> Good afternoon. Welcome, everyone, my name is Michael Morris. And I am the founder and executive director of the National Disability Institute. We appreciate you joining us today for this webinar titled Being Money Smart. This is the first in a six part series. We hope that he will join us for each of these sessions as we work together to share with you increased knowledge and understanding of how to really achieve a better economic future. Today's presentation will bring to you a colleague of mine, Elizabeth Jennings. And we also will have a guest presenter, is it 10, from the FDIC -- Nicola Kelly. And money smart will be the Title of her presentation. She will be followed by Elizabeth Jennings. She will also facilitate a discussion and conversation with a guest that you will hear more about later on in the program.
> Today's webinar -- let me first take you to a few housekeeping items. And turn to Nakia Matthews also from the National Disability Institute.
> Hey, everyone. The audio for today's webinar is being broadcast through your computer. So make sure your speakers are turned on. And turned up. You can control the audio broadcast by the audio broadcast panel, which you can see a photo of here. You can turn the volume up or down and you can pause it if you need t o. If you accidentally close this panel, which is kind of easy to do, you can easily reopen it from the top menu by going to communicate and then join audio broadcast. If you do not have sound capabilities on your computer or you prefer to listen by phone, you can dial the number below and you do not need to enter an attendee I D. In the lower right-hand corner of the screen, there's a media viewer where you have closed captioning available for participants who are deaf, hard of hearing or English as a second language. If you do not want to see this window you can just collapse it by it down. Or you can make it larger by closing down some of the other panels like the chat and the Q&A panel. If you experience any technical difficulties during the webinar, you can send me a direct message in the chat panel. You can send it to Nakia Matthews or directly to the host. It will come to me also. At the end of the webinar, we're going to have a Q&A section where the presenters will enter -- answer any questions. You can use the chat box to send your questions directly to Elizabeth Jennings. She will field your questions. Or you can use the Q&A box. If you are just listening by phone or you have trouble with the chat or Q&A box, you can send me your questions directly to Elizabeth Jennings at . And just a note that this webinar is being recorded. And all of the materials in the courting -- in the recording will be placed on our website within 24 hours.
> Thank you, Nakia. Let me first -- before we get going, provide an absolute wonderful thank you to our sponsor, Acorda Therapeutics. We began this relationship last year with our first webinar series. I hope some of you joined us. Acorda has really helped us with really thinking through the opportunity to present to you about financial wellness and to bring together this 6-part series. Let's talk a little bit about financial wellness. Today we're going to help you understand what does it mean and particularly, what does it mean for individuals with MS and the MS community? And we are going to share with you in this in each of the webinars that will be coming up in the next couple of weeks strategies to improve one's financial wellness. So what does it mean when we use the term financial wellness?
> We defined financial wellness as the state of your personal finances and really, it's a part of a process of gaining knowledge,s of gaining knowledge, gaining information, gaining understanding and working together towards more positive financial behaviors that will help limit stress in your life and limit stress related to managing money, keeping a budget, and really planning for a better economic future. When we talk about financial wellness, we are really talking about multiple parts of a strategy. For many of you, financial wellness may include just basics around planning a budget and sticking within a budget. For others, we are going to help you understand and learn more about utilizing favorable tax provisions. Some of which you may be aware of, some of which you may never have heard of. They could definitely impact your opportunity for a better economic future. We're also going to be talking about accessing affordable financial services. There are choices out there, in each community across the country, and we want you to understand more about the choices you have to make. We'll also be talking about becoming more financially literate. And financial literacy encompasses more than just thinking about and preparing and managing your money. Financial literacy also includes understanding more about credit and managing credit. It has to do with multiple strategies to help you improve your sophistication, your understanding, your skills in building a better economic future. We're also going to be talking about accessing available healthcare subsidies, building and maintaining assets, understanding public benefits, and many of you may be at this point on Social Security benefits. And understanding work and long-term disability options. All of these are pieces of a puzzle that will be a part of this and the future webinars.
> You may be aware -- and each of us find ourselves in a different position at this point in our l ives, but I want you to understand that nationally, for people between the ages of 18 and 64, for people without disabilities, about 12.8% had incomes below the poverty level over the past 12 months. For individuals with disabilities, that rate of having income below the poverty level is more than double that to 27.3%. You we know that no group in America -- we know that no group in America is more in need of and more deserving than people with disabilities. The National Disability Institute, which I helped start some seven years ago, is really singularly focused on working with people with disabilities across the spectrum of disabilities and their families all across the country to understand and really build an effective set of strategies customized to your own situation to advance your own economic self-sufficiency to become more financially independent. We will sell you know products. Our goal is simply to help you understand what we've learned a lot about over the last seven years. Strategies, tools that can help you and pathways to a better economic future. For millions of working age adults with disabilities, a dependence on public benefits for income, for healthcare, for food and housing becomes a trap that often requires you to stay poor to stay eligible for those public benefits. Why is financial wellness important to you and too many people that you know? Well, the recent -- research shows us that financial wellness will impact your mental and physical health. It will positively impact self-concept. This will also change your status with other community stakeholders, with people you interact with. And overall, it will directly impact the quality of your life. What does it mean in terms of financial wellness and MS? We were able to conduct last year, a survey with the MSAA and NDI together. That survey resulted in survey responses from over 3000 people dealing with MS nationwide. And here's some of the things that we learned: of those 3000 people, 55.1% of the households were now earning less than $35,000 annually. 16.4% were earning less than $50,000, but more than $35,000 annually. You may well be a person in that situation. Too, we learned when asked about the ability to pay all the -- pay all their bills in a typical month, 32% indicated they were having a very difficult time paying bills in a typical month and 46.9%, almost 50%, 1 in 2 reported a somewhat difficult time. 43% of respondents reported that their financial status had affected their ability to access medical care at some point. We learned some other things as well. And that's 71%, almost three out of four respondents, do not have enough savings now to cover three months of expenses. And that is 67.1% -- reported that their finances were worse now since there MS diagnosis. We also worked -- we were interested in learning whether you were aware of different tools and strategies that we've been working with people in the disability community nationwide -- these strategies and tools will help you stabilize your financial position and really sink towards a pathway towards greater economic self-sufficiency. So we ask, were people aware of the earned income tax credit? Were people aware of IDA's, individual development accounts? Were people aware of family self-sufficiency program? And were people aware of something called PAS has, which we will be talking about in subsequent webinars, which is -- PAS as, a Social Security work incentive to help peopleeople achieve greater self efficiency -- PASS. Almost three in for individuals in the MS community who returned this survey, almost three in four indicated that they were not aware and had not used any one of these financial stability programs. So this gave us further motivation and gave us further interest in bringing together this webinar series. What we do know and what we'll be sharing with you is that there are multiple pathways. There are multiple tools, there are multiple strategies that we want to share with you. On the next slide, what you have are pieces of the puzzle that we're going to help you put together.
> For those of you who may be on Medicaid, as your access to healthcare, you may not be familiar with Medicaid buy-in programs, which exist in over 35 states nationwide. You may not be aware of Social Security Work Incentives for those of you who may be receiving SSI, or SSDI benefits. You may not be fully using a variety of tax incentives, deductions and credits which could help you. And you may not be aware that instead of going to paid preparers to do your tax returns, there's a nationwide network of volunteers as part of a vital program, which we have worked on with the IRS, that can help you. And there will be no charge to prepare your taxes and you may in fact get your refunds even more rapidly. We'll be talking about financial literacy, about credit repair, we'll be talking about -- for those of you who may not be affiliated with a bank or credit union, the importance of starting and maintaining that relationship. We'll be talking about -- for some of you, the importance of a family self-sufficiency program, which is something offered through state and local housing authorities. We'll be talking about individual development accounts, which is a matched savings opportunity that may be available to you in your community and in your state. We'll be talking about ways to return to the workforce if you are out of the workforce. And opportunities around self-employment, micro-enterprise. And other opportunities to help you with post secondary education as well as home ownership. We'll share with you some resources that exist in every state in the country to help you with credit counseling, taxpayer advocacy office, to help you with tax questions that you have, protection and advocacy offices that exist in every state to help you with questions may be related to Social Security benefits, maybe other issues. And we'll also tell you about places you can go and opportunities that exist around work incentive planning.
> The first step in financial education really is for you to increase your financial educationas something that will get you on the road to thinking about financial stability and financial security. Financial literacy can empower you to take charge of your life and improve your financial wellness. You need to know that in one study that was done, 42% -- almost one in two Americans -- with and without disabilities, gave himself a grade of a C, D, or F, a failing grade in terms of how comfortable they were in understanding and effectively managing their personal finances. We're going to turn next after this brief introduction of mine to really get into a first opportunity that I think can be very helpful to you. I'm going to turn to Elizabeth Jennings to share with you an introduction to our guest speaker, zig 10, community affairs specialist with the FDIC. I want you to know -- Nicola As you listen to Nicola's presentation, as we said, there's going to be an opportunity for questions after the presentation and a second presenter has the opportunity with Elizabeth to talk to you, so maybe take some notes, write some things down. There will be a question and answer period, but I also want you to know as you are listening to this first webinar, that you are one of hundreds of people across the country who registered today for this first of the six part series. That's an exciting, exciting total number of people. And what we hope is between these sessions, you can really practice your skills and practice with what the information we are sharing with you, this new knowledge and think about what can I change in my own life? What can I do differently today? Next week? How can I plan for a better economic future? That's what this webinar series is about. Again, I want to thank Acorda Therapeutics for being our sponsor and helping make this possible. Elizabeth, let me turn it over to you.
> Thank you, Michael. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you so much for joining us today. We feel very privileged to have with us Nicola Kelly from FDIC. That's the FDIC. FDIC and NDI have been partners for several years now. And we partner with them because they offer a program called Money Smart. We're going to talk about money smart a little bit later in today's webinar. And we're going to have with us a speaker who participated last year in the webinar. And after the webinar, went ahead and completed the money spark curriculum. So she will be able to share her personal story with you. We feel very privileged to have Nicola with us today because in addition to the money smart financial education curriculum, money smart offered other opportunities through FDIC to help you improve your financial w ellness. So thank you so much for being with us today, Nicola.
> Thank you very much, Elizabeth. Thank you, Michael and Nakia, thank you also. I actually feel very honored to be a presenter with you all today. And I thank you for having me. Again, my name is Nicola with the FDIC. I've been with the FDIC for about a year and half now. For those of you who may not be aware, the FDIC is an independent agency of the US government. We are created to provide insurance reduction for depositors and banks and savings associations throughout the United States.
> As Elizabeth mentioned, the money smart curriculum -- we are very known for that. It's coming up on its 11-year anniversary -- matter of fact, this month makes 11 years for money smart. And what money smart is, briefly -- because you will hear about it later, a financial education curriculum that was created for those that are un- banked and under banked. And it's available online, it's available by CD, and it's available by attending classes throughout the various communities. So please feel free to go to the FDIC website to find out more about the curriculum. What I'd like to do for the first few slides of my presentation is to give you an overall understanding of the different parts of banking. For this screen, we, the FDIC, we protect these various deposit accounts. Not all products which you can get under a bank [Indiscernible] FDIC insured. Some banks sell non-deposit investment products, such as mutual funds, annuities and stocks. The FDIC does not ensure these products. Keep the following tips in mind to protect your money. Before investing in non-but -- have enough emergency money in savings or readily accessible accounts to support you and your family. Understand [Indiscernible] in trying to make ends meet. -- make ends meet. Having six-month may not be as easy as expected or understanding. So never invest in a product you don't understand. And be sure you have enough information before making an investment. That's just to give you an idea. So we insure checking accounts, savings accounts, money market and CDs. Here are two fees to avoid. Both are due to not having enough money in your account. The overdraft fee as you can see, we are encouraging -- it's when you spend more money than you have in your account. Nonsufficient funds. Which can occur when you write a check and because of insufficient funds in the account, it comes back.
> In 2010, the federal [Indiscernible] certain protections for bank customers when their deposit accounts are overdrawn. Customers must choose to opt into a bank's overdraft program. By choosing to opt in, what this means is that the bank can charge you a fee to process the point-of-sale or ATM transactions that exceed your account balance. This is called the opt in rule. If you do not opt in, the bank will decline your ATM withdrawals and debit card transactions at your point-of-sale terminal. If you do not have enough money in your account to cover with the withdrawal purchase. If you do opt in, expect the bank to charge a sizable fee for covering the transaction. Then overdraft and cost of fees will be deducted immediately in full from next deposit. Including payroll deposits, government benefit deposits and other direct deposit on which you may depend. These deductions will lower your account balance once again and may increase the risk of more overdraft and costly fees.