 of things that we really want to do with this next panel is we've been talking a lot about sort of big macro issues. And in some ways, I sat in the back of the room and felt as though we were talking about issues and they seemed very, very big. And what I want to try to do with this panel is start to take it down a little bit. And then I start to talk about what does this all really mean for individuals and their day-to-day lives? And what does it mean? And how are millennials actually adapting to this new environment and succeeding in the new environment? And that's a lot of the focus is on today, but also to try to talk a little bit about, what does the future bring? Where does this go? And so we're going to really loop this in looking at financial health and stability. The title of the panel actually talked about the future of building wealth. And I guess one of my takeaways from this morning's conversation is I'm not sure that even those words, even the right words for a millennial audience. And I'm not sure wealth actually is the right description for what we want to talk about. So maybe one of the things we'll do is just think about this. And when we get to the Q&A part, I'd love to hear people's kind of just even op-eds on this issue of even the idea and the notion of wealth building. I am joined today by four colleagues. You can please look at their bios. Each one of them has deep expertise in this area. Rilke Bryan, who's currently at Harvard University. Tim Chen, the CEO of Murdoch. Rohit Chopra from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And Jennifer Tesher, who's the CEO of the Center for Financial Services Innovation. So let me, let's start off by asking each of you to share some quick reflections on the financial challenges and opportunities that are facing millennials as they try to achieve economic success today and for tomorrow. Let's start work. Great, thanks so much, Brandon. We're excited to be on this panel. We're excited to engage in this conversation. So I wanna keep these opening thoughts brief. As a millennial, I just wanted to start by, I was doing some reflecting on what might make millennials think differently about wealth and financial management. And as we've heard echoed several times this morning that we're a generation that in coming years was defined as times of booms and busts. So the 90s when we were, you know, many of us were quite young, you know, it was a story where everyone was getting rich. The dot-com era, you know, everyone was, you know, broadly anyone who was invested in the market was making real gains. And then we saw that collapse. And you know, that was really, for me, it was when I was in high school, the dot-com collapse. It wasn't just the dot-com, I as a pretty nerdy fourth grader, 100 dollars worth of stock in baseball cards, which also collapsed around the year 2000. So when we're talking about, you know, following that with then in your late teens and 20s, watching the housing prices go up, and then again collapse, when we hear this idea that millennials are a bit more conservative and we're a risk averse, I think we all kind of see where that might be coming from. I think the second thing that also defines this generation in many ways is its relationship with technology as we both talked about, but how that's reshaping the way we interact with finances. And I think that we're an interesting bridge generation in that, you know, I still remember watching my parents, you know, writing a check at the grocery store, but yet I have never actually sat down and balanced a checkbook. So my experience, you know, in the 90s with ATMs and the debit card, and now today, you know, I don't have a kind of a personal relationship with financial institutions, with bankers. And so I think the way that we deal with our money, we think about our money is in some ways more fragmented and depersonalized, but I'm sure as we're gonna hear from folks on this panel, I think a lot more opportunity and power and potential there for how we reconceptualize how we manage our money. I did want to just take a few thoughts, do a few minutes to throw out some ideas when we're thinking about policy, and we're thinking about how can we actually move the needle here and actually help this generation build wealth from which we heard this morning that the monos are a bit far behind on this measure. If we're talking about wealth and public policy, I think the first thing we have to do is actually think about a suite of policies that makes wealth less important. So we know that we've heard that for many reasons, there's always gonna be tremendous wealth inequality, and we can all try to think about ways to kind of compress that distribution and make sure everyone has a piece of the pie. But we also wanna be thinking of those policies that make sure that you can afford higher education, that you can live and potentially live in your own home, and you can have a secure retirement even if you don't have massive amounts of wealth. And so there's a whole suite of policies we need to think of that are important for actually weakening the link between wealth and life chances. But we know that wealth is gonna be deterministic, so when thinking through how do we build wealth? First, for a panel that has the word wealth in the title, I'm gonna take a page out of Ray's playbook and talk about, we also really need to talk about debt. We need to have a balance sheet perspective. And when a lot of the policies that we have out there, some of which are great, some of which could be improved, that are designed towards building wealth or about savings and investment. But there's not as many policies targeted towards actually helping people and incentivizing people to pay down debt, to do so responsibly, and importantly giving people access to high quality debt products. We all need debt to help manage our finances in the short run and the long run. And so that needs to be part of our conversation when we're talking about building wealth from a global perspective. Second, I think for this generation, flexibility is really important. For a group that was really stunted in their labor market development because of the Great Recession, cars for increasing participation in retirement plans or increasing the amount of money you put in those plans are really not being heard because that's just not the timeline that people are thinking of. Right now it's, how do I manage day to day? How do I start to get that initial cushion that I need? So when we're talking about opportunities and policy levers for building savings, we have to find ways to meet people where they are. And the millennials are still focused on more of a short term, how do I kind of give myself that buffer that I need to actually have some financial stability that will then allow me to look further ahead? And so I think the degree to which we can take, the big policies of retirement and expand them to more kind of flexible dynamic measures would be really great. And the last thing I would say when it comes to policy is that we need to meet millennials and we need to do with every generation where their priorities are and where their proclivities are. And so this means things like if we're seeing this increased taste for moving back to the cities, for having an urban lifestyle and yet we want them to promote home ownership, maybe we need to think of nontraditional ways to do that. So things like shared equity or sweat equity, other pathways to home ownership that allow people to live the life they want, the American dream they want but not on this kind of standard 30-year mortgage 20% down that worked for a previous generation. We've also heard things like making sure the tax curve is reflective of the way millennials are actually forming households on a range of measures, including this rise in co-habitation, which will be interesting to see if that continues to be a trend. And then for this risk-averse group, what are other ways to engage people, to get them saving and to get them to kind of have this long-term perspective? So I think that they might not be the group that's constantly investing and following the stock market. There are other really smart innovations like prize and savings that I think might be one way to engage people and smartly incentivize the development of new savings. So I'll leave it there. I just want to say that a week ago when we spoke, you actually said you weren't sure what you were going to say. You did a really good job. The job is after. I was only a little bit of this a few days ago. Okay, Tim, why don't you tell us a little bit about your take on the issue and actually why don't you start with us. I think the most interesting thing I've heard today is nerd wallet. What is nerd wallet? Okay, sure, ready. So nerd wallet is a website that puts knowledge in your wallet. So I really created nerd wallet to address a big problem I saw. A lot of friends and family were having a lot of problems with decision-making. So it could be any sort of question out there, like what is a great rate on my mortgage to what do I do about my stock options? There's not quite democratized access to great answers on these problems. Sometimes one specialized financial advisor out there is really the guy you need to talk to to figure out what to do. Sometimes there's a huge billion dollar plus advertising budget that you're fighting against from Samuel L. Jackson pitching the Quicksilver card. That kind of makes it very unclear what the best decision out there is. So we created a nerd wallet to really fight some of these structural issues. And yeah, I guess there's two big things I wanna talk about today or talk through. One is decision-making. I don't think financial literacy is possible. The more I learn about this industry and the more opigness that I dig through, the more I realize that there are just infinite numbers of industries that exist around obfuscating certain pricing, information, et cetera. And there's not really a way to break through that unless something structurally changes. It's extremely difficult to help the masses of millennials out there understand the benefits of even signing up for subsidized healthcare, for example. And so there's the second big issue, which is distribution. The biggest challenge we face as a business is just to make people aware that we exist. And I think the same, even with the best policies out there, the same challenges really will happen there. So I think it's about decision-making and distribution. Hi, everybody. My name is Ro Witt. I work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And I wanted to talk a little bit about some reflections about what is it like and where are we, particularly with millennials in the seven years since the onset of the financial crisis. So September of 2008, excuse me, six years. September of 2008, we really see a massive change, not just in the financial markets, but that ultimately trickled throughout multiple sectors of the economy. And I think one thing we haven't really talked about enough is that the rising levels of student debt in America is really one of the aftershocks of that financial crisis. So many families lost home equity. They lost value in their retirement plan. They frankly just lost a lot of savings because many people were unemployed. State governments caught support to higher education and all of these forces coming together led to a lot more student debt. And if we look at the wage numbers, it's even a worse picture. We see that of course you're gonna make so much more money over the course of your life if you have a college degree, nobody disputes that. But actually the difference between college graduates and non-college graduates, that college wage premium, it's only growing because non-college graduates' wages are in free fall. Actually for college graduates, the starting wage has not grown when adjusted for inflation since about 2001. So the combination of basically flatter declining wages with a lot more debt may actually have a domino effect on the rest of the economy. The fact that people are more likely to live with roommates or live at home, that may not be a cultural phenomenon. That actually might be a very realistic economic reality for millions of people. We see the home ownership rate numbers. We see participation in employer sponsored retirement plans. But there's a legitimate question there. Should I pay down my debt? Should I save for retirement? Should I save for a down payment? These are hard questions with a smaller pot of money to pay for it all. And what I think is a bigger problem for the financial system more broadly is persistent distrust by young people, particularly at large financial institutions. Many people who are millennials saw their parents foreclosed upon while they were in college or just afterward. Often these foreclosures may have been illegal. They find their own issues with their student debt. And today actually the CFPB released a report describing all of the complaints and data in the private student loan market, which was essentially a market that boomed like the subprime mortgage market in the years leading up to the crisis. And now they're having a tough time negotiating terms on those loans, leading to more and more and more defaults, which ruins credit reports and makes the whole cycle even more vicious. So I think you're right, it is structural. Part of it is getting financial institutions to follow the law. And the other part is really thinking about how do we prevent all of this student loan debt from infecting other sectors of the economy. It's not gonna be an immediate crisis. It could be a slow drag. Less people wanting to start a small business. Less people wanting to save enough for retirement. And it's something we've gotta address with multiple policy tools. And it's not just gonna be solved like you said with financial literacy. If people don't have enough money to pay that debt, it's not gonna help them to educate them to pay it on time. So we have a lot we have to work on and there's a lot going on, but I think we need to really redouble our efforts to understand what's happening at a granular level with young people rather than just talking about it in averages and platitudes. Thank you, great. Good afternoon everybody. I'm gonna take Brandy up on her initial question about the overall framing for this panel. And I would agree that if I had been naming this panel, I don't think I would have named it wealth because attitudes are dramatically shifting in this country. Not just millennials attitudes, but Americans in general. When you ask Americans how they define success, today they are far more likely to define success as being about health than they are about wealth. The vast majority of Americans actually would say that and they would define health in a variety of ways. They talk about physical health, certainly, but they also talk about knowing how to spend well being financially healthy. And this isn't just a trend post-recession. It's a little bit like the comment that was made earlier that the recession in a way just laid bare instead of structural challenges in the economy. This is a 20 year trend that we've been watching over the course of time and I think the rise of millennials is in no small part contributing to this shift in attitudes. So before we can really focus on wealth building, we've got to think about health building. And as you've heard today, the financial health of millennials is precarious. They lack a cushion to weather ups and downs. They're more likely than any other generation to have underwater mortgages. They're drowning in student debt as you've just heard and they're averse to credit, which in many ways could be a very good thing, but it may turn out to be a bad thing because it may reduce their future prospects for credit when they really need it. They're more likely to use a range of financial providers, apps, tools in order to manage their day-to-day financial lives and while this a la carte approach can be beneficial, it also makes it more challenging to weave together the strands of one's financial life into a coherent quilt. Gone are the days of 30 years ago when your grandmother or mother, actually back then it would have been your grandfather or father, would have walked into the local bank and would have had a relationship with the person behind the desk and would have really lived the vast majority of their financial life through that institution. Those days are long gone. They're not coming back and the real question is what's going to replace it in a way that's going to enable millennials and the rest of the country frankly to sort of get their financial houses in order. So I see a tremendous number of challenges but I'm also buoyed by a lot of opportunities. The fact is the rise of millennials coincides with unbelievable changes and disruption in the financial services sector and that means that they're really paying attention. The private sector is very much paying attention to all of you and they can't help but not pay attention to you because you're enormous as a generation, you are their customers of the future and they have to figure out how to serve you. So this is a really powerful moment to be influencing the practices and business models of the private sector in a way that's going to work for this generation. Now money for millennials is nearly completely digital. About 88% of millennials do their banking online and half use their smartphone to bank and while smartphone usage and online banking is increasing for everybody it's certainly heaviest among millennials. But it also means that your expectations are different about how you want to engage and it also means that you are not that excited about sort of the biggest and most traditionally trusted to your point financial services companies. Of the 10 most hated brands by millennials in any category all four of the biggest banks are in that bottom 10. I'm sorry. Thank you. I'm sorry to share that with you. Sorry. And that leads about three fourths of millennials to be more excited about a new offering in financial services from Google, Amazon, Apple, PayPal or Square than from a traditional bank. Now on the one hand this makes them far less costly to serve. It also makes money social and communal. In fact, I think one of the most positive aspects of this is I think that the taboo around talking about money and talking about one's finances are gonna very quickly fall away. That wasn't something your grandparents talked about with other people or even my parents necessarily but the willingness of millennials and interest in sharing all kinds of personal information and details and really using one's social network as a support and a way to get advice is incredibly powerful and I think holds real opportunity in this arena. I also think the notion that money is communal is something that we're learning from our financial diaries work which Citi and the Ford Foundation and any of your network have been supporting. And if you think about it, financial services is a very individual activity today. Maybe you own an account with a spouse or your mortgage is possible with a spouse but most products are individually owned but money doesn't work that way. Particularly for millennials and so for a generation who's really wary of credit and very in many cases thinking about entrepreneurship, Kickstarter makes a lot more sense than leveraging your credit card for instance. So what else might we do to create these kinds of opportunities that aren't gonna drag millennials further down by being more mired and dead? I think the last thing I'll say is home ownership is important from a macroeconomic perspective but I think we've gotta start with where people are and that's just not where people are right now. And so I really like what was said earlier by Rourke about thinking about policies that make wealth less important and thinking differently about paths to home ownership or ownership in general of a place you might live whether that's a home or something else. You know what I wanna close on this idea that from a policy perspective I think it would be really powerful to think about what might the government's role be if we thought that the goal was advancing financial health? What would it be? Today we think about the government's role as helping to build wealth. So we see tax credits. We see the government incentivizing a variety of behaviors around wealth building but what if the government was actively involved in helping people promote financial health? Think about it in the public health arena. The government has an active role and responsibility to help promote public health. You see leather grids on the doors of restaurants in terms of their health and cleanliness. What if that were the case with banks and financial services providers? That actually might be very helpful to someone like Nerd Wallet. So I just think that that's a really interesting frame for thinking about what future policy solutions might look like in this arena. Great. So let me actually pick up on this issue of trust. Because I think that it's one of the characteristics of the millennial generation is, and I think it's both a strength and a challenge, is the questioning and the redefining of the role institutions play in our lives. And I think that while I agree with you, Jennifer, that the socialization of money that we talk more freely about these issues, I think there's still a lot of distrust of the institutions that are engaged. And so let me just sort of open it up to the panel and ask your questions. And you started us off a little bit, Tim, when you said the answer is not financial education. One of the ways you gain trust with people is if they feel safe. So what is it if there were things that you could suggest that would drive more sort of people feeling more safety, which then has an impact on trust? And these could either be recommendations related to the private sector or the public sector. Let's start there. Okay, sure. Maybe I'll touch on two pretty interesting examples from the private sector. So most of the people in Erdogan's office buy things off Amazon now. People trust that the reviews are pretty comprehensive and that the prices are within reason and that fulfillment will happen. If you rewind to 10 years ago, there was kind of a disaggregated huge set of people selling things online and that trust wasn't there. And I guess I think consumers have kind of a sixth sense around when they're being sold, when their information is not comprehensive and when something's just not quite right. And then they quickly build up the trust after some positive interactions. I think that's a bit lacking in financial services today. I mean, you see billion dollar plus advertising budgets from Geico, Allstate, Capital One, Bake of America. City. I don't know about city, right? And so, I mean, if you go into a travel agency in the 90s and you sit across the desk from someone with a computer monitor turned the other way in a brochure with like three options in it and you don't really know how the other person's being paid or compensated, you feel like something is off. And I feel like relationship banking today, I mean, still accounts for one third of credit card originations based on our survey data. Direct mail is another third. And I think consumers sense that something is a little off. So I don't know if this is something that CFPB could play a role in or some private enterprise like Amazon. Can I, I wanna ask you a question, Tim, because I think this idea of online marketplaces to help people sort and make sense of financial products and help make an informed decision about what might be best for them, have a really, there's a real potential for them. I'm excited about them. But in the same way that there's a perceived conflict of interest with who, how's the person sitting across the desk for me at a financial institution compensated, I think that we have the same potential problem with online marketplaces. It'd be interesting to hear a little bit more about your own business model and how your customers know that the products that you might be featuring in your lists aren't there because they're not, being top of the list isn't open to the highest bidder on the backend for you. Yeah, I think there's, this is absolutely a huge trend in internet. So you see the kind of web 1.0, 2.0 companies out there, very short term focused, trying to maximize their revenue per page view by basically auctioning off every spot on the page. One example of this was Yahoo Search with their overture acquisition. It's not that their technology was bad, but you could sense that something was kind of wrong when you started clicking on search results and you started getting weird things coming out the other side. Google moved all their ads up to the top and down the side and clearly demarcated that the things in the middle were to be trusted. And I think consumers either consciously or unconsciously realized this and started trusting them. The same with Amazon. Amazon, the way they lay out their page is highly suboptimal for short term revenue. But in the long run, it was great for lifetime customer value because people started coming back over and over again. So I think it's kind of a short term versus long term focus that defines the internet companies that are really broken through like say Yelp. Well, there's still questions about Yelp, but a lot of other verticals out there. I think that this same trend that was so broadly applicable about, I think of the sort of prerequisites of trust and financial services being accountability and transparency. So I think there's a general trend toward greater transparency of all types of institutions, whether they be government, corporations, whomever, and people are accustomed to knowing key data, key information, or just the fact that they disclose it does elevate people's levels of trust. And I hate to go back to the mortgage meltdown and the illegal foreclosures, but what I think people were learned in some ways was that the person who gave them the mortgage, they thought, why would they give this to me if I couldn't pay it back? And they didn't know that there was a global financial system that was securitizing those mortgages. It's not a natural thing to know. But all of a sudden they are starting to be more suspicious about it. And then when they see that they've somehow been harmed and there's no accountability by the institution who harmed them, that really undermines the trust. And I think that's really where we have problems. If we do not have a law abiding financial services industry that is clear, upfront, and transparent, we will not be able to rebuild that trust. I think we're starting to do it with mortgages. We're starting in other places as well. But that's why you're gonna see a lot of technology companies have a huge edge in offering financial products compared to other financial institutions because the modus operandi of transparency and accountability is just completely different. So, Mark, I wanna ask you a question about savings. So, one of the things we talked a lot about today so far, and I'm gonna come back to the issue of debt and student debt because it's so incredibly prevalent and I think it's a very interesting idea that was raised also which is how do you balance your use of debt? But the balance is also with both your consumption and your savings. I think rather than make assumptions when we use this word wealth, we sort of maybe have this notion that we're talking about these complicated savings vehicles, long-term savings. Can you talk a little bit about the ways that you see this generation actually being able to create that financial safety net for themselves and through savings and then some ideas that are actually on the table from a policy standpoint and any of the panelists can join in on the policy agenda related to increasing savings. Sure, yeah, I mean, going back to kind of my opening remarks, I think that to get people to actually kind of pay attention and be able to kind of be brought along to the notion that savings is not only something good and aspirational that you should do with something you actually can do, it's you have to make it accessible and flexible. And I think that's where, as we see kind of the boomers are freaking out about retirement and that's kind of taking over kind of the master narrative, there's this millennial generation that says wow, retirement is not only so far from where my head is right now, I don't even think I'm going to retire, the nature of work is changing. I think there's a lot of hand waving of, I hope that's going to figure itself out, I'm trying to figure out myself right now. And so that's where I think kind of demonstrating to people that savings isn't something about, you know, stocking away money for a very long time. It can be something that is not only kind of a month to month buffer, but even kind of this day to day smoothing of income. And I think that's where the savings conversation gets lost is that we always think that it has to be, it's something to do with putting money aside for some future, be it to fund an emergency or to buy a call or down payment or to kind of these big lofty goals. But really savings is a very fundamental part of kind of your day to day money management. And I think that's part of what's being missed. And that's what I think a lot of these new financial technology companies are really kind of springing up around and trying to give people tools for ways to sequester their money, allocate their money, do mental accounting, all these other kind of brands we're using, which is just really getting people into the habit of savings and trying to have that kind of foresight to think a little bit ahead of, oh I have a builder at the end of the month but my paycheck doesn't come to two days later, how do I kind of manage my money in that short term? And then if there's a way that we can piggyback off of on that mentality and try to get people to say, okay, well at the same time is there a way that you can pay yourself first or you can give yourself a little bit of a cushion. And that's something you can get people into this idea of the savings habit and then you can start to move towards these longer term goals. So I think a lot of the policies that are out there right now as we've talked to you to focus on retirement and home ownership and we could be thinking of ways to bring these tax credits, make them refundable and actually allow you to match money that you put into much more flexible savings products. And I'd even be for a traditional savings account or a savings bond or something that is truly flexible, not just thinking about some of these retirement products that you can potentially tap in an emergency. And I would just add that I agree with that, but if we're gonna go that direction, we have to redefine what success looks like because success can't be, oh no, six months later the money that was saved isn't there anymore. Well the question is what did it enable the person to do that they wouldn't have been able to do or maybe they were gonna use a worse option as a result and we're just not there yet in that thinking. Even folks who've sort of embraced this idea of we need to think shorter term still are measuring savings in kind of an old school way and it's not gonna help us advance our policy goals. Absolutely. So Tim, you actually work with consumers directly. What are some things that you see, some of the financial behaviors that you see among millennials? So it's interesting, our traffic is disproportionately, our traffic is disproportionately millennial and it kind of is reflective of, I think a certain type of behavior where millennials are more likely to proactively seek answers online. I think if you survey a broad population, people disproportionately ask Uncle Bob for solutions. Uncle Bob doesn't always know the best answer and so that's pretty interesting. I do want to kind of touch on the last point as well which is, I mean you may think of savings is also a series of making great decisions at very pivotal points in your life and technology enabling the distribution to do that. So for example, choosing a college major may have a much bigger impact on you than deciding not to drink a Starbucks and so the question is can we provide transparency along the way at various pivotal points in time? I think technology might be able to enable that. So let me ask about technology. Anything you see in the marketplace, excluding node wallet, any of you, that's really, you think a game changer. What do you think is gonna change the relationship the millennials have to money or help build this trust? So just to jump on the social point, I find that the social integration or the integration of money into social media and the dialogue with the sparking is I think the most exciting and I know one of those companies but the ones out there that are really kind of making savings kind of a joint venture. So say you and your fiance want to save for the wedding and then you can kind of go back and forth and there are challenges and you can challenge each other to be saving over these new ways to transfer money between friends where we actually are tagging with the monies forward and that everyone's seeing on Facebook that $100 was someone you owed for that fun time in Atlantic City. Like that makes the money cool all of a sudden. And I think that these kind of ways to integrate money into our kind of already existing kind of social media conversations I think are really exciting. If anything, they're just opening the beginning of the dialogue, but I really hope we'll make this generation different than the ones before it. So I'll give the panel the test I was warning them about earlier. So how many of you on this panel use Venmo? That was a... No? No, Tim? I've heard of it. You're messing me up here, right? How many of the audience? Venmo users? Yeah. So Venmo is a P2P, a person-to-person payments tool and a friend and colleague of mine wrote a blog recently where he was talking about what he called Venmo Line, that this is a way to draw a generational distinction, because if you're under 30, you're probably using this tool, you've heard of it. It's very popular, it's a great way to split the bill or do a variety of other things in a very social way, tag it, and if you're over 30, you're like, what is that and why would anyone do that? And there is, I'm sure it's some accent from Brandy and I are sort of bookending this panel up here, a little bit arranged by age for better or for worse. So I do think that one way to think about Brandy's question is to think about what millennials expect. And I think they expect a few things. They expect one-click convenience, right? So to use the Amazon example, I can go on in 30 seconds and have bought a book, literally. I can, and so why can't I do that with my money? There's more interest in function than form. So I don't really care if it's a checking account or a savings account or a CDD or what is it? I just care about the things I need to be able to accomplish. It's why simple has been so popular with this idea of safe to spend balance. So instead of just saying, well, here's how much money you kind of have, but this check didn't clear yet and making it very complicated, they do all that work for you and say, based on how much money you have and how much money you've told us to set aside for bills you have over the next 30 days and any other goals you have, here's how much you actually have left that's truly safe to spend. They've essentially taken the guesswork out of it and optimized for you your cash flow. So I'm particularly interested in solutions that enable that optimization. Low-income consumers, whether they're millennials or anybody else, are extremely challenged with managing their liquidity, whether it's because of income volatility or mistiming or other kinds of things and the technology that doesn't, it shouldn't be that hard, right? We should be able to solve for that. I think the other thing that we've talked about here and it writes a little bit to trust is this idea, this expectation around individual control. I want to control it, not the institution controlling it for me. And so when I think about that, I think a lot about cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, how many of you own Bitcoin or have transacted any Bitcoin? Who actually understands how Bitcoin works? Yeah, right. Excellent, good. So I'm with you, I don't think it makes any sense that we should be able to get Bitcoin out of the ATM or we can go buy a latte with a Bitcoin who cares. But the more interesting thing about Bitcoin is that it lacks centralized control and by doing so, it is imminently scalable and extraordinarily inexpensive way to move money and frankly other kinds of important objects or documents where you want to make sure that it only gets transferred one time and one time only. So I think that has enormous potential and could dramatically change the way in which we all engage with our money. So I think there's a lot of excitement but I want to be careful because I don't think technology is the solution to all of our problems. I think technology is a tool but the fundamental issues of financial health that we're talking about here, technology really is only a tool, I don't think it's the answer. So I'm gonna open it up to some questions and actually have a request. I would be very curious if there was a millennial in the audience that would be willing to actually share. So to their viewpoint, I want to kind of think about their ability to plan financially for the future because I think that one of the things we're hearing is that you're living, you have a very different set of experiences and the ability to be able to adapt to changes in a job, to income volatility, to a very, a population group that moves often, that does not stay in one place where family structures are changing and choices about how to build, to either have a financial relationship with someone or not. And I'd be curious just to hear kind of the outlook and your viewpoint. Unless the other side is, people can ask other questions. And so to your experience. Let's get you a mic. Let's get you a mic. I don't want to offer my experience but I just have a question regarding all of these issues. How do we apply those to millennials who are of the lowest income levels? People who are simply trying to survive and who are learning those survival techniques from past generations. All of this makes sense. But how do you capture those that are really on the fringe and how do we bring them to a point where financial literacy is important but so is day to day survival? So I would just share that I think we should make it clear that those on the lowest end of the scale are in no way fringe. It is very mainstream to be living paycheck to paycheck as a young person. So yes, it's very important to talk about long-term wealth building but I think in terms of survival we do have some real issues about how people can just stay afloat on whether it be, it's not really credit card debt. That was more a Gen X issue but really the big liability is paying rent and paying student loans. Interesting less so auto loans of millennials. And I think what you're finding is that people sometimes are searching for help often with and we oversee a lot of student loan companies, servicers, debt collectors and don't feel that they're getting accurate information on how to stay afloat. We have seven million Americans now in default on a hundred billion dollars in student loans and most of those defaults were avoidable if the loan servicer had enrolled that borrower in a program that they could pay even zero dollars a month and stay afloat. Huge disconnect with the responsibility of the borrower and the responsibility of the loan company and that's something that we need to fix. I think it goes more broadly though that macro wage trends are just really not good for a large segment of the population including many with college degrees unfortunately. I wanna try to put a finer point on what you said and maybe not be so polite because I'm glad you raised this issue. It's very easy for us to say, wow, all millennials really have it bad and it's a generational thing but I think we would be missing the point to not put an income and race lens on the issue because millennials are a big group and they're not all the same and they don't all face the same issues and they don't all come from the same place and bring the same sort of baggage or historic challenges. And by far people of color regardless of their age have it worse off when it comes to their financial issues and financial struggles and the financial crisis just made it worse. So I think it's important to acknowledge that. I will also echo something you said which is we shouldn't forget that there's also an income problem right here and no great technology or new financial wisdom product is gonna solve that we should just be honest about that. And I do think it's important for us to think about strategies, policy strategies, private sector strategies that really segment the audience so we can be dealing with this issue. So I appreciate you raising it, yeah. And I would just add, I think one of the reasons why I started my punitive policy kind of prescriptions with we gotta make wealth not matter is because there's always gonna be tremendous inequalities in wealth and the degree to which we can weaken that link between wealth and life chances is critically important or we're just gonna be reproducing the same inequality over and over again. When it comes to managing money, I think a lot of people up and down income distribution aren't that good at it but the consequences are just much worse for those at the bottom. They have no slack, whatever the language might be. And so it's really fascinating to hear a lot of times we're talking about how low income people, we're asking low income people to be more prudent and effective with their money management than everyone else in the population because it matters for them more. And that's a kind of a really interesting unfair way to approach these questions of financial literacy that we're expecting low income folks to be much better at money management because it actually matters to their consequences. If I screw up, it'll be okay. And one of the reasons why I think there is this big difference and something we don't talk about is this interaction between the formal, the individual, how they manage their money and their various bank accounts or whatever and the family and the social network that's behind them. And so I think a lot of what we're seeing in this kind of this generation that's launching into the labor force are those people who have the parents they can always kind of turn to, they can rely on, whether it's sleeping in the basement or whether it's actual financial support or the ability to be supported for that unpaid internship that finally gets in the job or when the car breaks down, the parents can take care of it. That is very also unevenly distributed. So again, you have some parts of the income distribution some groups of people are much better able to work on building their own wealth because they have a family social safety net that they can rely on so they're not constantly maxing out kind of whatever little nest egg they're able to build up. And so this interaction between the social network and the family social safety net you can bring to bear is gonna be really important for how your finances are gonna be determined now and in the future. I think that's really interesting and important because I'm now gonna argue against myself. What you lose when you say no, it's not about wealth it's about health is you lose the natural conversation that flows around intergenerational policy intergenerational poverty and transfer of wealth. And what's interesting about you just said work is when we think about that we're often thinking about parents looking down but you're talking about the other direction young people looking up for that pull up in this moment. And I do think we need a new language to think about this idea in the context of health. So what you said earlier around policies that make wealth less important or that don't do as much harm in terms of causing greater inequality. I think there's something, I think that may be the link but yet I don't think, unless I missed it earlier this morning before I flew in I don't think I've heard the word poverty mentioned once in this convening and I think that's a miss. I think we need to think about how it connects. Go ahead. Yep. Do you have a mic? Okay. Oh, there's a mic here. Sorry, thank you. Come on, you have the next one. Hi, I'm Lisa Miller from the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship and unfortunately I can't share my experience because I'm not a millennial. Although when you talk about student loans and saving for retirement I can absolutely relate. I think the point about trust really resonated with me and as someone who's older and considers himself to be relatively mature, anytime I get one of those phone calls about you can pay zero dollars and stay afloat or refinance or any of those things I immediately hang up the phone. So what can we do to educate millennials and young people in general about what the real options are to help them be more financially healthy? Yeah, I mean part of the underlying reasons why there is distrust of those calls is because they are disproportionately fraudulent in other sectors. I mean, that is true. You are when being told to selling something that sounds too good to be true it often is. I'm not just talking about financial services but more broadly. And so I'm not saying fraudulent in a legal sense but you know the auto dial saying I've got a free trip for you if you do X, Y, and Z. You know, that's a tough thing from an enforcement perspective to root all of that out because it's always gonna pop up. That's been existing for centuries. I think where there's a little bit of again, a disconnect is the person or company you do have a relationship with are you necessarily getting that clear information? And I think the whole transparency issues that were raised earlier kind of get to that. I think part of it though is on a related note, mental accounting in behavioral finance they sort of think about how are people actually accounting for their income and their assets? And what's so funny is that Americans have always had this belief which is not really true in continental Europe that renting is throwing money away and paying a mortgage is paying yourself. It's kind of not exactly, it's not totally true. Most of the mortgage payment you're paying is generally all interest on a loan. But what it's leading, and financial technology has made people think more in terms of their full balance sheet not just mint.com but everything like that. And I think what's happening is that people are now seeing they see a mortgage and a home as unattainable whereas it used to be you had that and you were paying yourself. And now you see this big student loan you owe and you feel behind that you're actually playing ketchup or that you're not really paying yourself for an asset that you earned earlier. And I think that skews people's risk tolerance and it makes people less likely to maybe even be an entrepreneur and it undermines further the kind of trust in the whole system. So it's multifaceted. I don't know if we'll ever be able to fix the phone calls but some of the other structural issues may indirectly get at it. I thought you were gonna give the CFPB commercial, right? You want to? I'll give it, yeah I will actually because from the perspective of trust it's not just private sector it's do we trust the government? And the CFPB is trying to be not your father's financial services regulator. And among the many things it's trying to do it is trying to think differently about how it educates the citizenry about making good choices. And they're trying to do it in a way that is very 2.0. I think the jury is still out but I also think that they're thinking very big about the role they could play. And I think it'll be really interesting to think about whether A folks will buy it and trust it and B whether that will also help restore trust both in government and in the broader system but I think there's a tremendous amount of the CFPB is doing in that arena that I think is quite good. So there. You ready? Ready. I'm still loud with the work out of Mike. I'm Mary Bruce. I represent AmeriCorps alums. The million folks have served in AmeriCorps since 1994. I'm also a millennial cusper. I don't know if that's a term but I'm on the millennial ex cusper. And I think, to answer your question I think one is it's very scary. Finances are scary and it is a scary time even if we think it's not a scary time and it's very confusing. And I think the gentleman from Nerd Rock was a lot of important points about even you can go and Google a million answers and find and still not know what to do or whether or not all your money's gonna go away tomorrow. And I think the other thing that I face and that the individuals I represent face is a perceived or real tension between being the lead generation or the lead generation and individuals who have served with AmeriCorps Peace Corps or volunteer regularly or wanna be a part of addressing the many community challenge we talked about this morning and that time and money are two most important things. So are you working somewhere that has strong CSR policies? You're working at a nonprofit that isn't going to pay you as much. It's hard to save and you're not making any money and how we're thinking about philanthropy. So mint.com doesn't have a, you can tag something as donations but there aren't, how are we talking about donor-advised funds for small donors? So I'd love to hear a little bit more about trends or thoughts around the tension between my own financial security and what that means as a responsible citizen who needs the flexibility in the workplace to be on a nonprofit board or to volunteer a nonprofit or be, have those opportunities to continue service. I think it's a really interesting idea but I don't, I think it's a new idea, honestly. I don't think, I'm glad you're raising it because I don't think a lot of people are thinking about that in the context of finances. Where it makes me go is someplace slightly different which is thinking about, which isn't this panel, right? Which is the contract between the employer and their workforce at a time when this is really the 1099 generation and folks who are, forget about entrepreneurs, they're freelancers, which is a very different kind of thing and sort of how do you live the life you want both in terms of having the financial security and benefits you need but also having the flexibility in terms of time and ability to contribute in other ways. On the one hand, the 1099 society allows for that in a new way but there's still not enough security that comes with it and I think that's gonna be a very important, an important conversation to be had. I think this is not tongue in cheek but I'm always amazed how AmeriCorps members are actually able to put together very stable financial plans for managing their AmeriCorps year when they're living on a very, very small stipend and we know and you'll hear a little bit more about this tomorrow when Wendy Spencer comes to talk but that the power of service and community engagement actually there is a direct correlation and there's some real data that shows how it can impact employment opportunities and I think we need to think about this as a teachable moment when people are ready to make an investment in their own future and the future of their community that having a financial plan becomes part of integrated and a piece of that process and not something that we just think about separate and devoid and I think integrating where we can help people to be aware and conscious of a financial plan we need to find more of those teachable moments. Okay, thank you everybody.