 Okay, it's a great setup for our first panel of the day, setting the stage, promoting financial capability among low-income populations, if I could ask the panel to come up. Well, welcome, everybody. I'm so glad to be here as the moderator and host for our first panel, Janice Boudler with the JPMorgan Chase Foundation. And we have a great conversation lined up for you that I hope is going to set the stage for the rest of our conversation for the day. But I really want to start by thanking all of you for joining us for the conversation today. I've known a lot of you in the room for a long time now, and those of you who don't know, I actually started in the financial health field on the practitioner side. And of course, now I'm on the funder and sponsor side. So now that I'm on the funder and sponsor side, I get applause all the time. People like thank me and they clap for me. But when I was on the practitioner side, that didn't happen a lot. So I wanted to actually start by just a round of applause, thanking all of you for the work that you guys all do on behalf of low-income families every day. And just thanking you for coming out for such an important conversation. I promise the tech guy would hang on to this. So that'll have to be my last applause for now. So I thought we would start this conversation just by acknowledging how much the financial health field has changed over the last five years. I mean, we really have a whole new set of insights into how we help advance the cause of financial stability for low-income families, what it means to be financially healthy if we look at what we're learning from behavioral economics, from human-centered design, choice architecture, the way that technology has changed. Also the landscape in which we're working has changed dramatically. We've had a global recession. We've also had huge advances in non-profit sophistication. And we recognize that those partners working hand in glove, private, public, and non-profit sectors is how we're going to reach many of the most vulnerable, the folks here in the room that we're all thinking and working on behalf of every day. One of the other things that we've learned is that precision really matters. I mean, for those of you who've been working on this for a while, right, we used to just talk about financial literacy. We used to have to be literate. Now we know that on any given issue, we have to be particularly poignant about what it is that we're trying to address, what particular barrier a family is experiencing, that those things change over time, and that there aren't any single silver bullets out there that are going to, boom, make a family financially healthy for the rest of their lives, right? That's just not how our lives work. Last year, colleagues working with a lot of folks here on the stage, a lot of you in the room, J.P. Morgan Chase Foundation, CFSI, our financial solutions lab partners, the Institute, I could go on. We were focused a lot on income volatility and short-term liquidity gaps. We've already heard that come up this morning, knowing that just those small things really trip up families. We were really proud to work with CFSI to graduate the first cohort of the Financial Solutions Lab. And this year, we're turning our attention to financial shocks, something that where Clint is going to be talking about a little bit more on our panel. But that kind of specificity and really focusing on understanding the problem and the set of solutions has really helped us advance the conversation forward. And so with that in mind, we're all here to talk about what is probably like the holy grail in the financial health field, which is figuring out how we leverage tax time and specifically how we capture that savings that is the financial cushion that we talk a lot about throughout financial health. We're going to hear about all the liquid assets people don't have. But this is the moment in time where potentially they might have them, and we want to figure out how to help them keep them. So that's where we're really, we're going to start this conversation. And I think what you're going to hear on this panel is another example of why this conference is so important because we're bringing the latest research and insight into this field and mashing it up with the practitioner perspective of what's going on in the ground. And that is where we see magic happen. Not to put too much pressure on you all for the panel, but it's going to be magic. So in the interest of time, I'm actually not going to read everybody's glorious bios, which I as a speaker almost always find painfully embarrassing. So I will let you all peruse at your leisure in your packet. You have their bios. And we're really going to structure this as a conversation. I've got a couple of opening questions for our panelists. And then we will turn it over to all of you and get your questions. So with that, Rachel, I want to start with you. And really, I mean, I think everybody here probably knows CFSI has really been on the forefront of pushing the conversation around the intersection of consumer behavior, products, services, and solutions. And one of the most illuminating insights we've had over the years is that, in fact, lecturing people about what to do and bad, bad, poor people, you should be making better uses of budgets actually doesn't jive with what people want. And we know that lining up solutions with their aspirations and their needs actually will get us a lot farther. So can you start and just give us a sense of what the latest data analysis are telling us about what people are experiencing when they try to save and maybe some insights of what they actually want? Yeah, thanks for asking the question that way, because I think it's really important. And it is, there's only so far you can get in swimming against the tide of what people actually want or experiencing in their lives. And so I was going to show one visual to sort of get us started. And then, of course, it ended up being up, I'm pretty sure, by accident already. So you've now already seen it over and over for a long, long time. But let me show you this one thing anyway, because I think that it's important. And the reason I wanted to show it is I think that seeing the visual matters. So in this work that CFSI has done in partnership with NYU, the Financial Access Initiative, in particular, and sponsored by Citi and the Ford Foundation and Omidyar, we spent a lot of time delving into the deep day-to-day finances of people. And what we've seen is, of course, unsteadiness. And the reason why I want to point out unsteadiness is because I think we have this assumption of steadiness underlying so much of the advice we give people. So what we saw in the diaries was that on average, people have five months in any given year where income is 25% more or less than their average monthly income. And what was super surprising was we saw just as much volatility in consumption. And I want to acknowledge JP Morgan Chase's Institute's research, which has been quite similar, but on a much broader scale. And one thing that I found fascinating was when Fiona and her team first put out their research, my partner Jonathan Morduk thought their consumption findings had to be wrong. But the idea that people's spending goes up and down turns out to be entirely accurate. And so what that means is that people are constantly trying to weather this up and down-ness of their financing. But so much of the advice we give people assumes steadiness. When you think about budgeting, we've generally thought about let's sit down with somebody and go through their expenses. A bunch of them will be fixed. And we'll just figure out how they're going to pay those on a monthly basis and then forget about it. And then you wouldn't worry about variable expenses separately. But those are already probably discretionary. So let's figure out how to help people spend less with their discretionary. But when you figure out that a lot of people's incomes and spending looks like this, I think that whole budgeting process has to be rethought. And what we've heard over and over from people in the diaries is that they're budgeting daily. They're budgeting on a daily or weekly basis. When they get their schedule from work and they figure out how many hours they're actually going to have this week, or when they get their commission check and they figure out how much they actually earned, it's so many people have really a huge amount of unsteadiness. And so I think that that changes your assumption about what people actually wanted to do. A lot of times they're not necessarily thinking about some long-term objective. They're thinking about how to manage this constant up and down in and out of their money. That's great. And so the client coming to you, this idea of shocks, which there's some sort of cruel irony, I think, built into the name because the shocks aren't actually a surprise, people might know that they're coming, but that hasn't made it any less difficult for them to manage it. So talk to us a little bit about what your research is finding here. Absolutely. Before I get to my research, I'd like to talk about myself, which is my favorite topic. A few weeks ago, McCall asked me to come and speak on this panel, and inevitably the same week my car broke down. Now, I own a car, most of you who own a car know, eventually over the course of the lifetime of your ownership, the car's going to break down, you're going to have to pay to fix it. But, and I'm not saying this is McCall's fault, I didn't think it was going to be that day. And that's typical of most households. But then turning to our data, the Pew Survey of American Family Finances, which was inspired by the great work that CFSI and others have done, shows that I'm actually not that special. The experience that I had with my car is similar to the same two experiences that six in 10 households in the US have each year. It's expenses that we can predict are going to happen, but we don't know when they're going to happen, and we don't know the magnitude of them when they befall us. And what we see in the households who suffer financial shocks is that they're expensive. We asked households about the most expensive financial shock they'd had in the past year, one that we thought they'd be able to remember. And the median cost, the typical cost, was $2,000, half a month of the household's gross income. If I had a slide, I'd have them put up my Venmo account. Could anyone actually afford to send me today half of your monthly income? Would you please? Now, and this is an audience that's a ceiling audience. It's people who are generally well paid, not as much as we all deserve, but well paid, and who are aware of the financial challenges that households face, and everyone in this audience would likely struggle with an expense of that magnitude. And this struggle is what we're seeing among households in the population. No one's going to legislate car accidents out of existence or legislate illness out of existence. The marker that we see that makes this problematic is that half of households who experience a financial shock have difficulty making ends meet in its aftermath. Households aren't prepared to use their savings, to use the access that they have to credit, and to use other financial means to weather financial shocks. And it's not just a short-term problem these households are facing. The households that we talk to, most told us that they still hadn't recovered from their most expensive shock at the time of the survey. Three, five, six months later. And it poses a challenge for those of us who are interested in helping to support households in building savings and accessing their resources. When we think about retirement savings, when we think about savings for home ownership, it's one pattern process. We build savings, the balance should always be going up. But what Rachel highlighted is really the point. For households with short-term problems, short-term challenges, and it's really all of us, it's building up savings and then responding. It's building up savings and then responding many times over the course of the year. And it's a fundamentally different set of strategies, a fundamentally different set of challenges that households face. It's one thing to use an opportunity like tax time and tax time is a fantastic opportunity to help households to build a rainy day fund. But households also need help to know when it's raining and to know what they should do when it is. And so I'm excited to be here today and for the conversation towards solutions to help households to be more financially secure and better off. Thank you. So, Debra, I'm turning to you. I mean, where we almost instantly go right away is to that solutions conversation. We're gonna get to products and services in just a moment. But we often gloss over like, whoa, before we can get people to adopt like our latest greatest awesome solutions, we need to actually get them to the table. And we need to actually get them to a position where those EITC or CTC dollars are flowing. And yet every year, even though we've now all been at this for quite a while, we know that millions of dollars are left on the table. So tell us a little bit about what you're doing to try to get at that. How do we get more people coming in accessing those dollars? Great, thank you. And thank you for having us here. So as many people in this room know and have been working on for probably their careers, New York City estimates suggest that one in five New York City eligible households who qualify for EITC currently are not getting it. At the same time, one third of all filers are eligible to receive free high quality tax preparation through Vita sites, yet only 3% are actually getting those. Estimates also suggest that nearly 77% use paid tax preparers, whose fees are generally around $150. These filers are also missing out on access to a suite of other financial empowerment services, which we've talked a little bit about already and we're gonna talk a little bit more about today, such as one-in-one financial counseling, savings products and snap screening. So with this missed opportunity in mind, I'd like to spend the next few moments talking about three things. The first one I wanna share with you what the administration is doing and has done to increase the investment in what I call the free tax preparation infrastructure for New York City, which again, so many people in this room have been working on for many years and are our partners today on that. Two, I wanna share a little bit about our efforts around a human-centered design process, otherwise known as service design, and how we have been thinking about making sure that this infrastructure is serving customers the very best way that it can. And finally, I wanna talk about the learnings from our process from service design and how we've attempted to integrate them and how we are gonna integrate them more into the future. So as many of you know, IRS has run the Vite to Tax Program for many, many years and the Office of Financial Empowerment has historically supported this effort through assisting with marketing and coordination on really a shoestring budget. Last year, the DeBlasio administration recognizing the key importance of all the work that we're all doing in this room and the importance of tax time invested an unprecedented $3 million to expand free tax preparation services and enhanced marketing efforts. So not only was that investment made, but that investment was baselined into the city budget, making it really a core service for New York City low-income residents. So I'm proud to report that after, again, a lot of the work of the people in this room that I will keep mentioning is I know what it took and that we were able to complete more than 50% more tax returns than the previous year. So that's an increase from around 90,000 returns to 150,000 returns. And so that is a system. A system has been solidified and enhanced and will continue to grow. So these 150,000 returns translated into an estimated of 250 million savings from diversions from private preparers as well as tax refunds. So as I alluded to earlier, as we scaled up the city's investment and the number of New Yorkers served, we wanted to make sure we were maximizing this time and so people would show up at the table and of course get the credits at which they were eligible. So towards that end, we partnered with City Community Development, Parsons School of Design, DASIS Lab, and the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York, CEO and Food Bank for New York City in a process called designing for financial empowerment. So that's an initiative that uses service design to ensure that every eligible New Yorker took advantage of the services. So as I think many people in this room probably have been familiar with service design or human-centered design, it's a process and we wanted to make sure sort of when we went into this process that the question we were answering was why are financially vulnerable New Yorkers paying for service that they can get for free in our efforts to attempt to secure more people to use our sites? So now I'm gonna talk a little bit about that process. So with any customer service, how the services design is implemented plays a key role, not only in bringing people to the table but also ensuring that the customer is satisfied and continues to use the service. So working with Parsons, which specializes in these sorts of things, we were able to move beyond the traditional scope of public sector stakeholder engagement, which in the best case scenario often involves identifying challenges, getting feedback, and then producing the service. So what was different about this process was we had a whole team from the beginning, whether it was a low-income tax filer, a private preparer, a community-based organization, a financial service partner, another government agency, the IRS, were all at the table from the beginning and to the end. So we were able to bring the diverse stakeholders to give feedback along the way and there was a real ownership throughout the process to the end. So this process brought to a lot of interesting insights to light. I'm gonna highlight quickly two of them and then you can sort of see how we're moving forward with the process. So the first one is, and we were really surprised to hear this, that apparently filers did not generally recognize Vita as a brand and they did not always have a meaningful level of trust within that system. And that's super interesting because despite the fact that actually just like private preparers, H&R Block or Liberty Tech Service, obviously Vita's sites are not necessarily connected. They're a network run by many different organizations. However, with H&R Block and Liberty Tech Services, there is this unified brand that the filers seem to recognize. So it really got us thinking, well, how can we think about, especially with the city resources, how can we think about this concept of lack of trust despite the fact that these services are high quality services. And two, this is very concrete. We heard feedback about long wait times during tax season at many of our partner sites and many of you who are doing this work know that that's kind of what it is. So finally, as a result of the service design process, we have begun to make some key improvements. Again, this is the only second year that the city has invested like significant resources in this project. So for the first time, we have a unified brand, NYC free tax prep. So keep a lookout. Many people in this room were involved in the logo and the branding of this effort. The city has rolled out a comprehensive marketing and advertising campaigns that highlights this new logo. And the language and the angle of the campaign was also informed by the feedback from the design process. And in terms of the long wait times, this year we have more than 200 NYC free tax prep sites. We are opening two more in Brownsville and Morasena. We've worked with our partners to extend their hours and days of operation, and we've created additional sites that take appointments as opposed exclusively walk-ins, hopefully to improve the customer service. We are also partnering with city community development to increase the convenience of VitaSites. VitaSites at several large employers, again trying to bring sort of this tax sites to where people are at. And we're hoping that this will increase the capacity of the overall system. So we're extremely proud of the hard work and commitment of everybody in this room and the partners and we're excited that we've been able to have really some concrete lessons from this human-centered design process. And I think a main takeaway from all the things I've said is that I think that what the city is doing is we're again really creating this infrastructure. And so hopefully with a core set of high quality services across the infrastructure, groups and other communities will be able to innovate locally and take best practices that ultimately when proven, we can scale across the system. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So Sarah, let's start now. Let's talk a little bit about solutions. So you did some interesting research looking at what people actually think, how they're thinking about savings. And I think I found it really interesting because if I look at what we've already said on the panel, people know that they need to save, right? Like we're not telling them anything they don't know. They know that they're going to get hit with these shocks. They don't know when they're coming. They don't know how much. But everybody here and most low income families we work with know that this stuff is coming at them the size of an Indiana Jones boulder, right? And they come up with really creative ways to try to manage that risk in their lives. And some of it's high tech, some of it is really low tech. And actually just a quick aside, so we are a key sponsor of the Financial Solutions Lab, all about the tech enabled solutions and probably to the embarrassment of some of my colleagues. I admitted on a panel that the way I paid for my honeymoon was with spare change, that I had essentially over a period of years starting from when I was in high school as that waitress got in the habit of, that probably dates me a little bit. I don't know, the last time anybody paid cash at a restaurant. But when I was a waitress people did and I saved all of my change. And then I just never knew what to do with it and over years and years it saved up and I paid for my whole honeymoon with spare change. I'm actually really bad at technology. So I did when I was looking at your study and seeing how people are finding this mashup of high tech and low tech ways to save. I thought, yes that really resonates not only with me personally but I think probably the way people again are actually living their lives. So tell us a little bit about what you found. Yeah, so we did research on lower income families to get a sense of what their lives were like for most of the year and then what their lives were like specifically around tax time. And so we really heard the stories that Rachel and Clint were sharing where people are experiencing a lot of volatility and having trouble responding to that volatility. And so it's not surprising in that context how positively people respond to tax time. People use phrases like it's better than Christmas or it's a bonus or it's like hitting the lottery. So that moment where they go into the taxpayer prepare and they find out the number is a really big deal. And so part of what families are doing occurs around that time. So they're already saving. In our study about 17% of refund dollars were put into savings accounts at least initially. Now in line with what we heard from Rachel and Clint before by about six months later more than half of that money had been spent. So we could view that as a negative thing. We could view that as a positive thing but that savings was being spent. But we also heard families describing other things that they did with their money. And so some of these were along the lines of what Janice was saying. We heard families saying I give it to my brother and tell him not to give it back to me. Or one couple that I always think about said we have a passbook only savings account in another town. So we can't go take money out of there very conveniently. And so we really have to think about it before we go spend, before we go take that money out of the bank. So families are engaging in some strategies themselves. They don't need technology to do that. They need a lack of technology and a lack of access in those cases to save. But when we thought more about how families were spending their refund dollars, we started realizing that we perhaps needed to think more flexibly about what counted as savings. So in the research we did, classifying families money to make a pie chart was like one of the most contentious things, right? Like when you buy socks, are they like indulgent socks and they're a treat or is that regular consumption? Or are you paying a head because you don't have holes in your socks yet? So doing all of those classification things are really difficult. And we realized after we had sort of agreed on a way to classify that there were some things we were classifying as paying down debt. Some things we were classifying as buying durable goods that maybe we should think about more flexibly as the way that families build a personal safety net for themselves. And so there were a few areas that I'll highlight where we saw that going on. So one, we typically think of paying down debt as families digging themselves out of a hole, right? But there's another way we can think about paying down debt, which is that it increases your ability to incur debt in the future, right? So there's only so long you can go without paying your rent before your landlord evicts you. So if you get caught up, you can fall behind again more safely. There's only so long your sister's gonna give you loans before cutting you off. But if you pay her back at tax time, you can call on her again. And so even though we think about paying down debt as in some ways the opposite of saving, I think we wanna take a more flexible approach to how we think about debt payment. Likewise, when we think about current consumption, so families would tell us we were in Boston. They would say we went to Costco or BJs and those are the big wholesale clubs, right? Where people buy a ton of stuff all at once. Say when we get that refund, that's one of the trips that we make. And so families told us stories about doing things like buying hundreds of dollars worth of meat and putting it in a freezer chest or buying a lot of pizza bagels or buying a lot of cans of soup, those kinds of things. So that counts as current consumption in the sense that they're going and buying groceries. But what they're also doing is they're buying savings in the form of food. And it has two advantages. One is that when you run short on money several months down the line when you hit one of those dips in your finances, you're not gonna run short on food. And the other advantage is that you can't spend it by accident, right? You don't have to give it to your brother, but most stores don't accept pizza bagels as legal tender. And so it's a safer way to save in some sense. So families are setting up ways to save beyond just savings accounts that I think we wanna be flexible about as we have this conversation today. And we appreciate the methods that families have come up with themselves to try to create this safety net. So this is a space that is undergoing rapid iteration and maybe we should think about pizza bagels. I mean, that's not a bad idea. And I've mentioned the Financial Solutions Lab quite a bit, but just to shout out that those applications are currently open, looking for solutions around the issue of weathering shocks. And even what we've heard so far just gives you a glimpse of the kind of creativity that we see and the reason why we host these challenges in the first place. The CFSI really leading that work. But it is true that, you know, get coming really for anybody that this is a space where it feels like there is a new app every week. I mean, there is something new all the time. And we have this mashup of low tech and high tech ways. So Sarah, maybe I can come to you and then we can just, I'd love thoughts from across the panel is all this innovation moving us forward or maybe where do we still need innovation to focus or innovators to focus. So you said Sarah, but you're looking at me. So I think that maybe I should still answer. Yes. I'm sorry, yes. Which is fair. Yes, sorry for everybody. Sarah Gordon, but you're Rachel, sorry. I thought you were doing something on the panel. Yes, that is probably a glitch in my brain between the two. Sorry about that. I just wanted to not, you know, jump in if I wasn't supposed to. But you know, I do think all the low tech things that this Sarah on our panel is describing are really true. Like we hear the same stories over and over in the diaries. And I think that the most successful solutions are gonna be the ones that leverage these instincts people have and this workarounds that people make on their own, but figure out how to introduce technology because that's not necessarily scalable, right? Like you, the bank of mom works because my mom is not gonna, or the bank of my sister, whoever it is you're giving the money to, that works in part because of something that could be universalized and then brought to more people, right? So in that case, what's at work is a limit on my ability to withdraw. So there's a, we had a diaries family who did the same thing, a guy named Robert who gives his money to his mom and he describes it as she's a lock box, right? She will not give me the cash unless I'm really gonna use it for a good purpose. So savings accounts for the most part are designed with no limits on withdrawal. And in fact, this core idea struck me so strongly because I had first heard it from the IDA field where one of the reasons people liked IDAs was, well, I can't get the money, I can't use it. So how hard is it then to create an app where it's harder to get your money than just clicking yes, right? That seems doable to me. And so if this is some core instinct that a lot of people have, then shouldn't we leverage technology to make that much more achievable for more people at scale? So I continue to be excited by both. I think it really is about human-centered design and paying attention to what people need and then incorporating it into technology. And I genuinely think what we're seeing in the tech space is different than what we saw even five years ago. The financial services sector is at the beginning of a wave of innovation that is new. And I say that even sitting in a place that called itself the Center for Financial Services Innovation, we've been talking about this for a decade, it is different right now. Because financial services is a regulated industry, it's really been much slower to be attacked by tech entrepreneurs than travel or retail sales. But it's happening now. And once it gets going, I don't think there's any reason to think it won't take up sort of the same speed and power that you've seen technology take up in other fields. So Sarah, let me actually come back to you. And I'd love for you to weigh in on this, on this mashup of low tech and high tech and maybe based on what you saw with families where you think there's still some space for innovation. So we collected our data several years ago. So I think things really changed so rapidly in the pace of academic research is so slow that we're not always best positioned to say this is what families are experiencing now, given the technology now is not what it was several years ago or even a year ago. But I think there's, as we think about innovations, we wanna, there are ways to do, as Rachel was saying, learning from what people are already doing and thinking how can that sort of be realized in technology, but then also making sure that we don't sort of disrupt the successful techniques that people have developed themselves by attempting to make them better with technology. So I think there's gonna be that tension there. But then also, thinking about the other main factor which is not sort of a technology problem but that people have these dips and spikes and also not enough income, right? The dips and spikes might be more manageable if you had a higher overall income. And so thinking about those broader issues as part of our attempt to develop solutions is important. Deborah Allen, let me come to you. I'd love for you to weigh in on this but maybe also specifically with the lens of service delivery. So in your remarks, you were talking a lot about how you guys are applying these things to thinking about how we get more people to draw down on EITC and CTC. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic of product innovation but also specifically innovation in the nonprofit sector and maybe what public and private actors can do to support that. Thank you. I have a lot of thoughts in my head. Particularly about the technology and I hope to answer your question as well. And that when we look at the scale of people who are not claiming EITC right now, it's over to estimates again. The data that we have is actually another issue that we can talk about. But estimates are around 200,000 people are not claiming. So if I just said that 150,000 returns were done last year, you can see that if an additional 200,000 are not claiming, how are we possibly going to do that without some sort of technology solution? And so I think that we spent a lot of time thinking about how can government and how can now that we have this infrastructure. And I say that slowly because it's only the second year that we are now really funding it in a deeper way. How can we create opportunities for that innovation to happen and then given the sort of the constraints of government and the opportunities of government, how can we then scale it? So it's something that's gonna require a lot more thinking through, I think. Clint, do you wanna weigh in on this? Yeah, particularly on the challenge that innovators have, if we take, for example, really simple savings products, a checking account, a savings account, there's the product that you build and then there's the product that people actually use. We see people in our data who are saving in their checking account and doing so very successfully. We see plenty of people in our data who are effectively using their savings account as a transaction account and paying an awful lot of money and fees to do so. And so in these innovations, it's important for us, we think, to see two things. The first is the flexibility that balances liquidity, the ability of households to access the resources that are theirs against the friction that helps them to leave the money when they don't really need it. But then also being careful not to reify a given account or account structure. It doesn't matter that I put my money in account number one and not account number two. It matters that I grow my pie of savings overall. And so from a measurement perspective, from an evaluation perspective, and also from a design and implementation perspective, the ultimate goal isn't dollars in accounts, it's financial well-being of households. And there are a lot of different pathways and I think that's part of the exciting innovation. There are a lot of different pathways to that goal right now. Yeah, I wanna echo that, because I think I agree so strongly that ultimately you're just trying to improve the financial health and well-being of a household. And we're, as a field, making this progression over time to being able to figure out more and more what it is that we want to measure and therefore what it is we're trying to get to, right? So we started out with, as you said, like what do people know, I feel like the financial capability conversation got us much closer to what people are actually doing and now we need to move the next layer down to what are people achieving? They actually have, and I feel like it goes beyond even if people have savings that they can draw down, it goes to, are they avoiding hardship, right? Are they able to achieve their dreams and objectives over time? Do they feel like the CFPB has done a lot of work to define this and consumer research to try and understand what do people actually self-identify as the objective and see if it's done our own work to try and say, well, what do we think the objective should be? To just try and move further and further, I think of it as up a layer of abstraction of what people actually need and want. So I've got one more question. We'll go down the line for panel and then I would love to take some questions from the audience if we're doing okay on time. Yeah, okay. So as we move into audience Q and A, I would love to get your guys' thoughts. What do you guys see as some of the key barriers right now when we're trying to innovate to help families become more financially secure, more financially healthy? Start anywhere somebody wants to raise their hand and tackle that. Just kind of repeat the two major factors that we talked about earlier, which is the overall amount of income that people have and then the volatility of that income. And it's not just the volatility of wages, but people depend on help from relatives. That can be volatile as well. People depend on child support payments. Those can be volatile as well. And even delivering assistance through the tax refund system introduces volatility, right? Because we give you a big spike once a year. So there's a lot of volatility and income and then as Clint artfully pointed out, we have volatility in expenses, right? And so I think those are the two, the volatility and then the overall amount of income are the most important factors that stand in families' ways of achieving financial well-being. Take a little different spin here. I think that from, again, our perspective in terms of really what becomes a collective impact approach to tackling, making sure people get the benefits to which they should get, or even financial health in general. It's really, I think, making sure, especially with tax time, making sure that we have accurate baseline data. And I think at this point, we're using estimates from the IRS from 2013 and those estimates are derived from other estimates that I know I'm here with researchers. So maybe you'll correct me and give me some solution that I don't know. But it is one, we're spending a lot of man hours trying to understand what's actually happening on the ground. But two, if we really wanna know if money's actually making a difference, we need to know where we're starting. So all of those things obviously are hugely important. I wanna add one more layer and that's the psychology that households bring to their money. We collect our data over the course of a calendar month and if we had interviewed everyone the first day of the month, 75% of households would have described their family as financially secure. If we had interviewed everyone on the last day of the month, only about a third of households would have described their family as financially secure. Now, we didn't see big differences in income. We didn't see big differences in wealth. What we saw was what people were focusing on and what was informing the way they felt about their money. At the time, this is problematic for savings because when did they have the money? They had the money on the first. They felt okay, maybe they didn't choose to save in the way that they wished that they would have if they'd been making that decision on the 30th. And so giving people tools to understand the ebbs and flows within months and across months will be helpful in overcoming some of these psychological barriers. Yeah, I would add to that that there's not only a psychological issue around time but around the basket of things that families are rightly thinking about. So nobody that you interview about money is focused on money because of money. It's never about that. It's about what it means for my family this week. Nobody is thinking about spending and saving as the primary thing. Spending and saving is about what it's gonna facilitate in your life. And so I think we are often a layer removed from what people are actually thinking about when we think about money and it makes it more challenging to come up with the right answers for them. And I think it also makes it harder to explain why what we do matters. Not only to them but to others in the world. Like I'm constantly feel like I'm getting the question. Why does stability matter relative to just more income or more wealth? There's sort of even within this field a debate about what is the core need? Well, none of them. The core need is like getting our kids to soccer on Saturday. So I think that the more we can acknowledge that and the more we're gonna find that we need to have partnerships across like sort of outside of our field. And it becomes more important therefore to spend time with people who are working on education or working on other kinds of family supports or on healthcare or on housing because these issues of financial wellbeing are so interwoven with other issues in people's lives. And sometimes those may be the more pressing issue for somebody or the way into a financial conversation because they're really trying to figure out something financial in order to figure out something in healthcare. So let's go to the audience. It looks like I think we've got mics lined up on either side. And so let me do a time check. How much time do we have for questions? Five minutes. Okay, so let's take two questions at a time and then we'll toss them to the panel. We'll start. Sorry, my name is Gerard Miller. I'm from Neighborhood Housing Services at Bedford-Stuyvesant. And to the last two questions, I'm sorry, last two comments about the psychological barriers toward using these kinds of techniques as a service provider who offers financial literacy, education, and counseling. We are available to teach these skills to help people through these psychological and behavioral changes, but getting them in the door has been the issue. So we offer the VITA program and we partner with Grove Brooklyn and the Financial Clinic to drive that piece but connecting our homeowners and our home buyers and these folks and getting them in the door for financial literacy where I can then explain to them the technological applications that are out there. I can explain to them about the dips and the spikes. How can, let's say, larger partners, larger entities help back agencies like mine to get people in the door so that we can get them to you? We'll hold that question. We'll take one more over here and then we'll turn both over to the panel. Hello, my name is Miranda Tejeda and I work for the Food Bank from New York City and we run a large VITA program here in New York to combine two things with Sarah and Clinton had mentioned about that $500 expense your car. In the city, it's not quite the car's things usually but it's the same dollar amount and we have this survey questions about where would you get this money from? And done this for so many years that when somebody surprised me, it will stick in my brain and one gentleman is that we kind of use it as a training model, can we use, can I question you this to teach other staff how to conduct the survey? So I went through a series of questions of, oh, would you borrow the money from your friend? Would you use a credit card? Stop said, no, no, it does, I said, so where'd you get the $500? I'm giving you a choice, you have to spend it. He says, I wouldn't pay my rent. And I'm like, well, New York City don't pay your rent. He said, no, I know exactly what it would take to, housing court, to this, to that. He created his own mechanism by which to get a loan in a way from the land because that was his emergency situation. And what you were saying about the money, that beginning of the month question, the reason the food bank is involved in Biden is because of the staples of your rent, your con-ed, your transportation. Which of the budget issues usually gets cut? Food. And that's why we're involved in how much of that question that you had asked at the beginning of the month is impacted by SNAP or the lack of it at the end. And maybe, can we take, if we can be quick, one more question, because I think that will get all of our questions and then we can go straight to the panel. My name is Peter Burgess, true value metrics. As regards setting the stage, I crossed the Atlantic 50 years ago to this wonderful country. I earned more in one month in the United States than I could earn in Europe at the time in one year. Now, the reason I bring this up is that today, quality of life in Europe is probably better than it is here. I worry that the subject of today is basically to make living in poverty a little bit better. And I would argue that, and it's not the people in this room we need to talk to, it's the people who are not in this room. The extraction of wealth from ordinary people in this country over the last 50 years has been appalling. There are trillions of dollars that do nothing, yet we've got millions of people who are struggling like crazy. And I'm really, you know, I'm at the point in my life where I'm pretty pissed off about it, and somehow we've got to get the really wealthy leaders of this country to understand where their money has come from, and it's come from the people who work hard but get paid very little. I appreciate everybody in this room, I think it's wonderful. But there's a missing huge element, which is this extraction of wealth from the people of the society. Sorry. I think you'll probably find a lot of empathetic ears in the room and certainly with the congressman who was here earlier. So let me turn to the panel and ask you guys to address what we heard, and I heard a few things. One was circling back to this, the idea of nonprofits as service delivery providers and knowing that we both are needing to increase our sophistication to get to a group of people that really require high-touch services, and they're only gonna be able to get those with our nonprofit partners. We heard a bit about the role that benefits or public benefits are playing and helping to maybe not smooth income, but boost income and some of those are at risk. And so maybe some of you can speak to the role that that's playing in overall household income. And then on this last point, I think Rachel, you alluded to the sort of the conversation even within our field that is constantly goes back and forth of like, oh, we should focus on income or oh, we should focus on savings when in fact a lot of this work as it plays out, I'm sure for those of you who are working on the ground, is that this is all happening all the time. We're trying to address all of them. Many of you also sit at advocacy tables that take a long view and trying to think about long-term advocacy change. So maybe somebody on the panel can also talk about how those things are all coming together. So why don't, I will throw those toppings at you, all of them, and maybe just go down the row and have you opine on what you heard as question and discussion items from the audience and at the same time, share some closing thoughts with the audience. Sure, I'll start, but that was masterful as a summary of how to tackle those questions, which I heard as so disparate, but you really connected, so fantastic. And the way that you then described it really made me think it is a lot about partnerships and about being able to, it sort of goes back to the high tech, high touch model. So when I hear this question from a non-profit, I want to partner you with others in the field who can help with marketing, with advertising, with reach in some ways, right? I think very much of the work that New York City is already doing, but I also think of the work that I saw Avi Kanani earlier today is doing with Alice, where he wants to be able to help people apply for, really to be able to leverage their money better, right? And he's gonna try and work through Vita's sense. And I think we need more of that. And I think that actually goes to this last question as well, because people's financial lives are intertwined. We think about assets versus income versus cash flows. Well, those are three financial statements that are mathematically connected. It's not like I'm gonna be able to raise my income and not have it have a positive impact on my cash flows or my balance sheet. If I'm focused on my balance sheet and I'm trying to save and invest, it's gonna have some impact over on my income, my ability to spend, or my ability to manage my cash. I've always had a hard time with this, like prioritization of income versus wealth building versus ongoing spending because the math means they're all bundled. And so I think the question is really about, is there a way to target our resources such that it will be most effective in the moment on the overall system? And that's why so many of us then come to this conversation on tax time because it seems like tax time is a moment where you might be able to leverage, that you might be able to leverage that moment and have a big impact on the interconnected web of income cash flows and balance sheets. And that's why it's so appealing. But to think you can only try and solve one thing, I just think it's unrealistic. I think that's absolutely right. I'd like to thank all three of the question, gentlemen, for their questions. It's always heartening to hear people who are making differences in the real lives of people, saying that they're seeing stories that are consistent with what we see from 10,000 feet in our data. It makes us feel better and give us more confidence. But the attention issue, how do you get people in the door before they're in crisis is problematic. And it's because people don't have time. They don't have the attention, they don't have the bandwidth to commit to the important hard work of making change in their lives until the reason for doing so is so steep that it's much more difficult to help. And it's a challenge that I think partnerships that outreach, that communication and design can help to approach and opportunities like a tax time moment where we all are legally mandated to think about our finances, whether we want to or not, could be used differently than the way that it's currently used. And seizing advantage of these opportunities to deliver services that so many people, millions of people desperately need is really where the core of this conversation is today. Yeah, I guess I would just close by saying that for us, it's really all about that infrastructure and the sort of community network taking a collective impact approach really within neighborhoods, recognizing that a free tax preparation, Vita site alone isn't gonna solve a problem. The workforce development organization is not gonna solve a problem. The problem of local business is not gonna solve the problem. The resident association is not gonna solve the problem. So how can we collectively come together to find what problem we are trying to solve? And that problem very well may be the lack of ownership low income people's assets with a lack of low income people's ownership within their community or their jobs or their property and come together, put the problem out there with the right data and then work together to solve that. I would circle back around to what Rachel mentioned before about partnerships and how important that is because when I think about tax time is sort of potentially being this magic moment, I think we need to think in a really, human centered design way about what's going on at tax time. So people are coming in, harried about their finances, negotiating about who's gonna claim kids on for tax purposes, the kids might be with them. So how do you deliver all this nugget of life changing knowledge in the midst of all of that? And that's a place where partnerships can be really important, right? Do you have the office set up so that the kids can play so you can talk to the parents? Are you talking to them about how they're dealing with all of the issues with their family members who aren't in the room? So really being aware that it's not just this one individual walking in the room, ready to listen and learn, but thinking about the various partnerships you're gonna need and the various sets of skills that as I'm sure you all know go well beyond the financial realm for talking to people in a real way about their finances. That's great. Well, I hope that we set the stage for even deeper conversation throughout the day, focusing more on what can be accomplished at tax time. I wanna thank my panelists and thank you all again for joining us in this conversation. Thank you.