 I am really thrilled to introduce our next panel. It's been already a very exciting day. We take it for granted maybe a little bit, but we should step back and recognize that we really have a glittering array of very exciting projects and research that has really, I think, revolutionized how much more sophisticated we can all be when we're thinking about not just the nature of the problem but even more excitingly the contours of a lot of different solutions and so I am particularly thrilled to get to take a co-host privilege and moderate this panel and really dig into some thrilling research results and programmatic results and early findings on programs that are working. And joining me on the panel are, to my immediate right, Gail Hillbrand from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Gail is the Associate Director of Consumer Education and Engagement. She'll be talking about the findings from your report, increasing savings at tax time and promising practices for the field. It felt pretty relevant. Next to Gail is other Gail, who is not called other Gail at home, as I recall. Gail one and Gail two for the Dr. Seuss fans. Gail is a senior fellow at MDRC and she'll be talking about their most recent research findings around SaveUSA, which you heard a little bit about. And to other Gail's right is Tim Flaca, Executive Director of Doorways to Dreams Fund, who will be talking about their Saviour Refund Campaign and prize-link savings, wonderfulness. So with that, I'm just going to shut up and go right to Gail. Thank you. This job is full of, we're speaking from the podium. So at least I can see those of you hiding behind the camera from here, that's nice. I'm going to talk about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's work in tax time savings. My colleague Dave Saminsky is the leading this work for Office for Financial Impairment. I asked him to give me the acknowledgement of his work and he thanked virtually every person in this room. So let me just say, it's Dave Saminsky in the Office for Financial Impairment at CFPB that's doing this work. We believe in savings. We believe in it for family economic stability, for opportunity, and for resiliency. And we believe in tax time as a moment to talk about savings and wealth building. But this really predates the CFPB. It's the work that all of you did that caused Congress to put these words in our statute telling us very directly to be sure we're working on wealth building and savings at tax time and especially at EITC time. I'm going to do a couple of things with you. I'll give you kind of a quick run-through on our goals and approaches. Then I'm going to talk about the results in our four years of working with Vitas sites. Then I'll tell you about a randomized control trial we have going on with paid preparers. I'm pretty sure that's why we're invited to speak, but I can't give you the results on that yet because they're not in yet. So I'll just tell you what we hope to learn. And finally, I'll close by telling you a little bit more about the CFPB. If you're in consumer services, things you can do with us, things we have that we hope you will use. So you've already heard that tax time really matters. I'll just add that our financial well-being research shows that people do better across the income spectrum regardless of income. If they ask questions, if they make plans, and if they act on those plans. And that'll be no surprise to any of you who are working in coaching, counseling, and other kinds of service provision. So tax time is a moment when people can make plans and have real chance to act on those plans. Our own short and medium term goals are pretty simple. We're trying to help and to learn. So we want to develop a better understanding, not only of what works for consumers, but what works for the providers in the room. And that's all of you running Vita programs and other kinds of community services. The best idea in the world that you can't implement is not a very good idea. We also want to learn what more we can do to be helpful now. If you run community service programs, you're thinking, you're from Washington, you want to help me write a check, let me go back to my community and get the work done. We are not a grant making agency, so that makes it a little harder. We have to figure out what else we can provide to you that will help you do this work every day on the ground. Our longer term goal is a little more ambitious. It's to make sure that every single consumer who's getting a tax refund is offered a conscious opportunity to think about saving a piece of that every year at tax time. And this is ambitious because we've got 110 million households who are getting a refund. And that means if we can move these numbers by just 1% in each of these buckets, that's a million families. And I say we collectively, because we're not going to do it all by ourselves and our little agency in Washington, we do it together. We talked about how important the paid providers are and our most recent numbers suggest it's about 52% of consumers still going to paid providers. So for all the fabulous work being done in VITA, we have to reach people not only in the VITA channel, but also in the paid provider channel. So we've identified key audiences, consumers themselves, the online and software preparers, and the in-person industry, both the community service, VITA and the like, and also the tax preparation industry. Now I'm going to go a little bit slower and tell you about what we have been doing. We were just started in 2011, after tax season, was just about done. We, in 2012 and 2013, put up some posters and provided some scripts, provided programs to use, and our program became more substantial in 14 and 15. I want to highlight for you two results here, 2.75% of people who filed through VITA sites that worked with us in 14 and 15 were splitting their refunds. The national average is only 1.5, so that's actually a pretty substantial increase. And 2% signed up for savings bonds. And again, the national average is about 1%, and that's overall taxpayers, not just VITA taxpayers. So what I really focus in a little bit on this slide and what we have learned so far, and I say learned very specifically because most of the creativity here is coming from those of you who are running sites around the country, and have been generous in sharing with us your knowledge about what works and what doesn't. So this slide illustrates, and if I were a professor, I'd have a little picture and you could see it move around, six different touch points where people hear about savings at the VITA campaigns that we're working with. They walk in the door and see a poster. They walk into register and get some kind of mild information about savings. They sit down and there's a video. Then step number four, this person you see in the center before people go in to get their taxes done is actually really important. This is the savings specialist. It's a volunteer or a staffer whose sole job is to talk about savings and to put that idea into the person's head before or to facilitate what might already be there before they go in to sit down with the preparer. I am. Great program we're working with in Ohio. We went out to visit them for something else. And the executive director said to me, we're so committed to savings. Invite a tax time. We only do it on Wednesdays, not on Saturdays because we're just too busy on Saturdays. And we have too much of a backlog. And that comment reminded us that you have to put extra personnel, so those of you who are funding in this area, somebody's got to pay for those folks. And for those of you who are thinking about the number of volunteers that you need, please think about that person who can help to anchor the consumer in this thought before they get in to their turn that they've been waiting for with the preparer. Step number five is with the preparer where there will be prompts and questions to ask. And step number six, when the return is being reviewed for quality, is an opportunity to congratulate the person who has made that choice to do some savings. We're not in this alone. We've learned a great deal from the work you've already heard about from Intuit and the Center for Social Development, also from Save Your Refund and The Doorways to Dream, Save USA, and some of the folks you're going to hear from later. Tim, I have to think of you as the not gale on our panel, so. And many of these folks have been in this field much longer than we have. We did put out a report last year as to what we have learned so far through the 14 and 15 work. And the purpose is really to help everybody in the country look at a list of practices that your colleagues are using that are working for them, and say to yourself, which ones do I want? Which ones might work? Some of these practices require organizational buy-in and staffing. Some are things that individual volunteers and staff can do. Around the time we're putting this together, CSD was putting together its toolkit. And while the report and the toolkit takes somewhat different approaches, if you put them down side by side, they give you a very good set of things to think about for your own programs. So I'm going to talk about the 10 promising practices. There'll be a different 10 for the ones you heard from my colleague earlier. And then I'll tell you a little bit about what we're doing in 16. We find, and the programs we're working with have told us, communicating with consumers before they come into the tax site really matters. Offering that option more than once at the tax site matters. Making sure the preparers know about the nothing bolts. Well, did you bring your savings account information with you? How else can we make sure people know what to do in that moment? Item four, we talked about it already. That's touch point four, having a real person right there whose only job is to help facilitate savings at the site. Anchoring and prompts matter a lot. And I put out at the table at the front this entire report and also the anchoring worksheet that we provide to vita sites. The programs told us it's really important. It can't just be one person who's enthusiastic about it. It has to really be an organizational understanding for all the staff and volunteers that this is part of the job that's being done that year. We find that giving people too many choices actually makes it a little harder. Incentives and gamification, making it fun. You'll hear more about that from the not-gale who was more of a specialist in fun than I. You can find this report if you didn't pick it up at consumerfinance.gov, the Office of Financial Empowerment web page. So for this tax season, we're working with 41 campaigns in 25 communities around the country. Each one has applied to be considered and has committed to do something. We're offering a set of good practices and saying, you pick the ones that work for you and commit to giving us information about which ones you used and what your savings results were. And we'll be putting out a new paper on that after the end of this tax season. We'll also be doing a convening of those pilot sites and others who have to be included. So if you have a special interest in being part of that, please do let us know. This year, we put a savings insert into 11 million envelopes for those folks who still get paper checks. We've done this in the past, but not with a specific savings message. And then I want to tell you a little bit about paid preparers, those 52% of people. We have a randomized control trial with H&R Block. There are three big steps that are happening there. 400,000 consumers getting email and an equal size control group who are not that we're looking at both. 25 stores where people are getting their preparers are being trained and another 25 where they're not. And gamification, which Tim will talk about a little more. We have done a survey and we're in the field for the second year with the same work. We do expect to have results this summer, but I can't tell you about them yet, so please stay tuned on those. We are deeply committed to my RA and I'm not going to tell you again, you just heard about that. But where else can you not worry about losing your money and not pay a single fee? Finally, if you're running a Vita site, if you're in consumer services, chances are you're doing a lot of other important things in your community in addition to Vita. So think about other places where the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau can be helpful to you. Ask CFPB at consumerfinance.gov. There's 1,000 questions and answers about money topics from as simple as what's the difference between a credit report and a credit score to as complicated as how do I talk to my 10-year-old about money? Where should I start? We take complaints and if the people you serve are not bringing their problems forward to the CFPB, then the people you serve will not be getting their fair share of the government's attention in this important area. So people can complain at consumerfinance.gov and at 855-411-CFPB. Some people get their money back. Every one of those complaints also informs how we spend our regulatory time and that's really important for the people who we all serve. You can visit us and you can also sign up for the Empowerment Newsletter. We won't spam you, you'll get it maybe every other month. It'll tell you what we're doing in the tax space and in related spaces. So thank you for your work. We are in the business of learning from you and trying to pass that information back out to the rest of the field. It's been extraordinary privilege to be on this journey with you. OK, for the next few minutes I'm going to give you a quick overview of the final impact or what we call effectiveness findings from the SAVE USA evaluation. This is an evaluation that was conducted by MDRC of the SAVE USA program. And for those of you not familiar with MDRC, we are a non-profit, non-partisan, social research organization. Our goal is to use research to improve the lives of low income individuals. I directed the SAVE USA study at MDRC but several other evaluation team members are here today and what I'm going to say reflects really their hard work. The SAVE USA program and its evaluation were funded through the Federal Social Innovation Fund. This is a program run by the Corporation for National and Community Service. And a number of foundations and organizations shown here provided the matching funds for this effort. This is a requirement of the CIF. So what is SAVE USA? SAVE USA was designed to address one of the issues that many of the other speakers today have focused on. Less than half of low to moderate income individuals have emergency savings of $500 or more. SAVE USA encourages low and moderate income tax filers to directly deposit tax refunds into savings into a special account. And the savings can be used to pay for unexpected or emergency expenses or really for any other purpose. Specifically, SAVE USA offers people who are filing their taxes at VITA sites the opportunity to directly deposit $200 to $1,000 of their tax refunds into a special savings account and then receive a 50% match on their pledged savings if they maintain their deposit for about a year. And then annually they can deposit tax refund dollars and be eligible for subsequent savings matches. Some of the features of the SAVE USA model were meant to mimic a federal tax credit proposal which was being developed for low and moderate income tax filers in 2011 which is when SAVE USA started. It was patterned as others have mentioned on a SAVE NYC program. And this federal tax credit proposal back then is fairly similar to what Representative Serrano was describing early this morning. So by design, this program offered no additional services such as financial counseling. The match was paid out once a year as would be the case in a tax code embedded program and even small withdrawals resulted in the loss of the match. There were a number of partners involved here shown in this slide. Notably the program was operated in four cities, New York City, Tulsa, Newark, and San Antonio. The SAVE USA research consisted of an implementation study as well as a randomized control trial in New York City and Tulsa. And we've particularly focused on people who enrolled in the program in 2011 and then essentially we followed them through 2014. And to examine the effects of SAVE USA compared to what would have happened in the absence of SAVE USA, we randomly assigned individuals in two cities to either a SAVE USA group eligible to open the accounts and earn matches or a regular tax filer group not eligible for SAVE USA but they could deposit tax dollars in other kinds of savings products. And so this design ensured that the individuals in the two research groups were comparable when they entered the study. So any differences we saw over time between these two groups which we'll look at in just a minute we can confidently attribute to the SAVE USA program. So just quickly to be in SAVE USA you had to be willing to be in the study have an adjusted gross income of the amount at or below the amounts shown here and anticipate at least a $200 refund. In our sample we had over 2,500 people the majority of whom were female over half had dependent children and their average AGI was $18,000. We used a number of data sources, baseline data, account activity and data from two follow-up surveys given to people at 18 and 42 months after they enrolled. We had an 80% response rate which was very high. So what did we find? Well in terms of implementation you can look at this chart where we're looking at the 2011 enrollees in the three years of the program that were studied as part of the evaluation. And as you see in the first column most people opened an account in the first year about two thirds kept their original pledge savings amount in their account, got a match the following February and if you go across all three program years the average match for these individuals was $365 just among the people who received at least one match it was 540. Participation decreased after year one in year three for example about one in four of these individuals put money into their save USA accounts when they filed their taxes. So what did we find in terms of the impacts or effectiveness of the program? To measure the effects we took advantage of the very strong random assignment design that I talked about a minute ago. The red bars in this slide as well as the next few slides show what happened to the regular tax filers or control group members. That is what happened in the absence of save USA and the blue bars show the save USA group. So quickly what you see here is about 47% of the save USA group directly deposited tax refund dollars into a savings account in year three of the program the most recent year that they filed taxes is an increase of about five percentage points. We also found that save USA increased the percent of people at this three and a half year follow up point who had non-retirement savings and this is of any type, anything they considered to be savings, money at home, minimum balance in their checking account. We also found that save USA increased the amount of savings that people had an increase of $522 which represented about a 30% increase above the regular tax filers. We also found that save USA increased some aspects of support for savings particularly the percent of people who reported having a savings goal. We also looked at other outcomes that were hypothesized to perhaps be affected by savings if savings were in fact increased and I'll go through this very quickly because I think I'm running out of time but we found basically that save USA had no positive or negative effects on debt. We also found however that save USA had no positive or negative effects on the use of high cost credit. Also surprisingly we found it didn't have any positive or negative effects on the likelihood of people reporting that they had a financial hardship and these effects were consistent across a lot of subgroups. So what did we conclude? Save USA definitely led to sustained increases in non-retirement savings so it did have behavioral effects but we think that match say, and we think match savings programs like save USA can be included in a toolkit of savings initiatives for low and middle income middle income families but we also think as other presenters have said earlier that other interventions are needed to further improve the financial situations of low and middle income families basically other interventions are needed to improve and increase their income. So you can find out more about save USA on the MDRC website and with that I'll close. All right, hello everybody. I just wanna start by acknowledging that we are all sitting in a room with no windows in the middle to late afternoon after a long day so you would be forgiven if your energy is flagging and I can only promise to try to talk really fast and maybe really loudly to compensate possible threats of interactive activities if they're too many nodding heads. Okay, I think we all deserve a snack to get started so this is what I'll offer you. We have been doing a lot of thinking at D2D about what we think of as consumer engagement and so I saw a lot of relevance to the tax conversation I wanted to start with this and there are a lot of ideas contained in this framework of consumer engagement but what it really comes down to is that we all tend to be motivated by a sense of doing right by people and sometimes that can temporarily blind us to the fact that we are competing for people's attention in a very busy marketplace and what we really want, we would submit the sort of North Star, the Holy Grail is for people to want whatever it is that we have to offer them and why? Well, number one, it's a whole lot easier to grow and scale things if people desire what you have, of course but two, in a lot of ways, I would put out there that we're all in the behavior change business and I would further submit that if you're trying to get somebody to do something even if it's something they're already basically convinced is in their interest if they're showing up voluntarily and enthusiastically you have a lot more to work with. So it will not always be possible I think it's really, really, really hard to produce things that people want and that are also good for them. Goodness knows there's an entire economy looking for new stuff to make us, let me try that again, looking to introduce new stuff that we will all want and buy and we have the extra challenge of trying to not just make stuff that's desirable but also good for us but I wanted to put this out just as a starting point and I think what engagement comes down to in the simplest form is our people using the things that we put out there and probably the single simplest metric there is take up and as I thought about having the chance to come and talk with all of you today and reflected on our own work in this space we see really three drivers of take ups I wanted to share that framework in case it's helpful for folks and as you can see those are incentive and as Dave Williams still in the room with his discussion of rational man this is our rational man theory what sort of financial bribe or financial incentive will cause you to try something the second one is product so it turns out that what people are offered to save in matters in fact we've run pilot tests over a number of years we first started by saying why don't you just split your refund and put some into savings and some into spending the next year then we offered US savings bonds we actually saw take up rates rise dramatically that's not conclusive but I think there's a case to be made that sometimes what product you put out there for people to save in has a significant impact on how likely they are to actually save and the last one is you could call it promotion for a fancy word but it's really the ask what is the nature and the way in which somebody is asked to save and I think we've had some good discussion here about the difference between scalable, low touch high reach ways of asking through for example, turbo tax those of you from the Vita world would be quite familiar with more what I think Gale 1's diagram depicted I will say in our work we have seen the highest variability around this question of ask we have run pilots where we will see next to zero take up in one facility and in another facility 23, 24% take up and even when you normalize for the population the single largest explanation is probably the quality and the nature of that person delivering the ask so that's interesting just two other quick points on this slide again just listening to all of the kind of great stuff that people are talking about today I'm struck that we are still trying to figure these things out we're still messing around with what's the right form of incentive not to say that there's only one we're still seeing new products being introduced today we heard some great explanation of my RA oh this is bad I've got five minutes left I'm on slide two all right we'll turn up the speed and of course the R2S work is around the ask so here are four things that we've seen that seem to really matter make it easy for people to save make it stand out or maybe better said make it fun incentives do matter rational man not withstanding and product choice really matter so let me walk through some of these first of all in terms of easy this ability to split your refund is foundational this is the mechanism that allows us to make a decision at the moment of tax filing that we want to allocate funds for savings and the incredible thing is the government will enact that for us at no cost right it's available to everybody so that's really important just a piece of foundation for savings the second thing is as we thought about you know that's not enough though right it can't be just easy we need to somehow grab people's attention that's led us to produce a savior refund and this is offering people a chance to win prizes for committing some of their refund to savings and we do that there are over a hundred prizes they range in value from a hundred bucks to a grand prize is twenty five thousand dollars but this injects an element of interest and excitement and helps again stand out or make saving fund incidentally not just for tax filers but also for tax preparers savior refund we've been doing several years now and I think the takeaway is that when people find out about it it is very motivational so we've seen a lot of growth both in terms of enrollment and also in terms of dollars saved beyond just people using this promotion we have also found that seventy four percent of people who use it tell us they did not even know they had the ability to split their refund eighty three percent had never used the form before so this appears to be an important mechanism to make people aware of the tools they have also eighty three percent decided to do it because their tax preparer asked them in this current tax season we are expanding savior refund through a partnership with America saves I'm sure how many people are familiar with America saves okay run by consumer federation of America so savior refund is now available in eight hundred and seventy two community tax sites around the country and as gail one mentioned we're working with working with h and r block as part of the cfpb's research to offer savior refund to four hundred thousand tax clients and in person that's the email in person into their district offices but I want to take a moment to talk about product because this is something I think is really really important it's a truism that we don't save if we don't have what a place to say right it's even more the case david I assume that body language is validating all care right yeah that's off message now uh... but this is especially important for for low income or financially vulnerable people without a product you're not going to save and we believe that a public product set right so my array that we've heard about today but also you have savings bonds which is something we spent a lot of time working on are really critical and let me give you three reasons why uh... first of all there are gaps in the private market uh... if you have fifty bucks to save somewhere and you don't want to pay a lot of fees there are not a lot of private providers who want to do business with you and that's just a fact uh... the second reason is that there is a huge signaling effect by having your federal government in the business of delivering savings products things that we value as a society government tends to be involved in public safety we have an expectation the government plays a role in the delivery of public safety uh... when it comes to education we have an expectation that this is a shared interest of ours so the government will be involved in the delivery of education that's not to say that some of us won't go out and purchase private education or private security guards and that's fantastic but if you're a low income person knowing that the government is in the business of offering high quality safe affordable savings products has an important signaling effect and finally i've heard discussion of this today i think we'll probably hear more in the next panel the direction is only of more activity and dollars flowing through the tax code system and if we want to build savings through that policy lever i think all of us who care about low income people have a strong interest in making sure that there is a high quality set of universally available products to link up to those flows of tax credits and tax deductions uh... so public products very important savings bonds again something we spent a lot of time on uh... they are a remarkable product with a long history and special affinity among many of the populations we're trying to serve uh... it turns out that uh... that the connection between tax time and savings products public products exist today only in the form of u.s. savings bonds and for various reasons that do not have to do with the merits of the product that is under threat so congress is introduced a bill it's now in in both the senate in the house uh... it's a one-page bill it's very short and it simply says don't break this link between public products and tax time savings until you have a new way to deliver uh... something like a savings bond don't take away the system that exists today i encourage you to look at it and finally but when we think about public savings products and i think we got a flavor of this from elisa coydie we shouldn't fall into the trap of assuming this is our father's old mobile or something that was from a generation ago there is ample opportunity for innovation that brings sectors together there's no reason in the world in theory that you shouldn't be able to buy a my r a account or u.s. savings bond on a gift card when you go to the mall and you look for a gift for a new niece or you know child or whatever it is there's no reason that you shouldn't be able to access these products not only through mobile technology but through partners in the private sector the use of a p i is the secure data links can allow this entire sort of explosion of activity that's uh... represented by silicon valley to serve as a distribution system and an acquisition of customers system and link it into these public products we've had informal conversations with innovators who are excited about doing that and we think that's a way that this kind of public product can be brought forward into the twenty-first century okay i think i am out of time so i won't uh... offer you any more reflections but is it back to you know johnathan so i'm going to invite audience questions and while i do that i'm gonna strikes me again again when i think about what you all have been talking about and what we were talking about all day that that these conversations have become much more sophisticated and much more specific and feel much more human centered we have a better sense of what motivates people what's really going on in their lives we're talking in a much more specific way so i have two questions that come from that observation one is is this more sophisticated approach to trying to affect savings a fad uh... or does it represent do you think related to that my other question is does a more sophisticated way of trying to connect and engage uh... make it easier or harder do you think for policy makers to get it uh... with some hesitation i'll go first on that with the last question i think in policy it's especially important to realize the person making the policy is actually not the target audience who's going to benefit from that policy the bureau were deeply invested in user research because what works on me might not work on the person you're serving or might not work on all of the different subgroups of people we are all serving so really starting from what the customer wants in their own life and what's going to be effective for them is tremendously important i don't think this is a fad because all this talk about behavioral economics it's great science fascinating it's interesting but marketers have known how to do this for centuries and uh... we know in this country that about twenty five uh... dollars is spent on marketing of financial services products for every one dollar spent on financial education we can make that one dollar go farther by using some of the same techniques i mean i would just offer if you think about my rubik's cube slide uh... a point i meant to make that i think is on point here is that it's not that there's one answer that if we just figure out the right product and the right incentive in the right way of asking people that then were right you know that i think a more realistic way to think about it is that consumers are complicated and they exist in many different points in life and different values and priorities and what we're really after is to figure out how to match the right set of incentives and product and ask with the right consumer someone who is not interested in retirement and that's not kind of on their mind offering them a product that says retirement and an incentive structure that's built around retirement and using the language in the framing of retirement is not necessarily going to land uh... so to tie it to your first question i i feel like that kind of insight is not a fact i think we've made progress in understanding that sort of nuance of who the market is uh... and then the final comment and everyone will have their own opinion on this but some of the big drivers of this conversation around inequality those don't feel like bad issues to me those feel like generational issues that are going to take a long time so we may you know ebb and flow in terms of our appetite to talk about them but i think the real drivers of the conversation are going to be with us uh... i'm going to go again uh... but invite people to step up to the microphone and if you have a question if you have one uh... the other uh... when i think back to when we started this work back in new york city government uh... for ourselves one of the early myths that we needed to bust uh... was the idea that trying to help the population that was drowning in debt think about the future uh... was sort of putting the curtain for the horse uh... i think together we've all shown that's not true uh... but for many that was a real uh... as i say we're a real myth buster it was an opportunity to step back and say this defies our expectations and changes the landscape of the possible i'm wondering in each of your work what you have seen uh... to be the real uh... happy surprise or instructive surprise uh... that you think is a pivot point for propelling your work forward i'm going to go last on that one other game well let me think uh... we had a lot of surprises i think uh... in the same u.s.a research going back a little bit to the previous question uh... we could see in our databases that people were saving in a variety of ways a lot of different patterns a lot of different products so uh... i'm not sure if this was a big surprise to us but i'll just echo the comments that others made uh... you know i don't i don't think there's one thing that's going to work for everyone i think that you know a variety of things we've kind of called it a tool kit of approaches and some things are one tool and that tool kit will work but let me think a little bit more about surprises you said you were sort of prompting the audience uh... you know what's the one thing you need you know to move forward here and there was a sort of a a pause from the audience uh... and i think it's not just because uh... there's no natural light but also because there are some of these different vantage points to answering that question and that's the realities of the complexity here but also uh... the realities of the opportunities uh... i was in a room once in washington where they pulled together people that had a bunch of fun and promising programs and we aimed at the tax code and said okay well let's all agree and put our energy behind one really good idea and that was not going to happen uh... and it was not going to happen for a number of reasons one of which was there were a lot of promising practices that all felt like uh... key pieces of the puzzle you know you're like the the hip piece of the puzzle uh... with gamification well the now institutionalized hip part of the puzzle uh... and so i wonder what you've seen is really surprised you well i guess i mean we'll see if this answers that question now but one thing that we we certainly have discovered of the years is that on this question of should you say when you're in debt that at least for people who are parents there is a sense that the next generation is a clean slate and that my life may be my financial life may be beyond repair but you know my offspring or maybe it's my niece or my nephew but that's our next generation represents uh... a wise investment even at a time where kind of my financial life is messed up so i think that is something for us all to remember uh... both the specific lesson but also like that sort of an example of a possibly easy to overlook motivational hook right that really resonated with people we want to keep our eyes open for that and then the second thing i would say and again i'd be curious if people share this but people have a pretty native sense that saving is a smart thing to do you know that this is not we're not really trying to sell people on something that they don't already feel uh... our task is to is to make it easy and to kind of you know help people to act on that impulse that they have pretty deeply uh... it's just a subtly different frame and i think it's useful i'm ready now i'd like to add on there i think that this point about what your kids see is amazingly important people bring their kids when they're doing financial transactions they bring their kids to the vital site if they're not bringing them in there's still something to talk about at home you remember the i get blood today sticker some of the sites are using i save today uh... that moment of being able to say to your kids i did this for you i did this for us i did this for our family is a really important moment not just for the amount that's safe but for the pride and for the self determination that goes into it and the financial well well being worked that we're doing we asked a lot of adults who are happy with the financial lives what that what you know it feels control feelings of freedom now in the future but a number of them said someone in my life talked to be about money and we're encouraging parents to talk to their kids about money you don't have to be an expert you can say i would have done it differently and here's what i would have done differently you can say here's what i would do the same here are the small steps that we take every day as a family and that there's a power in that you don't get from putting extra ten bucks on your credit card although i was very inspired by the conversation the earlier panel which is paying down debt is another way to create room in your household balance sheet it can be a form of savings as well hi come out from the financial access initiative in the US financial diaries uh... i'm interested in sort of the mdrc results in the fact that we skipped over the it didn't actually make any difference in these people's lives and overall for this for the maybe you actually should be convincing people against their intuitions towards savings and getting them to pay down more debt because it is from an economic perspective pretty obvious that most of these families would be actually much better off if they took that money and paid down debt because they're carrying a lot of high-cost that instead of saving at a very very low interest rates you know given that uh... all of us thinking about hey what what they're getting back in the country fund is their savings are ready let's stop worrying about getting to save their savings let's get them to pay down their debt and let's uh... use all of this time and effort to work those people and that and get people to automatic tax filing instead of spending all this time with turbo tax well i guess you know we were evaluating the effects of the save us a initiative uh... you know i i can't really extrapolate to say okay what if we would have been said uh... what would we have seen if we would have been said uh... studied something that was focused on paying down debt i can say that uh... at the beginning of the project there was uh... worry on both sides in terms of the debt issue that some people would actually increase their debt in order to keep their pledge savings amount you know in their account for a year and get essentially a fifty percent interest uh... on on that amount interest rate other people thought okay if you save you'll have more money to pay down the debt so they were you know original hypotheses going both ways and as you saw in the slide we saw no effect on that uh... you know i i really can't say what the you know uh... what is the best thing to do about that i will say at the end of the study uh... the people in our samples so this would have been uh... about three and a half years after we first started to follow them they were in very precarious financial situations uh... on average they had about two thousand dollars coming in each month and this included from public or government benefits uh... and on average they had ten thousand dollars in debt so you know i'm not sure i would defer to other people uh... in the audience who have studied this uh... much more than i have to you to to talk about best ideas for putting that those figures together it came up in your presentation if i had just seen it before but even even for the people of these precarious situations what percent of them continued to save or comparatively more than people who have not been part of the program even after the program went uh... it was about a seven percentage point increase in the percent of people who were saving and this was after the program was over essentially so there was something about the program that led people to continue to save not necessary some of them could keep their save usa accounts if they wanted but you know they weren't going to get another match many people were saving in other kinds of products but it was an increase in the percent of people who were saving we have a couple more minutes we have one more question it was just coming back on that generational uh... uh... and uh... i guess an influence you were saying i actually asked why my sisters fifteen years and actually has a seven fifty seven credit score because i tried to finance myself because nobody really taught me uh... and so this is more of a product question also as well as well as your research that gail did i didn't see i didn't see anything in the chart that sort of measured the people that actually the low income individuals that received public assistance because i know working as uh... having six years as a volunteer now doing financial counseling for baffler stuyvesant what i saw is that sometimes when i talk to the people that i do virtual taxes now bars for saving you're just counseling for savings goes they're really reluctant because they say if i have a certain amount in my state that they will take the benefits away right uh... two thousand dollars and i'm really gonna outweigh the benefit that they get from public service because at the end of the day they're still making about maybe fifteen or even sixteen thousand dollars right it's far now as far as you know trying to prop up trying to sell them on the products how would you go about that well in save you say this was an issue that everyone involved was worried about at the beginning uh... and i think we did get some waivers and some of the states where our research cities were located where they would not count any assets in the save you say account against eligibility uh... for uh... uh... public benefits but i think this is this is an issue this is an issue certainly highlights an important part of that equation have you run into any impact uh... in your work team on asset limits uh... yeah i mean i don't know that we have you know it is one of those things where it's hard to know right when it's on people's minds it's certainly an issue that we think about and has come up in other parts of our work as well uh... you know i i am struck but i'm not sure we need to get into it but you know their rules around the itc being exempt from some of these and but the bigger issue of course is who can tell right and and what's the chilling effect of not knowing yeah it's it's it's a thorny one okay thank you so much the panel thank you for all of you