for me to stop eating chocolate ice cream. Same with you. If there are things that, and I'm presuming here, that there may be some things that you're doing that you could do better, and that is a presumption on my part, but if there are some things that would make it easier for you to manage your financial wellness, then you will find them. Susie Orman and Jim Cramer and all those folks have really successful careers in their careers were built on giving financial advice. And, they tell us, they've got it all written down, they tell us how to be successful. In their messages, they are very clear on what we need to do. But why, last year in America, where there are over 1 million personal bankruptcies, why do we, right now, have almost 3 1/4 trillion dollars in outstanding debt, and why is the average psycho score 600 and ash the average FICO credit score 646 out of -- if all of these people are making millions of dollars telling us the right way to do things, why is that still happening? And, it may be because the financial techniques offered up by the financial gurus aren't techniques that'll work for you. Dave Ramsey sold all of his belongings and paid off all of his debt, and eventually turned around what was a bad situation for him, and became fabulously wealthy. Okay? I can sell all of my belongings. To pay off my debt and start over. It won't work for me. Some of the things that Dave Ramsey says makes sense to me, and I use them. But, I pick and choose. The things that will work for me. So, it's different strokes for different folks. What works for your neighbor, what works for Dave Ramsey, what works for Susie Orman name not work for you. And, it's okay. You don't have to live up to any standards except for your own. You want to find out what it is that will work for you, and you will be successful. It's not you. You are not the problem. So, next screen, please. You simply keep trying, without pressure, keep trying until you have found a system that is the perfect fit for you. And, it may not be all at once, there may not be an avalanche of information that works perfectly for you and everything goes into the category and you become financially successful. But, here it is. I'm going to talk to you about taking the first steps towards improved financial wellness. Okay? Improved financial wellness. I'm not going to talk to you about getting rid of all of your debt, I'm not going to teach you how to put $10,000 into your emergency savings account, I'm not going to do all of that, and, watch you struggle to pay your monthly bills. That is the 600 pound elephant in the room. That is what all of us in the world of financial education want to accomplish. We want you to have an emergency savings account. We want you to get out of debt. We want all things financial in your life to be perfect. That is our goal for you. So, next screen, please.