 Hey, well welcome everyone. Is this the first time, raise your hand if this is the first time that you've been to this conference. Wow, there's a lot of newbies. That's great. I think this is probably like my fifth or sixth or something like that. It's always such a pleasure to be on campus and attend some of these really great workshops. So thank you all for attending our workshop, which is called Financial Wellness, a Foundation for Your Future. I'm Liz Sharp. I'm the director of Community Economic Development at Capstone and my new friend, Laurie Wood, founder and financial wellness coaching for Evolution Financial Coaching. So we're going to start by just going through the agenda. So Laurie and I will introduce ourselves, tell you a little bit more about ourselves and why we're here today, talking with you about personal finance. Laurie's going to lead us through the financial barriers for women and some definitions around coaching and wellness. And then I'm going to take over and go through some step one and step two and step three, I guess, all about where we need to be in our financial lives throughout our lives with our personal finance. And then Laurie's going to take over again and we're going to go through some financial goals workshop. During this time, you can feel free to ask questions. So there will be an opportunity at the end to ask questions, but if there's something that you need clarification or you just have a general question on, don't hesitate to just raise your hand and we can address it at the time that we're talking about it. And that will probably be somewhere in here that you're going to be asking possibly some questions. So this is me. I'm an accredited financial counselor through the AFCPE, which stands for the Association of Financial Counseling and Planning Education. And my main job is director of community economic development at Capstone Community Action, which is one of the five community action agencies around Vermont. I've spent a lot of my years working there doing one-on-one financial coaching and counseling for Vermonters. Currently, I oversee a number of programs that are related to economic development. So we have a micro-business development program where we do coaching. We have volunteer income tax assistance program. We have financial coaching. We have a new program. In fact, my colleague, Laurie Kosar, is teaching a class right now called Green Savings Smart, which is a financial coaching program, but with the lens of helping us as Vermonters transition away from fossil fuel technologies. So helping low and moderate income Vermonters navigate all those incentives and credits and programs and services that are out there to help us make the transition. And we provide one-on-one coaching and workshops that are free, and we really are here to help people save money, reduce debt, build credit, and become more financially secure. And maybe if you listen to the Noon Time show called Vermont Edition, I am usually on there about once or twice a year talking about personal finance. So that's something that I have fun doing. So now I'm going to pass it over to my new friend and colleague, Laurie Wood. Great. Thank you, this. So thank you all for being here today. It's a great day for you, Vermont. Nice fall day. And such a great lead-in to this day from Patrick Leahy and Janet Yellen and Marcelle Leahy. Thank them so much for this conference that they put on. I'm pleased to be a presenter because I've been an attendee at this conference before. I lived in San Francisco and moved back to Vermont about 13 years ago. And I wanted to see what was going on in the world of women's economic development. So I decided to attend the conference. And I was just so pleased. I came the year that Sonia Sotomayor was the keynote speaker, and it was just such an awesome opportunity to hear her speak. And to see the way that Vermont and especially Patrick Leahy have worked to lift women up. So it's such a great legacy that he leaves behind as he retires this year. And I wish him well in his retirement. And it's so great to have Janet Yellen here because I put a little something about her in my presentation to that. So we'll see what we got. So you can read the bullets here, business management degree from Champlain College and a 30-year career. But the story behind the story, I think, is a little more interesting. So I got my business management degree at Champlain College when I was 29 years old. I was a daughter of a single mom. I was the third of five children. And we grew up on public assistance. And it was really hard, right? It's really hard to do that. So I moved out of my own into my own apartment three days after I graduated from high school from Spalding. There's some women here from Barry. So I graduated from Spalding High School. I moved out on my own. And I set out to create my own economic foundation. I put myself through college. So I moved to Burlington at some point in that time frame. And I put together my degree by taking classes at St. Michael's College, UVM, Community College of Vermont, and Champlain College. And I was fortunate enough that I worked for IDX. And I don't know if some of you may know the history of IDX in our state. I'm a large employer then bought by GE in health care. I was fortunate enough to work in that organization. And I became a manager in that business and was working on my business management degree. So I was learning while I was doing. So it's a really great way to get that education. So I have had the fortunate happenstance of my life to be able to create a solid economic foundation. And I retired. So I retired at 57 this year. So I'm 58 now, for many years. But throughout my career and throughout my history, I built and utilized tools. I would help my employees, so people that were on my staff, make sure that they were taking advantage of corporate benefits like 401k and making sure they got the raises they were earning. They worked their careers to obtain. And I decided when the pandemic, I was tired of traveling to New York City. I was working with major hospital chains in New York City, like Memorial Sloan Kettering and other organizations. I was tired of getting on the plane every week and going to New York City. So when the pandemic came, I was like, hmm, this is an opportunity to just sit back. And I did something before it became popular. I quiet quit, right? Is everyone going to be quiet quitting? I stepped out of my management, and while I was looking for all scripts at the time, I'm going to have to be careful what I say, because we are on TV. So I took a little bit of a step back from my management job. I became an individual contributor for the next year. And I worked with a very large, the largest health care organization in the Northeast called Northwell Health. And I was sitting back, and I was thinking, you know what? I don't want to do this for very much longer. So what am I going to do? So I was talking with one of my friends who's a mentor. And she's like, you have been financially coaching people your entire career. Why don't you make a business out of it? So I did. I found the Financial Coach Academy I had quartered in Arizona. And I took some formal training about how to start a business, because I've been in business for 30 years, but I had never started my own. I didn't really know all the steps I needed to take. So I walked down that path. I launched my business. And today I have 55 clients. I'm doing well. I enjoy it. And I'm doing as much as I want. My goal for this period of my life is called periodic part time. So I work when I want, and as much as I want. My ideal client that I want to work with right now is women, women who want to become more confident and confident in managing their financial wellness, who need to solidify that backbone and that foundation that they've had, whether they're 25 or 65. So helping women understand what you have and how you can grow that. And being able to look at a lot of different areas of your financial world. So that's one of the things that I'm really passionate about. I think of financial wellness as a form of self-care. We need money to live. That is a fact of life. We need to feed our songs. We need to put a roof over our head. We need to have transportation to go to the doctor to work. So it's important that we create that solid financial foundation so that we can do all of those things. And as Janet Yellen, she didn't know she was teeing up my presentation, or my portion of this presentation. But we need to continue to reduce the financial barriers that women have seen and felt over the years. So let's talk about what a few of those are. So how many women, I know some of us were born before 1970. I wanted them. How many remember that you couldn't get a credit card in your own name if you were a single woman? And thank you, RBG, right? So there was a lot of them she did for us, and that was one of them. And married women could get credit cards. And Vernon, I might have to pick on you every now and then, just because you are. Sorry, the token man in the presentation. But Vernon's wife could have gotten a credit card because he was a man, and he had a wife, or has a wife. Sorry, he's sitting in for her today, so he can tell me about this morning. But she could only get 50% of the credit limit that he could get. Fair? You decide. Women, it was also really difficult to pursue a co-ed Ivy League education. And co-ed is really the term there, right? So Harvard had Radcliffe. There were women's colleges associated with a lot of professional universities, or a lot of the Ivy League universities. But women and men couldn't sit and learn together. That's not creating a place where people are going to work together and continue to function together, right? It's putting different, it's putting people against each other. And when women did get into those Ivy League educations, again, let's go to RBG. She might come up a couple of times in my presentation. She was one of the seven women in Harvard Law School. And the dean of Harvard Law School at that time had a practice of inviting the women to dinner at his house with he and his wife. And having them tell him why they thought they should have a place that a man should be sitting in. Really, that's what happened back then. And sometimes those things still happen today. So we need to, those are some of the barriers that Pat Lee talked about that we really need to break down, we still need to continue to break them down. Health insurance, that was something that Jan Yellen talked a lot about. Women pay more for health care insurance premiums than men because we access health care. We have children. We have parts that need regular review, right? So we go to the doctor probably more frequently than most men. And it wasn't until 2010 under Barack Obama that the gender disparity in health care premiums was addressed in 2010. Women could also not be guaranteed for getting, couldn't be guaranteed that they wouldn't get fired or demoted for getting pregnant. Again, RBG, she graduated from college. She followed her husband, I think it was Kansas. And she worked for the Social Security Administration. She was demoted when she got pregnant for her first child. What did she do? She went to Harvard Law School and started fighting for women to address the issues that she'd been facing as a woman, right? So those are the things we can do. Women couldn't obtain birth control. Again, Jan Yellen talked about childcare. You could get fired for getting pregnant, but you couldn't practice family planning, right? So married women could get birth control. If their husband could prove that they were using it for family planning, but single women couldn't get it until the 70s. Crazy, right? And don't get me started on Roby Wave. And financial equality in the workplace is a problem and was a problem and still is a problem. I'm just gonna share a story from when I was a manager at a company, I'm not gonna name the company or the people, but I was a manager at a company in the 80s and I had been promoted to supervisor the year before and I was getting promoted to a management position and I was promoting to women, to supervisors behind me. And we were sitting in a budget meeting. It was my boss, the president of the division of the company and the accountant who was working on budgets. And the man in the room, president of the company, said, we can promote these two people, but they're gonna get half of their raise this year and half of their raise next year. Would you think that's fair? No. So they had done that to me. So we always try to make it better for those that come behind us, right? So I said to the manager, to the president of the division, I said, I'm sorry, but I don't support this. And they get their full raise or I'm not part of this. And he's like, well, it's a lot of money. They might not know how to handle it. Oh, really? I said, well, let me tell you, this one woman, Lisa, did you know that she worked in Manhattan and she worked on Wall Street before she moved to Vermont because she wanted to change her life? I think she knows how to handle money. Pretty sure about it, pretty good with that. He's like, wow, we went back and forth and I finally said, I am not backing down on this. If you want to proceed with this, then you can tell them why they're getting half of their raise this year and half next. I'd be happy to join the conversation, but I'm not leaving it. And he was like, ooh. So we ended the meeting, we agreed to disagree. And the next day he walked into my office and he said, we'll do it your way. And I was like, we have to fight. That was one example and that was back in the 80s, but we have to fight for other women and we have to support other women. What did Madeline Albright say? There's a special place in hell for women who don't support other women, right? So it's important to think about the financial equality issues that we're still facing today and do what we can to support them. And I was glad that I was in a position to support that decision and really fight for that decision. Yes. Can I add one thing to one besides, Ivy League schools aside, right now, before the 70s, there were no women in medicine. There are no women MDs and there are no women veterinarians. Right now there are more women veterinarians than men entering school. Same in that it's gonna be that way soon in medicine, human medicine, but men have fixed it so that they're in the specialties where they get the money. And my daughter, for instance, who's a pediatrician, gets paid a whole lot less. Fortunately, she's in the Department of Medicine so she gets paid as much as a man. There you go. That's important. So it's still a big problem even though it's 2022. Yeah, it is. And it's interesting if you walk down the halls of UVM in the School of Medicine, you'll see that there's a picture of every class that graduated from the School of Medicine and you see no women, one woman, two women, five women. So you see it in pictures if you walk down the hall. I see it every day. So there you go. Thank you for sharing that. Yes, please. Quality is important. Yep, financial equality, yeah, but financial equity is important as well. Yep. Traditionally, men's jobs pay more. Mm-hmm. But women nurses, a lot more money than I do through high school diplomas out of PhD, and then six people above the $1 million family. Right. Yeah, it is a problem that plagues us where you can paint those examples of women with PhDs making less, I don't know if everyone can hear her, women with a PhD making less than people with men with a high school diploma because of the job that they do and how that job is valued in society and because of what roles have traditionally been male and female. So that is a really big barrier that we all need to continue to work on and advance from whatever position we sit in, right? Thank you. Any other questions, comments, anyone that bring up anything for anyone else? Okay, great. So you know what, there have been so many women breaking down barriers and I found this great article of five because I was like, oh my God, I could talk for ages about the fantastic women who have broken down barriers. But I found five, let's see if you know any of these ones. So Maggie Lena Walker, anyone know her? Nope, so Maggie was the first woman to charter a bank, St. Luke's Penny Bank. And she really focused on women and minorities. And her bank was one of the few banks that survived the stock market crash in 1929. So she was doing things, supporting people that she believed in, teaching them how to save and invest and she kept their money safe. That was a feat. I don't know how she did that, I'd love to know it. But that bank still exists today. It's merged with other banks to become the consolidated bank and trust in Richmond, Virginia. So fabulous story, right? And she was born in 1864, a hundred years before I was born. So lots of things that women have been doing historically and can continue to do today. You guys are making me a little nervous. Madam C.J. Walker, anyone know her? What do you know about her? She started a cosmetics company and became a millionaire. Yeah, yeah. So she is featured in a Netflix show called Self Made. So if anyone has watched that, so that's Madam C.J. Walker. She was born in 1867 to enslaved parents on a cotton plantation. She was born as the name Sarah Breelove and she married and took her husband's name and she became Madam Walker. And she had issues with a scalp. She had a scalp condition and she created products to address her issue and it became widely popular. So her business was very popular. Her business has continued on and she's remembered as being a pioneer of black female entrepreneur who embraced financial independence and working from the ground up to build something to fill a need in her community, right? So she was working to fill a need in her community and other women had that same issue. She doesn't work really quickly. Who is Weiser? Anybody know her? So she became the first woman named as a president of an American bank. So she succeeded her husband Horace Weiser who served in a bank in Dekora, Iowa. And what's interesting about her, not only was she the first bank president, but she grew up in Vermont. So she was a Vermont girl, moved to Iowa and became a bank president. So strong roots here in the state. How many people grew up in Vermont? Awesome, great, all right. Fourth, Miriam Sievert. Anybody know this name? She was the first woman of finance to have a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. One woman, 365 men. Can you imagine? I wonder if there is even a woman's room on the floor of the Stock Exchange, right? She had to say, wait a second boys, my turn, right? She was a loud voice for equality. She changed jobs a number of times because she knew she was not making what the men were. So to your point earlier, she had visibility to that and she made a change. She did what she needed to do to make a change. She went on to open her own brokerage firm and serve as superintendent of the state of New York for banking for the state of New York. And one of her quotes, I love this. It's a new one, it might show up in other of my presentations going forward. When a door is hard to open, if nothing else works, sometimes you have to rear back and kick it open. Even if you're wearing two inch high heels. You know, and that's really, I think the message that Pat Leahy and Janet Yellen were speaking to us today is while things have gotten better, they're not equitable. We're not paying for value in our world and we need to break that down. And then the fifth woman, can you guess who it was? Janet Yellen. Yes, so when I read this article I'm like, ah, I have to use these five women because it ends with Janet. You know, and you heard her qualifications today. You know, she's the first woman to hold the U.S. Treasury Secretary of the United States and have been the chair of the Board of Governors for the U.S. Federal Reserve and to have been on the Council of Economic Advisors. So she's a three-time winner. The trifecta. And she's the first woman to hold all of those positions and she's been widely applauded. You've heard a lot of the accolades for her this morning. She's been widely applauded by economists around the world for her work, for women and for the people of our country. So thank her. She kind of had to scoot out really quickly. I wanted to have an opportunity to say hello. I did have an opportunity to say hello to Pat Leahy and the first time I met Pat Leahy I worked on his 1986 campaign. So we had a little chat about that. So I made him briefly back then. I'm sure he really remembers me. But he was very gracious. All right. So let's talk a little about financial coaching. Is anybody aware of what financial coaching is? It's kind of a new profession. So financial coaches are people who have some experience, whether that be personal experience and credentials like my Financial Coaching Academy, Liz's credentials, where we just, we help people look at their money however that is, right? So we're not advisors. We're not telling you where to put it in stock. We're not helping you invest it. We're helping you to get ready to do that. We're helping you put the budgets together, looking at the big picture of your finances and helping you to see how that relates to your life and the life you wanna live, the life you have today and where you're going in the future. We help you with education and encouragement to help reduce that financial stress that women feel financial stress a lot more than men. Cover that in a little bit. But having someone there to have your back can really help you look at things differently, can give you a different perspective, can provide some education and encouragement that we all need. And it's also, I think in our generation, we are one of the first generations where it's okay to talk about money, right? It wasn't when we were growing up, right? It was not okay to talk about money, but now it's more, it's a topic that can be open and you may not wanna say, you know, I make this much money, but you may wanna say, I'm dealing with this particular issue, do you have any suggestions? Like, and really open up those conversations to people like myself, to Liz and her team, and other people in your life that support you and wanna help support you. To do things like establish and accomplish your goals, whether they be that you wanna create an emergency fund or some of you were talking about retirement and feeling comfortable about being able to take that step, right? And as you're early on in your career, thinking about, okay, what do I want to do in the future? How do I wanna live my life and what do I need to do to get there, right? So those are the things that financial coaches can do. As well as help you understand your mindset about financial matters, whether you have an abundance mindset or a scarcity mindset and help you find ways to address those things. And to also work with you and other professionals to support your goals. So I often work with my clients with their accountant, with their lawyer, with their financial advisor so that we're all on the same page as to what's happening in that person's life. And your accountant might be TurboTax or it might be HR, blah, but it's helping you to understand your financial world and the tax impact, especially as you're approaching retirement. I call that the decumulation phases of our portfolios, right? We've spent a lot of time accumulating and then as we hit retirement, we wanna make sure we decumulate in a way that is tax efficient and that supports our lives and our goals in retirement. So a little bit about financial wellness. So financial wellness is a topic or it's a definition you can find on the internet. So the definition I like to use is that financial wellness is a state of financial wellbeing in which you can pay your debts and provide for your current needs. So you can take care of the needs that we all have, right? We have them food, shelter, transportation, medical. That we can weather unexpected emergencies and life transitions. We don't know what life's gonna hand us, you know? We hope we can plan for things, but something always comes up. So having that emergency fund and the ability to weather a life transition to be able to plan for your long-term goals, whether that's retiring in this beautiful state that we live in or maybe you wanna retire to a place where it's a little bit warmer in the winter. Depends on whether you embrace that cross-country skiing that Pelley talked about. And also to be able to make choices that allow you to enjoy our life. We work because we're supporting ourselves and our family and we wanna have some joy and we wanna have our friends and family over for dinner. We wanna take a vacation or whatever it is that brings you joy. You wanna make sure that there's time and the finance is available to do those things. And also to be at peace with your financial decision-making. So to know that you're doing the best job that you can with what you have and to manifest other ways that finances can or income can come in for you. So that's my definition of financial wellness. Any questions, comments, anything you add to that? Is that resonating with people? Okay. Is it sequential? Do you have to have bullet point one before you get to bullet point two? Absolutely not. You can do them all at one time. They are not sequential. Very good question. There's really not a lot about finances that are sequential. Other than you have to have some money before you spend it. That's a little bit of that. Although credit cards, don't get me started on those, have changed that a little bit. So I always like to say you have to have income before you spend it. So this is the results of a survey completed by Price Waterhouse Coopers. And they did a survey of employees to find out what financial wellness and what the impact of financial wellness had on people. And 34% of the respondents said that the lack of financial wellness impacted their mental health and impacted their sleep. It impacted their self-esteem and their physical health. Worrying about money has so many impacts. And one of the joys to me about financial coaching, I was working with this couple who are in their 70s. They had a lot of credit card debt living on social security. And we needed to create a plan to address all of that. And as we sat down and started talking over a couple of months, they said to me, do you know how much stress you have taken out of our life? Just to have someone to look at this with us, to partner with us, to show us a different way of doing things because they were the front generation that it wasn't okay to talk about money. So they didn't talk about it with their family when they needed help. So it's important that we understand that we understand the impact that it has on us so that we reach out for help, whether it's to your neighbor, your friend, your sister, a colleague to get that help you need. So why does financial wellness matter specifically for women? So, you know, we heard Pat Lakey women are earning more on average than we ever have before. The first study that was done in 1967, women were earning 59 cents on the dollar. Today, it's about 89 to 90% for white women. It is not the same for women of color. It is worse for black women and even worse for Latino women. So we are earning more, but the equity gap needs to go away. And the pay for value needs to be addressed. Women are still earning significantly less than their male counterparts. We talked about that, you know, if you are in a job where you're the same role, there are some things that have come into place. There was a really under reported legislation that happened under Barack Obama called the Pay Transparency Act. I don't know if anyone heard of it. Yeah, so it was the Pay Transparency Act in companies. And in fact, when I was a manager of companies, if people talked about their salary, it was grounds for termination. It is not that anymore. And companies are looking at their books and really going through them and bringing everybody in the same job to the same level. So the last company that I worked for, I was part of that team where we were looking at everyone across the board and bringing people up to the same level so that same job, regardless of gender, regardless of national origin, was the same pay. So that is something that is being addressed. Companies don't have to do that. I believe it's still voluntary, but people are stepping up and taking that step. Women live longer and we take time off from the workforce, right? We take time off from the workforce if we have children. Sometimes we're in that, they call sandwich generation where we're still raising children and our parents might be aging. So it's a really hard time to work. And especially with the pandemic, that was a really hard time for women to work if they didn't have flexibility. So making sure that in our younger years that we start those good habits of putting money into our retirement and understanding how the impact that has of time value of money and interest rates and compounding interest rates. So getting money in early, starting to save early and continuing that throughout your lifetime is really important. Liz, we'll talk a little bit about that. Women are also a little bit more emotional about their finances and then we feel the stress and that's what I mean about emotional, but we also make decisions from an emotional perspective, right? So if you had to choose between investing and feeding your kids, you're always gonna choose feeding your kids, right? But we also look at our community. So a lot of us, I know a lot of my friends and peers, we specifically shop at a co-op or we specifically stop at the farmer's stand and buy our meat and our dairy and vegetables and things like that because we wanna support our local communities. We wanna make sure that in Vermont where we have such access to great agriculture that we're supporting that agriculture and that we're feeding our families with local food, grown here, supporting the farmer, supporting the person who delivers it, it's creating that economic opportunity for all of us. So really thinking about that and I think women think a little bit more about that. It's a personal opinion. And the last item or number of why financial wellness matters for women is because at some point 90% of us will be solely responsible for our finances. How many people have been, how many of us in here have been solely responsible for your finances? So whether you married late, I didn't get married until I was 47. Whether you have been divorced, whether you've been widowed and we have a few people who have been widowed in here, you will at some point become solely responsible for your money. And true fact, more money in the United States will be in the hands of women in the next five years than ever before in our lifetime due to generational wealth. Due to many economic factors. So if we owe it to ourselves, to our families, to our communities, and to our greater United States and the world to be comfortable, to be confident and to be confident with how we manage our portion of that. Anybody disagree with me on that? So here are the five components of financial wellness. So in-com we talked about that. You have to provide for your current needs. How many people in here have a job where you go to a job and have a coach at them? How many people in here are business owners? How many people do both? She's saying both, both, both. Oh, great. Yeah, so there are lots of ways that you can have income. You can have a job. You can have a side hustle. You can babysit. You can volunteer. You can work at your local co-op if you want. So there are lots of ways that you can create income. You can have real estate and have income coming in from that real estate. And that's one way that I was able to start to really build some financial, a really strong financial foundation for myself and my family was through real estate. Purchasing my own home at 29, certainly was really helpful. Savings can help us weather those unexpected financial emergencies and enjoy life. And these are not sequential either, so you can do all the things at one time. So savings, you know, putting some money aside into emergency funds. So if your car breaks down, remember the first time I bought my first car and like at least once a month, it broke down. So I learned a lot about having a little emergency fund because I needed it every month to fix my car. And so it's important that we set somebody aside that we have some money that we can use for emergencies if we have them and also to enjoy our life, right? To set some money aside for vacation or if our favorite holiday is Halloween, you know how many people love Halloween and it's their favorite and they spend a lot of money at Halloween. So putting some money aside for those things. Spending, being able to pay your debts from a solid budget, so being able to understand how you spend, what you spend your money on, aligning your spending with your values like we talked about shopping in your local community rather than in a large consolidator. And investing, investing helps you plan for those long-term financial goals and transitions and helps you to enjoy your life. And Legacy is building something that outlasts us and it's creating that financial piece. And Legacy can also happen right at the same time. So one of the things that my husband and I have done, I read this book called Die With Zero. Some of us, that's not our goal but what we want to make sure that we've got enough to get there. But why do we wait until we die to give it to someone who needs it today? So we've picked one person from each of our families who needs some help today and we provide them some financial support. It's not a lot, but it makes a difference in their life today. And so we've made that commitment why wait until, if I'm projecting another 30 years, my niece who I'm helping is gonna be 65 herself at that time. Why would I wait to help her? She'll be through all the accumulation stage. So those are the things that we can do. We can start to build that legacy today to make sure that it's there for the future and for whatever we want to give it to. Please. All righty, well thank you, Laurie. I did a couple of things that Laurie said. I wanted to comment on one was her comment about women being demoted when they became pregnant. I kid you not, I worked at a job in the mid 90s where women did get demoted when they got pregnant. And you know, I just remember being shocked going, really, this is really happening. So we definitely, as women, and I'm the only woman on my select board and I've been on the select board for 10 years. There had been another woman, but recently we had someone who left midterm. So we have to appoint someone. And I was the only one who nominated the two very intelligent women who were running for the open seat. And I was the only one who voted for them. And a man was voted in. And you know, it just was very, like today, like this was 2022, right? So we definitely have some gaps to close in that regard. So the next section that we're gonna be talking about is really looking at some of that stuff that Laurie just showed in the previous slide is like knowing your numbers, right? And so we're gonna start with, these are the things that when you're thinking about you and your own personal finance, your net worth, which I'm gonna go into some detail about what net worth is, your credit score and why it's important to have a healthy credit score to improve your personal finance. Taking a look at your family budget, that's often the first thing that we do when we're working with someone in financial coaching is really sitting down with them so that we know what's the money in, what's the money out. And then what is your debt load? And then finally, we're gonna touch on some retirement funding as well. Okay, so we're gonna start out with what net worth really is. So it essentially is your assets, what you have in the positive, minus your debts, what you have in the negative. So these are what you might include in your assets. Your checking and savings account balances, any investments you have, retirement account balances, your car's value can be included in net worth, your house value if you're a homeowner and potentially some other assets that you might have. Versus your debts, so what are your outstanding loan balances on your credit cards, your car loan, your home, you might have a home equity loan, you might have student loans, personal loans, loans to family and friends. So you take what you have in the positive and you subtract your debts and that becomes your net worth. And it can be positive or negative. So here's an example of an example of Rosie, who is age 32. Her assets, she has a house of value of $375,000. So if she were to sell her house today, it would be $375,000. Her car is worth 12,000. She's got a pop-up camper worth 4,000. She has 6,000 in her savings account and 15,000 in her retirement. But for her debts, she still owes $325,000 on the home. She has a car loan balance. It's actually higher than what the car is worth because that's often the case when you have a car loan that it's worth less than what you actually owe on the car. She has student loans of 65,000. She's got a $4,000 credit and she owes her parents who helped her with the down payment, she owes them 20,000. So her debts are 427,000 and her assets, because we're including the value of the home, are 412. So her net worth is negative. And I can tell you, there's probably people in this room who have a negative net worth, especially if you're younger and you have something like student loans, right? You just probably don't have enough money in your savings account. You may not be a homeowner and your net worth is gonna be negative. And that's just very common when you're, especially when you're young and you're starting out. Here's an example of the positives. So we have Samira and Jan, who are in their 60s. So their house value is 425. They've got a car, they've got some checking and they've got a bit more than Rosie did in her retirement savings. For their debt, they don't own on their home anymore but they do have a home equity loan and they do have a car loan balance. So their debts are only 45,000 but their assets are 775. So they have a net worth of 730,000. So you'll see that, when you start out younger, your net worth's probably gonna be in the negative. Back here's a little slide. So in this case, you might have, because of student loans or other debts that you have, you might be in the negative. And as you go, as you get older and you're building assets, particularly through retirement savings and home ownership, by the time you retire at age 65, 70, that's when you start to spend. And then Lori had mentioned the legacy, right? There might be something left over here to pass on to your family or to pass on to charity or there might not be, right? So it really depends on how long you live and obviously how much you've saved. So this is sort of a typical example of what net worth might look like. Anyone have any questions on that? So you can do this, oh, sorry, yes. Would you typically calculate net worth as a couple together or individual? You would probably do it as a couple together and if you're co-mingling your assets. The other thing that I was gonna say is, sorry, I was gonna say no, no, no, that's okay. So the next thing is your credit score. Does anyone here know what your credit score is? Yeah, okay. If you don't, I think I believe I offered in the actual greater description that if you wanted to have your credit score pulled, we can do that at Capstone for you and all you'll need to do is just give me your name and I can get in touch with you to be able to do that. But a credit score is really important in terms of your ability to build your net worth. And again, home ownership, car ownership. Getting a car so you can get to a job. So in order for you to have good credit, there's a lot of factors that sort of go into to a credit score. But in terms of where you wanna be, you wanna be up here in these greens, right? And it's not like you start out low when you're younger, right? When you first start out, and let's say you have a student loan and maybe you have your first credit card, you're probably somewhere in the high 600s to low 700s for your credit score. And in order to get up to sort of the 800s, that often takes time, that's age. I'm gonna go through a little bit about the credit scores here. So it really does affect your ability to borrow for these large purchases, like a home or a car. A lower credit score means you're going to get a higher interest rate on a loan. So for example, if you have a low credit score that's down here, it's unlikely that you're going to be able to qualify for a mortgage because there's a lot of reasons why you have a low credit score. That's gonna make you a risk to the lender and a house is a big risk. However, you will be able to get a car loan with a score like this. But the difference is that your car loan's gonna be around 17 to 20%. Vermont has a cap of 20% on what a car loan could be. Other states have even higher interest rates. But it can mean the difference of someone with good credit and a five-year car loan paying something like maybe $2,000 to $3,000 in interest versus a person with poor credit who's often lower income getting a seven-year loan at a 17% and paying $13,000 in interest. So it really is dramatic, the amount of money that you pay. And what makes it even more difficult for people to understand is that the person on the five-year car loan with the low interest rate has the same monthly payment as the person with the high interest rate and the seven-year loan because of how loans work. So they put people in, yes, you can afford a $250 or $300 car loan, but it's gonna cost you $13,000 versus a $300 car loan costing you $2,000 or $3,000. So some people don't know also that credit scores affect your insurance premiums. So for home, for auto and for life. So if you are someone with a low credit score, your insurance premiums are gonna be higher because you are simply a higher risk to them. If you have a low credit score, you are truly more likely to be in a car accident than someone with a high credit score, which is why they increase those premiums because the actuaries tell them that and that's how they do the math. It can also affect your ability to get a job. Most jobs don't check credit scores, but if you were to be working for like a financial institution, they may check your credit score. So you wanna make sure that if you are doing a job like that, at least go in knowing what your credit score is. And it's certainly considered when you're renting an apartment. So if you're looking to rent an apartment, oftentimes the minimum score that they're gonna want is a 680 for renting an apartment. In fact, and this goes back to wanting to have good credit, my children are college kids, right? And they're renting apartments because there's no housing. Well, who has to sign for that need, right? And I have to have good credit for my kids to be able to rent an apartment while they're in college. So it's not just necessarily, oh, I don't need to rent an apartment. Your kid may need to, or your kid may need to get a student loan that you have to cosign on. And it truly does. Having a good credit score offers a lifetime of savings. And if you don't have good credit, it's a lifetime of higher expenses and a serious impact on your network. So I'm just gonna quickly go through how to build and maintain a great credit score. So the nice thing is, is that credit scores do change, right? They can go up, but they can also go down. So even if you have a poor credit score now, there is opportunity to grow your credit score and improve your credit score. Equally, if you have a great credit score now, there are ways that it can very quickly go down if a few things happen. So in terms of what makes up a credit score, so those numbers that you saw, like the 780 to 850, the biggest impact on your credit score is your payment history, which means, do you pay on time? And on time doesn't mean necessarily the day that it's due. So let's say, I know for example mortgages, right? They'll say, the due day is the 15th of every month, but you have until the 30th to make your payment, right? And when I was young and sort of naive, I was like, oh wait until the 30th to pay my mortgage because I don't have to, right? We're meanwhile, so that wasn't considered a late payment. All they were doing was earning more interest on me, right? Because I was waiting a couple of weeks to make my payment. But really in order for it to nick your credit score and make your credit score go down, you have to be more than 30 days late. So if you're just a few days late, you may get a late fee from your credit card company that's $35, $40 because you were late on your payment, but it's not gonna affect your credit score. It is a 30 day or higher. And that can make your credit score fall by like 60 points in one month, just by having a 30 day late payment. The other factor is the amounts owed. So this really has to do with what do you have as outstanding balances on loans, but also your credit utilization. So let's say you have two credit cards and a bank line of credit. So you have a credit card for 5,000, you have a credit card for 2,000, and you have a line of credit for 1,000 on your checking account. So that's $8,000 is your full credit limit. And you never really touch your overdraft protection and you use the $2,000 one for emergencies. And so you're only using that $5,000 one. Your whole credit limit is 8,000. And what you wanna do to keep your credit healthy is to use no more than 30% of that credit limit. So that would be five times three is 1,500. So you wouldn't wanna have more than $1,500 overall. No, I'm sorry, 8,000 is your credit limit. So eight times three is 24. So 2,400 would be the maximum amount that you would want to have charged on all three of those credit lines because that's 30% of your whole credit limit, $8,000. So it's not per credit card. It's really per your entire credit limit. The golden rule is around 8%. So 30% is, you know, it's a safe amount but you really wanna try to keep your credit utilization to be around 10% to 8% of your entire credit limit. Yes. So is that debt to income? Is that what that? So that's different actually. So debt to income is, and that's a good question, debt to income is how much debt is safe for you to have compared to your overall gross income. And that is around, I think I actually mentioned it in here if I talk about debt. I think that that's around 45% of your gross income should be all debt. That includes housing, whether you're renting or you own, and all of your other loans. And the reason that that number is there, because some people are higher than that, right, is because you won't have money to spend on everything else that you need to spend on. Food, clothing, pets, transportation, heating, all the things that you need to live, 45% is really the max that you wanna have. And a safer amount is more like 40 to 42%. I think I talked about that a little bit. But this is really about, so you'll find that let's say you get a brand new car, right? And you have a car loan of $30,000. That's gonna actually make your credit go down a little bit because you suddenly have this big balance, right? But as you pay your car loan down and four years in, you're down to $7,000, your credit score's gonna go up as long as you keep making on-time payments. Your credit score, if you max out your credit cards and you're just typically, even if you pay them off in full every month, if you're using all of your credit, you'll see your credit score go down because you're using all of your credit. And credit cards love to loan you money, but they also, and they love for you to pay only the minimum, but they also want you to make payments to your credit card. So they will, if a car company sees or a mortgage in particular, if you're looking to purchase a house, you wanna make sure that your credit card balances are down because that's gonna affect them giving you a loan because if they see that you have high credit limit, they may reduce the amount that they loaned to or they may not loan to you at all until you get your credit card balances down. Yes? Is there a detriment to your credit score as to? No, in fact, I always tell people, if you, so maybe you got your first credit card in college, right, and you never use it, having that is actually, this goes into the credit length, 15% of your credit score is based on how long you've had credit. So if you quote, like it's funny, I'm in my 50s and they say that my lowest reason for my score to be lower than it is is because of my length of credit history and that's because I paid off my mortgage and I don't have an old credit card anymore. So I look like I'm young in the credit system even though I'm not, even though I've had credit since I was 21. So things sort of fall off your credit report after a while and so your credit length, I mentioned earlier, younger people tend to not have the super high scores because they're just young, they haven't been in the system long enough. And so as you get older, as long as you're making your payments on time and you're not getting too many loans because that's another thing, type of credit, right? So one credit card isn't gonna get you an 800 credit score but having a variety of credit, so whether that's a mortgage, a personal loan, a car loan, a student loan, those are varieties of credit, some are credit lines like a credit card, some are installment loans like a car or a mortgage are considered installment loans and they all sort of weigh differently too, right? A house weighs a little bit more because it's a bigger responsibility than say a credit card. A car will be helpful for you if you've never really had a lot of credit, that can boost your credit loan because that's also a big responsibility playing for a car. So types of credit impact your credit score. And then the final thing is how often are you applying for credit? So new credit. Has anyone gone to apply for a car loan recently? No, well if you did, if you had your credit score looked at, you would see that they had like seven different inquiries because they were going to seven different credit unions and banks to see how can I get the best, how can I get the best rate for this person? And that would actually impact your credit score negatively temporarily until you got your loan and then once you start to make payments your credit score would go back up. So those are sort of temporary things. But what they really raise red flags on are people who are jumping from bank to bank looking for a loan and getting rejected, right? Those are the kinds of things that will cause your credit score to go down. So that's really what makes up your score and simple things like bringing down your balance on credit cards can boost your score very quickly. Like in a month, from a previous month to the next month you can see your score go up if you've reduced your credit card balances. I remember seeing someone score, because I've looked at hundreds of credit scores, go up by 100 points just from their student loan being in deferment and then it went into its first month of payment like that a payment was due and they'd made their first payment, their score jumped by 100 points which I'd never seen. But so there's ways that you can take steps to improve your credit if it's not. Liz, are there some questions? Oh, sure, yeah, sorry. Why is it that the way that they look at your credit score is different like there's the hard look or the soft look? Yes, that's a good question. Why? Why is that different? Because there's something called a soft inquiry and a hard inquiry. So a soft inquiry is like if you were to come to me and say, Liz, could you pull my credit report? I have a contract with TransUnion who's one of the three credit bureaus. I pull your credit report. It's for informational purposes only. Same thing with credit karma. You may have an account with credit karma. You can pull your credit every day. It's you looking at your credit in order to see how you're doing, how you can improve. Whereas a hard inquiry is actually looking for a loan. And so when you're looking for a loan, that is an immediate red flag that you need money, right? And so that's why it's considered, that's why your credit score can go down because it's like, oh, suddenly Liz needs money. Liz doesn't have money, she needs to borrow money, right? It could be a completely legitimate reason why I need to borrow money. I may just want to get a new credit card because I get points on it, right? Or I may be looking to purchase a home, right? And those are legitimate reasons, but they raise a red flag that you're looking to borrow. And so immediately your credit score will just go down a tad. Now, if I were doing that over and over again, because I kept getting rejected by banks, that's an even bigger flag, Liz is desperate for money, right? And so we have to lower her credit score because we don't know her at all. We don't know where she, you know, we can look up where she lives, but we don't know her personal, we don't know anything about her, except for her credit score. And that is sort of a universal number that is shared among banks for them to say, is this person a risk? It's all about risk. Because you're not asking for money. You're just looking at your score. So when a hard inquiry is when you go to the bank to make, you know, you're looking to get a credit card or you're looking. So it's really, it's just for informational purposes for you and you're not looking for money when you do your own credit karma or you come to me. But if you go to a bank, you're looking for money. It's all right. That's okay. Because so I went to open a bank account for my business and is that like because they're looking at all the different cards you have or different accounts you have? Like I just don't understand like why it's so different. Like I guess that they're looking at it, but I guess they don't understand why it's so different for them to look at my score or they need to look at my score. Yeah. Oh, there's no difference in the score. They're gonna see the same score. They're gonna see the same exact report. It's just, if they're looking at it. Now if you were just opening a bank account and not like a, you might have done a line of credit or something like that for your business. No, it was just, it was just a bank account. If it was just a bank account, they weren't running your credit. They were running, they might have been if you were at a brand new bank doing something called check systems, which is like a bank's credit report. But that's not, that doesn't have any effect on your credit score. Like your regular FICO score is what it's called or Vantage, that's what credit karma uses is Vantage. They're both just scoring mechanisms, companies that do scores. So they're seeing the same exact thing that you're seeing, but they're seeing that through, they're just looking at it to, if they're looking at your credit score because you're getting a line of credit for your checking account or something like that, they're looking to see is, you know, Sabrina gonna pay her money back, right? Is she a risk to us? If we give her a $10,000 line of credit, can we trust that she's gonna pay that back? And so they'll look at your credit score in order to determine whether or not to give you that $10,000. But if you're just opening an account, they're not pulling your credit score for that purpose. But if you're applying for car insurance, they are, right? Because they have to set the premium, right? And they'll say, and you don't necessarily know that you've agreed to this, but you have at some point agreed over the phone or in your application that you can have a credit score. And that's also, that is in a hard inquiry because that doesn't necessarily lower your score, but it does have an impact on what your premium is gonna be. Yeah, so I think the full is, a soft and a hard inquiry looking at the same score, a soft inquiry won't negatively impact a hard inquiry may. So that's sort of the, may lower your score slightly. Yeah. A few points. It's not a big deal. Yes. I was advised to freeze access to my credit scores when I'm older. Which I did. And I know how to unfreeze it. Just say I need to get in the car. Is that gonna adversely affect me that they've been frozen? No, you would just need to give permission to unfreeze them so that they could, so that they could look at your, your credit score. I know when they first started that it was a little hard to unfreeze that, you know, I'm gonna thaw them. I don't know if the word would be. I'm gonna thaw your credit score. But yeah, that's, it's not a bad thing to do, but it does become like, if you wanted to even look at your own credit score, you might not be able to until you unfreeze it. Why would you unfreeze it? Because it was a lot of breaches. Yeah, there's a lot of, you know, people. Just some information. Yeah. And you know, I guess I'm, I'm not one for freezing my credit score, my credit report only because I just feel like my whole world is out there, right? Everything's electronic in my life. And, you know, my credit score probably isn't, I mean, I know I, you'll get letters that say we've been breached, right? Probably every one of us has had something that's been breached before. I did actually just have someone use my ATM card in Poland and took money out of my account, but I got it all back. And that was a whole different story. That was, I didn't even have, I was in Poland, but I did not have a credit card there. I did not have my bank account there. And so it was just a very weird situation that happened with my bank. But anyway, those are, those are, that's a good question, but yeah, you have to unfreeze it. Did someone else have one? You can also do things like a mandatory match on social security numbers. So in the nineties, right before the year 2000, I went to get a car loan because I wanted to keep my credit fresh. And I thought, well, I can pay for this car or I could just get a car loan just to keep my credit fresh. I was denied in seconds. I was like, what? I pulled my credit report and there were two Lori Woods that lived in a similar address. One with bankruptcy and one with really good credit. So it took me six months to clean that up. So it's really important to pull your credit report and make sure that the things that are on there are yours because it does take some time to clean them up. So pull it, do that soft inquiry and understand it because you can be negatively impacted. And it took me a while to fix it. Yeah, and that, yeah, that's an unfortunate story, but it's not actually rare, right? You do see sometimes that the other thing that can happen too is that, and generally the fraud that happens on credit reports is through family, right? So it's someone in your family who's applying for a loan in your name and then they end up not. That's another thing about credit that I didn't mention here. Here's some of the things that I just talked about. They came through on the bullet points is that I always say cosine with a caution, right? I guess I'm cosigning my son's apartments, right? I must have wanted to build out the application for him. And so just be sure that if you're cosigning, especially sometimes people will do this for children to get them started, that if they are late in their payments that negatively affects you too. You equally own a loan that you've cosigned with. And I always, I work with a lot of single women and they would often get into situations with boyfriends where they would cosine on something and then the boyfriend would leave and the sad story would be, well, I, you know, he took the car too and I still owe on it, right? And so just be really careful about cosigning, trust the person and know that there's always a risk. Yes. Do you advise loan consolidation if you're trying to like lower some of your interest rates? Yeah, sure. How does that affect your credit? So anytime you apply for a loan, there is sort of a slight negative impact. And if you have a lot of credit cards and you have high balances on them, your credit score is probably not terribly high. It's probably in the 600s as long as you're making on-time payments. So some people do play that game of like let's transfer over to 0%. You just have to be really careful when you do that. One company that I do recommend to folks who have really high credit is called, it's a non-profit debt consolidation company called Green Path. And Green Path is a company that will, basically they'll review what you have in all your outstanding credit cards. They'll even do car loans. They'll do loans and collections. They'll take on anything that you have that you need to sort of pull together. And they come up with a plan for you to pay it all off within three to five years. And you make the payment to them and they distribute those payments to the creditors. And they've negotiated plans with the creditors. So they've helped lower interest rates. There is a monthly fee for Green Path, but the amount that you save compared to what you would be doing if you were just paying the minimum and paying those high interest on credit cards is so much less. It's thousands and thousands of dollars less. Credit score? A little bit, yeah, but I always say to people, that should be the least of your worries. I'd rather save $10,000 and have my credit score go down, right? Or I don't want to be, I don't want to be paying these credit cards for the next 15 years. So Green Path is definitely a healthy way to an irreputable, and there's a couple of them out there that are called debt consolidation versus debt settlement. Debt settlement is totally different. You don't necessarily want to get involved in that, but a debt consolidation company can help you. Yes? If you look them up online, is it trustworthy that they're who they say they are? You probably want to double check with someone, but there are lists of who's accepted in the state, like that the state will allow business to be done. But I'll tell you, there are hundreds and hundreds of them that Vermont will allow to use. But I meant, Oh, Green Path. What do you have specifically? Oh, you'll find them on the web. They have a, it's like Green Path.org. Or no, I forget if it's org or comm. I think it's probably org. But you'll find it right away. I would say yes, usually just, you probably already know this, but make sure when you're looking at your URL, like when you're looking at the website, that there's the locked thing there, and that if you hover over it, there isn't something hidden underneath there. That's a different address, but those are safe ways to make sure that especially you get those emails, it's like, oh wait, I work with that person and then you hover over it. It's like, no, I don't work with that person. That's asking me to go rush them to the bank with money, right? I have a question. I think we have a few more questions here. I have a 19-year-old grandson who is buying the car soon. He doesn't want to finance it. He wants to make the money out of his savings account. He has a debit card, not a credit card, so I'm sure you have no credit score at this point. How can you build credit? That's a great question. So building credit, you can start when you're young, you can also sort of rebuild credit, or if you've never had credit before, you can start at any age. So building credit is either one, to start taking out your first loan, and that usually requires you to have a job. Actually, it always does, right, except for a student loan. You don't have to have a job to get a student loan. But is to have a job. One way that's an easy way to start is through something called a credit builder loan. Credit unions offer them. Essentially, it's where he could put, like, anywhere from $100 to $500 in a savings account becomes a secured account, and then the bank or credit union will loan him that money back, and then he'll make monthly payments that include some interest to pay back that secured loan. Another option is a secured credit card. So as little as $500, he would put down as a security deposit, and then he could use the credit card. The trick, though, is if you have a $500 credit card, what did I say was the rule of how much percentage you don't want to use? Yeah, like 30%. So no more than 30%, which would be $150, right? So a 19-year-old, if you trust them with only spending $150 on their credit card, you probably don't. So usually, you've kind of got to gauge, like, is this person ready for a credit card? If they're not, a secured loan is a really good way to start. Do you have some thoughts? Well, they can also, so if you trust the younger person, they can start to piggyback on your credit. So if you have a credit card and you add that younger person as an authorized user and they use it, they start to assume some of your credit. So, but you get the negative hit if there's a problem. So, but you'll also get the bill so you can monitor and see what's happening. So there are ways along what was talked about to start helping those younger people. It may be a credit card that you haven't used for a long time. Maybe you're having them use one of those and making sure that it gets paid off every month. You know, just charging your gas and paying it. And trick is, you don't have to wait until you get the bill to pay it. So you can use a credit card like a debt card. You charge something, you immediately go and pay it. Charge it, go and pay it. And you pay a lot less interest if you pay your credit cards that way. And pay it in full every month, right? So you just want to make sure you pay it in full every month. Because otherwise, if you don't, that next cup of coffee that you charge on your credit card is gonna be starting from the day you charge it, it's just gonna be earning that 17, 21% interest rate. So you definitely, if you have credit card balances, try to avoid using them if you can until you pay them down. Because you're just immediately on the next purchase, you're starting to pay interest. There's no more grace period on your purchases. And in the interest of time, I don't want to rush through things because we do want to give you time for the activity and also just continue to ask questions. The next thing we're gonna talk about is a part of your financial wellness, is your budget. So knowing your family budget. Lori's gonna be sharing, I think, some hand out budget handouts, or we can email them to you. We're gonna go through the setting. Yeah, so this is just an example of a budget that I use when I'm working with a client. So I'm gonna go through sort of three pages, but the first page is sort of, what are your everyday monthly expenses, right? We all have groceries, we all have rent or mortgage, we've got our cell phone, we've got heat that we might pay for gas for the car, car loan, car insurance, childcare, all that kind of stuff. So those are your regular monthly expenses. And so in this case, the total monthly expenses for this family comes to 3,065 every month. But then I also like to not forget those yearly expenses. Like in about a month, someone's gonna deliver my firewood and I'm gonna have to pay them $900, right? So I don't have to do that every month, but I do need to make sure that I have that in my yearly expenses. So in this case, I've got a cat, you don't wanna forget about pet care, they've got one camp that they pay for their kids, there's the Christmas and holidays, there's tires, right? Those are all those big expenses that we don't necessarily even do every year, but we wanna budget for them. Car maintenance, at a minimum, I tell people put $1,500, right? And that's usually not even enough, right? At this point, it's probably $2,500 would be a minimum for one car. So you wanna make sure that you have those things in your yearly budget. So in this case, for the yearly expenses, this person comes to just under $400 a month that they should technically set aside, right? Because those things are gonna happen, we just don't know when, right? And then in this case, they've got one credit card with a minimum monthly of $25. So that's where they don't have any student loans. So the final thing here is that, and usually this is just one page, but because of the slides, we're putting it into three, we're looking at the income. So then we have, this person is, they've got a couple sources of income, there's like a monthly paycheck of $1,200 that they get, and then somebody's paid bi-weekly $820 every two weeks and that's after their taxes and everything like that. So they also have a second job where they earn about $100 a month. So they're taking home $2,900, but we did learn that between the monthly and those yearly, they actually need 3,466. So on a monthly basis, they don't really quite have enough, right? They're short $526 every month. But over here, I kind of put in some other factors. This is a family, remember they were playing daycare? So if they're paid every two weeks, we get those magical third-page tax twice a month, right? Every twice a year. And so we want to factor that in as part of their money in. They also get a tax return that averages around $5,000 while they have kids, right? And they're working. So that's not always gonna be the case, but in this particular year, they're gonna get a tax return. So they actually get on average an extra 553. So technically they can do this, right? But you gotta be really careful, right? Because we don't wanna get that magical tax return and go on vacation, because we didn't put that in our budget over here. But I will say that I would say most of the time that I'm working with someone, there isn't a way to cover that deficit. And the only way that it can be done is through decreased spending or increased money, right? This is where we talked about the debt load. So a healthy monthly debt, including housing payments as rent or mortgage should not exceed 45% of your gross before taxes monthly income. So here's, I'll just give you an example. Gross monthly income after taxes only is 3,500 for this person. So that means that housing, and this is really hard, especially for you young people. So Lori and I grew up in a different time period than some of you young people in here, right? Housing was less expensive, interest rates were different, right? There's a lot of factors that allowed us to purchase a home in our 20s that 20 year olds and 30 year olds are having a big challenge doing right now. So I wanna acknowledge that just because we were able to, didn't mean that we pulled ourselves up by our boot strings. We had a different economic situation at the time in the United States that we were in an opportunity to be homeowners. And so a healthy amount of housing debt is 30%, but we know that in Vermont it's often 50%, right? And so this 1,050 would be the amount that they'd wanna spend on housing. That includes if you're a homeowner, mortgage, taxes and insurance, right? So that's not a very big, fancy house. In fact, that's probably like a $700 mortgage is what that is, which is probably a $100,000 loan, right? I mean, at a $150,000 loan. So your other debts, car, student loan, loan payments, credit card is in an extra 30 plus 15 equals 45, so you don't want it to exceed 525. So this and why? Because going back to the budget, remember our budget back here? All those things, firewood, hair care, Christmas and holidays, we have to pay for that out of something, right? Out of our money. So that's where that 45% comes in. And we thought we'd just throw in an example of the credit card interest example. So in this case here, to give you a sort of a sense of, especially with these height, like this one here, the for regular purchases, it's 17 and a half percent. If you were to do a cash advance, do you know what that is? Like you go to the ATM and you pull money out, 27.24% and that's immediate. You don't get a grace period on a cash advance. And so in this case, the balance is 2,900. They're saying, oh, but all you have to pay is $40, right? That's like less than 2% of the balance. They're telling you you have to pay. And it's due on 10-2. And they say, if you paid only the minimum, it's gonna take you 10 years to pay off this $2,900 balance and you'll end up paying an estimated total of $5,700. So it's almost twice in interest. But if you paid 105 only, it'll take you three years and you'll save 1960. You'll only spend 3,776 of that. Or if you pay it off in full, you'll just pay the $2,916. I'm sorry. And that's like the stuff that you want. Because what ends up happening, especially when we look back on that budget and it was a negative number, how do people continue to do it month after month? How do you think they do it? That's it. So this is why this is sort of a doom scenario, right? So I'm a single mom, I'm three teenagers. I'm working three jobs. The budget, it's doom, right? So there's no way to do the things that you're suggesting to do. It's, I will completely agree with you that, and I've said this and I'll say it again, being a single parent is one income, right? And in your case, it's like one plus because you're working three jobs. I mean, for this reason. Right? Exactly. Look at the budget and there's no way. And so, what do some people do? They either have partners, they get roommates, right? Because two incomes makes all the difference. And when you don't have the two incomes, it's until your kids are grown up, it's gonna really hard. You're just getting more expensive, honestly. I've got three in college. I mean, there's just three. And guess what? When they get out of college, I'm done. Like, I have one more year and then I'm like, woo-hoo, I am done paying for you. This is what they said to me. Mom, what happens next year with our rent? And I said, you're paying it. You're getting a job. And they're like, okay, just checking. I'm like, yeah. You're off the payroll. Right, I'm like, and this was a funny thing. They both asked it separately. So it wasn't like they were just like, they were both curious like, are they gonna keep paying my rent? I'm like, no, I'm not gonna keep paying your rent. Okay, so yes, and I totally agree that this is what makes it hard. And this is why it makes it hard for women. Janet said it in her speech, right? For the childcare costs, for everything, the costs of kids in college, food, food. Food for kids, I mean, you're talking, and so sometimes, and in a situation like yours, if you qualify for food stamps by all means, apply for a food stamp. Use a food shelf if you need to. Like those are things that are ways to sort of help bridge what are really expensive times right now, especially with inflation, right? The cost of food has gone up. And I do not, for one minute, do I say to someone like this, all she needs to do is pull herself up by her bootstraps. There's no bootstraps, right? I mean, most people out there are working and they're trying to get their bills paid. They're trying to take care of their families and feed their families. And it's not always possible to do it on your own. But that's my savings at that point. I mean, I'm 65, but I was the same, I mean, and I had it. I was both in pretty low wage jobs. We just had enough to get by. Well, that's it. There wasn't enough and didn't have retirement. And there may not even be enough to get by, right? Like, hopefully your kids get some jobs if they're older so that they can at least take care of themselves, probably buy their own clothes, stuff like that at this point and better. But I mean, I think it's that the budget was balanced. Yes. That's it. Yes, exactly. And now groceries cost twice as much. The oil cost three times as much. There's no savings. So you gotta use the credit card to get groceries? Exactly. You use the credit card to get groceries. That's exactly what happens. And then you pay your credit card so you're not necessarily killing your credit because you're able to make your payment, but you haven't ended up having to put it back on the credit card. That's exactly what happens. And you're not the only one that this happens to. And I will say that once your kids are done with college, things should get easier for you. And that's the other good news is that I still have 15 years left of work, right? Now that my kids are pretty much done. So that's when often women in particular start to build their wealth. It's in the last, like, 15 years of their working life because they had no chance to otherwise, right? And... Well, and I think that, you know, looking at, so there are lots of programs in Vermont as Liz says. So Calstone can help you look at the budget, see if there are things that can be tailored. I'm sure you've done a great job with it. Oh my gosh, the local credit even in the summer, that's great. But that's the budget they put together in their life. We'll have that. Right. But there are also, so now that you know the numbers, there are lots of oil programs that just came out that are helping to subsidize oil costs. So I think this is the trick. I'm not low income. Low income. Right. I am grateful for my education. Right. And even as a person with an education I'm grateful for working three jobs that I love because I'm lucky enough to have the education that lets me do what I want to do. I can't do it. Yeah. As a single parent. As a single parenting is, it's that, no it is, it's... And that rent number on that budget, I wish that was my rent. My teeny tiny crappy apartment for the four of us. Yeah. I know this was also before like all the huge price increases, but you're right. I mean, it's, yeah, and I don't have a better answer, right? I wish I did. Where's the magic? That's what I was going to say. Right. I wish I had the magic to share. Right. It's very good. For any commerce business, try listing on eBay, Mercari, Potschmark. That's how I did mine. Because I was doing the same thing. My parents don't pay for college or rent or anything. I moved out very young. And that's what I did. I started going to garage sales and Goodwill and picking up books and use clothes. And even if you list one item a day, because I'm sure you're very tired at the end of that day. I was very tired during full time and working two jobs at school. So you can do that. And you'd be surprised what you can sell things for. And I mean, it's crazy. I buy curtains for $5 and sell them for $80. So you can try that. I have a few people who do that. And it can be a very lucrative side hustle. It can help make those things happen. And the other handout that I have that I can email to you is a looking at side hustles that you can do from home that may be able to help supplement that income. Because as Liz said, there's no magic. It's you either increase the inflow or you decrease the outflow. And I'm working with a woman who's a single mom. She's a nurse in San Francisco and has three boys as well. 13, 11, and 9. And she started coaching with me about six months ago. And every night when she's working on her stuff for our meetings, she tells the boy, I'm working on the finances. So they're like, mom, what is this finance stuff? You're all suddenly working on it. So she sat down with them and she showed them what they wish she was doing. And it has an impact on kids. So I think it's also really important that our children know kind of what it costs to live because they're gonna step into it. So it's part of that education. It's part of that generational wealth building knowledge for them to know what it costs. And to also look at education like, does everyone need to go to an Ivy League school? No. Can we go to a state school that's gonna give us a really solid education and not tank our future with student loans? Absolutely. And can we find great opportunities for support through grants and money that we don't have to pay back? So there are lots of opportunities. So looking for them, though, does take time. So I think people like Capstone, I have some suggestions. It's really just talking about with other people. And one of my girlfriends, we lived in San Francisco, we joked around, we're like, we're gonna create a female commune where we all just buy one house and share the responsibility of the kids so that there are two incomes and children that are brothers and sisters. So I have two colleagues that rent out rooms. They're single parents and they rent out rooms to adults to help people pay. They own their homes, so they were able to do that. But it's how they got by. Because again, it's really hard on children's income. I completely acknowledge that. Yes. Does that buying property together a model of a supported life? You mean like if you buy it with a friend or something like that? For tenants and mortgages, yeah. Yeah, it's fine. It's just you both have to have good credit. You both have to have jobs, right? There's, I kind of always describe your... Well, look, they have chalk here. Yes. Like, it's a school's room. Right, I didn't know they still use chalk. But like your credit, your income, and your debt are sort of, these are the pillars that you need or the points that you need in order to be able to get a loan. So all these things have to sort of fall together. You can be unemployed and have great credit and you won't get a loan necessarily because you don't have a job. You can have great income, but bad credit and that will impact your ability to get a loan. When you think about it, the husband and wife are two people and they get a mortgage, right? So it's just two different people. So I've bought property many times with friends. So when I lived in San Francisco, there was no way to do it unless it was multiple people. Yes. Just a quick comment. I worked at a college for over 20 years. VSEC has a list of scholarships. There's probably a hundred of them. They used to be a booklet on loan. Now it's online if you go. Students overlook that. I have students who are coming from low income families who graduated with no debt because they spent a lot of time going through that booklet. Where am I eligible for writing essays, getting help with the essay? It is the best way. There's a lot that's available. There's a lot that's available. But I will say, as a parent, spent a lot of time with that purple book. Every dollar my kid's gotten scholarship was deducted from their institutional aid. So all those hours were not helpful. So now that my youngest is coming up, I'm gonna get a job there because that's at least money in the bank because those scholarships reduced the amount. And you're right, some very low income people can get away with having very little debt or go to a college where they don't have to spend that much because they get different grants and scholarships. But I know we didn't do this week in the same thing yet, wasn't it? They're changing some of the rules for 2024, sorry. Like grandparents can now provide some funding for the college application and it doesn't decrease. So that's a new rule coming up, I think it's in 2024. So finally, before we get to our little exercise, I know it feels like we're rushing through it and I love the questions. And this should have been a three hour workshop, right? We're gonna just touch on retirement. So it's never too early to save. So if you have available to you a 401k or a 403b at your workplace, you wanna strive for 10 to 15% of your salary. You certainly wanna be able to contribute at least the minimum that you do to get the match. So if your employer, so for example, at Capstone, they'll give me 4% as long as I give 5%. So I can give more, I can give 10%, but they'll give me 4%. If I give less than 5%, they'll give me less than 4%. So you wanna make sure you understand what's available through your employer. And I also wanna, a lot of employers are moving away from this, but a lot of them have where you have to be what's called vested before you actually get that match. And that means you need to stay with your organization a certain amount of time if you actually wanna collect on that match that they've given you. And so certainly before you stay there for two years and move on, if all you need to do is stay a third year, you're financially better off doing that if you can. And it makes sense financially for you to do that so that you get your employer's match. There's also something called like in self-employed 401ks, if you're a self-employed person and then there's also, well I think I said wrong, yeah. So yeah, the self-employed and solo 401k for self-employed people. And then there's just IRAs if no place is available and there's something, there's two types. There's traditional IRAs and rock IRAs. There's also usually in your employer-based 401k, you can choose to either have it be rock, meaning it's after-tax contributions that you've made so you don't get a tax, you don't see your income lowered, your taxable income lowered. But the good news about that is that you never get taxed on that retirement again. So you're taxed on it in the year that you give the money but as it grows and when you use it and you earn interest on it, none of that gets taxed. If you passed it on to your family, they would have to pay taxes on it. But you and your lifetime don't have to pay taxes on it. And so you can often start with as little as like $500, $250 depending on the financial institution. And for any kind of savings, I always say make it automatic, right? Like take just something out of your paycheck so you don't see it or set it up if you're self-employed, set it up so that automatically the money goes there to your retirement. And then just quickly on social security, social security has become an important part of people's retirement. It really was not designed to be the main retirement for people because in the old days they had pensions. So if you worked for, when they still do, like universities have pensions, schools have pensions, but like in the old days, say you worked for like Boeing or something like that, right? They might have had a pension fund, which was like a guaranteed income that you would get every month until you died. And maybe if you set it up so that your spouse gets it until they die, and that's your pension. But those became very expensive for companies to maintain and to fund. So the onus was switched to you to save for your retirement. And we'll give you a little extra money if you work for us, right? So it went from them paying it and then going, many companies not really being able to afford or fund their pension plans to you being responsible. And that's called a defined contribution. So social security was never designed to fully support you in your retirement. And so, and women in particular, because we take time off from work, lose those earning years in our retirement because what they do is they take the highest 30 earning years that you have to figure out what your monthly payment is. So women traditionally have a far lower social security payment than men because they've taken time off in the workplace and their higher earning years are when they're older and then they retire. So the longer, if you anticipate living a long time and you can wait until you're 72 to take your social security, that'll be your highest available balance that you can get. You can take it as early as 62, but it's a much lower balance or a much lower monthly payment amount. And some people like to wait till their full retirement age, which for me I think is 67. And I anticipate like how are they gonna fund, right? There's all these worries like, what's gonna happen to social security Medicare, right? How are they gonna fund it is probably through raising the age, cause people are working longer for you to get your full retirement balance. Some of the young people, it's 67 today, if you're young in this room, but it could turn to 70, right? Or they will increase the percentage that we give to social security, which is like 7.6% or something. So social security, if you go to ssa.gov, you can see what you're projected to get. But again, that is dependent on you working until your full retirement age, assuming that you're making that salary that you're making for the rest of your life. So it's a little bit, this isn't a guarantee of what you're actually gonna get is what I'm trying to say. And the news is, is that by the time I retire, it might be 30% less anyway. So just keep that in mind when you're thinking about and planning for your retirement. So we have a few more minutes and Lori, I'm gonna pass it on to you. And we might just make a little switch. Okay. We were gonna walk through a handout and have you work on it? But I think we might, we might punt on that. You can give it to you as homework. So financial goals, why do we wanna establish them, right? So financial goals give us something to work towards, gives us focus as we're working to sitting down and planning our budget and our spending and how we're gonna make the dollars stretch, right? Cause that's what we end up doing, stretching them out. If you have a partner setting financial goals together, make sure you're playing on the same team. That partner doesn't necessarily need to be your spouse. That partner could be the children in your home if you're a single parent, right? So it's making sure you're playing on the same team so that your children understand how you're spending the dollars. So they, you know, like if they just, they're eating because they feel like it rather than eating because they're hungry. Like, you know, there's a lot we spend on snacks and junk food and that kind of stuff. So really make sure you're playing on the same team by having financial goals and bringing the people and your family into the conversation. It also helps us to ensure that we're planning on what we want to do with our money. So if there is extra money that we can stretch out of that budget, she wants to be let in the dollars loss. The, that we're planning what we wanna do with our money. So it helps us to do that. And setting one goal at a time so that we can, you know, we can measure that goal needed and then set the next one. So just working on one at a time as you're starting to add financial goal planning into your monthly to-dos is a good thing to do. And also give every dollar a job, right? So if you, you know what your paychecks are, right? Don't leave $200 in your checking account because guess what, it's going. If it's there, it's gone, right? So I sat down with this woman who's a teacher and, you know, we put her on a different kind of budget I call the plan ahead method. So we take every paycheck and we allocate every dollar in that paycheck and where it's going and some of it's going into savings accounts, right? So we put them into, you know, a gift savings account. It might be $5 a month that goes in there but it's an amount that's set aside for those annual purchases or those things that happen once at, you know, or the finance or the emergency fund. So, you know, we do this paycheck at a time and she's like, oh my God, like this changed my life because I used to just like, you know, play the shell game with money and move it around and but if I look at it paycheck at a time and as soon as I get that paycheck, I make those payments that are going to get paid with that paycheck, there's not money sitting in my savings account or in my checking account for me to do anything else with because it's already been allocated. So things like that can be a game changer and, you know, just looking at your money differently. So give every dollar a job so that it doesn't create its own because if it's left to just do its own thing, it's not going to do what you want it to do. So what we were going to do and I'm going to, this is audience participation time, Liz and I can take more questions or we can go through this handout. We were just going to go through financial goals and we have a handout that you can fill out. I can go through how we would do it but we were going to give you about 15 or 20 minutes and we're going to be right at the end of time. So if you'd rather spend the time asking questions if there are things that you'd like us to cover, we'd be happy to do that. I think there's an app called, I think it's called EveryDollar, you can use. Yes. And it does exactly what you said and it can actually change the names and everything. I think you need a budget, does that too? Doesn't it? That's right. So what she's talking about is there are apps that you can use for financial budgeting. So EveryDollar is one YNAB or You Need A Budget, YNAB is another one that I use with some of my clients. Some people like to do things on an app and then they find it easier to kind of manage it. You can link your accounts so you can link your credit cards, you can link your banking accounts to it so it sees when you have money coming in it puts the transactions in and you just have to categorize what they are. So that budget that Liz showed earlier you can automate the filling out of that and you can have it start to look for trends and help find ways that you can make money. So there are lots of tools out there like that. There are hundreds of them. But Mint, I use a little bit of the nice thing about Mint is that Mint also gives you your credit score. So it can give you your credit score as well as help you work that budget. YNAB or You Need A Budget, I like that because it gives me month over month reporting. I can just pull up a report that shows in January, here was the income and expenses, February income and expenses. So you can start to see where there are trends seasonally and you can start to see where there are things that you spend money on annually. So as you're putting that budget together it gives you a lot more information. And every dollar, I haven't used that one but YNAB and Mint have used. So they're all good. Just find one that if you're gonna use it, if you're gonna sign up and use one, use it. I know a lot of people who like set it up and then they don't use it. It's, they're really helpful. And be aware that there will be ads. So if they're free, there will be ads and they'll say, hey, here's a new credit card for you. So be careful of the ads. But some of them are helpful because they target, they look at the data, it's all artificial intelligence, they look at the data, they look at what's going in there and then they target ads to you based on your spending and your income. So there is targeted advertisement. So other questions? Yes. Loans versus savings, say you have half the money to pay for a car or use a car. Is it better to borrow the full amount and hang on to your savings so you have the reserve? I go back and forth, because interest rates obviously are low on savings. That's right. That's right. So first of all, I'm gonna talk about savings because you gave me an in there. So how many people have their money and savings accounts at their bank? How many had a credit union? Oh, that's a lot of credit unions. How much interest are you earning per month? Nothing. Like 0.01% or 0.1%. If you did nothing more than take your savings account and put it in a high yield savings account, so the one that I use is called allyallly.com and I don't promote them, I don't get anything from anyone using them. But their interest rate right now is 2.15. So if you're in a passbook savings and you're getting 0.1 on your money, I don't know, that's kind of like you're not, it's not even beating inflation. So I would first of all put my savings in a higher yield savings account so that you're getting a little bit more every month. And what's nice about these high yield savings accounts is you can create buckets. So you could put your annual, your monthly savings in there and you're saying, five dollars a month goes into gifts, $10 goes into my car maintenance fund, some goes into my emergency fund. You can set up all those savings envelopes so that you can have visibility to how much you've put aside. And one of the things that I work on with my clients is that if you're gonna put it aside and you're gonna have a plan ahead budget, you can only spend on those things that are luxury items when you have it. So you've gotta put it aside and you visibly know when you have it because it's in that bucket, right? So it's that austerity measure of working with our finances. So on a car loan, what I would look at is if that money was in a savings account or invested, am I gonna make more on the interest in an investment or am I gonna pay more interest on a car loan? So if the car loan is 5% but I've got it in the stock market and I've historically been making 10%, I might do, just to go let in. It'd be your money. Then I might look at that. And some of that is emotional. So if you remember earlier, I said, some decisions about finances are emotional. Like, I hate having a car payment because the moment you drive that car off a lot, it loses value, right? So I do not take car loans. I have not since I was 30 years old. So I will only buy a car when I've saved the money for it and I pay cash for it. So that's a personal opinion. Do you have a? Yeah, I mean, it depends. You wanna have some sort of emergency savings if you don't. And again, like she said, it's often a psychological thing. And it also can deal with cash flow, right? So a car loan is gonna give you an extra monthly payment every month. So yeah, either way. And I also, I'll just sort of say the opposite of what Lori just said is that I like to keep my money in Vermont because of the Vermont credit unions. And so just to give you a perspective of 2% versus 0%, if you put in $1,000, that's like a dollar a month that you're earning. And so is it worth putting your money out of state where the credit unions really are there to support our local communities, right? And they do that through your money, right? You doing business with them. So that's just my little spiel. I would agree with that too. So it really just depends, right? And sometimes your credit unions, so I was having this conversation with a friend because I talk about money with all my friends. So we were sitting down and having lunch and she said, you know what? I just went to my local credit union and they gave me 2.5%. So ask, right? You can also buy the iBond, I think, through October, which is 9.63% if you can give. And it's completely safe to the Vermont Treasury and Vermont. So the US Treasury Direct, if you go to treasurerdirect.gov, I think it is you can invest up to $10,000 per calendar year per person and get 9.6 for six months. And you have to keep it there for a year in order to get that 9.63%. And it will be adjusted again and we still have inflation. So I don't know what the new rate's gonna be, but it's completely backed by the government. Right, so state or federal, take your pick where you put your money. And like Liz said, that that's a guaranteed income. And that might be enough if you put it in to make that car payment that's gonna add to your monthly budget. So it's really kind of looking at everything you've got. So it's hard to take one decision and say, oh, this is what I do. I sit down with all of my clients and the first thing we do is a net worth and a monthly spending budget. So that we're making decisions with all of the information in front of us. Because it's hard to just pick and choose what's the right thing. It's gotta fit into your life situation. Okay, thank you. So I think we're gonna, I'm gonna make an executive decision. We're gonna skip the goal setting. We're gonna skip that. And we're just gonna start homework. Yeah, we can take it. So smart goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound. So if you're gonna set up an emergency fund, you wanna put $1,000 in it and you can take $200 a month out of your expenditure expenditures to put towards that emergency savings. Well, it's gonna take you five months, right? So make it specific, make it measurable, make it achievable and make it realistic and time bound. It may take you 10 months. It may take you 12 months. But just understand what that's gonna take. This is the goal setting exercise. You can have the handout if you want it. But your question, and whoops, your question and what Lois was just saying, there are lots of financial wellness organizations in Vermont and I think this is a little more important than the goals for working. You know, Mercy, if you're a small, if you're a woman who's starting a small business, Mercy Connections, Claire Wheeler is here today for Mercy Connections. They have a women's small business program and they help women get their businesses started. So there's lots of support from them. The Vermont Women's Fund, Meg is here today and that's an organization that can provide funding to women's businesses. So the one o'clock, the martial arts women who are doing the training on defense happens to be one of my friends and they just got a grant from the Vermont Women's Fund to keep their program going. So there are lots of organizations that are funding women's work in the state. The Vermont Community Loan Fund. So Vermont Community Loan Fund, you can donate money to or you can invest your money in and there is a guaranteed return on that as well. And they take that money then and loan it out and 63% of the money that Vermont Community Loan Fund loans out goes to women-owned businesses. It's not by design, it's by what's happening in the state is because Pat Leahy's been doing women's economic opportunity conference for 20 years, 25 years, maybe. But the leadership team is a lot of women on the Vermont Community Loan Fund. Credit unions, Liz mentioned that. And then Liz, can you talk a little bit about Greensaving Smart and Community Action? Yeah, so the Vermont Community Action Partnership is throughout the entire state. There's Capstone, which is where I'm from, which is the Washington and Memorial counties. There's Brock, which is in like the, sorry, the Rutland area. There's Sefka in Southeast Vermont, NACA in the Northeast Kingdom, and CVOEO, which is up in the Burlington area. So we cover all of the counties in Vermont. And we offer things like fuel assistance. We work with people facing homelessness and eviction. We have the Head Start, Burley Childhood programs. The programs that I oversee at My Community Action are at all the other community action agencies as well, which is the Microbusiness Developments. We do business coaching for free, financial coaching for free. And then we have this thing called Greensaving Smart, which is statewide now, which is what I mentioned earlier, which is doing financial coaching, but with the lens of how can we help you transition away from fossil fuel technologies in your home heating and your transportation costs. Another thing that all the community action partnerships work with, except for NACA, but there's NEDO up there is weatherization. So if your income eligible, and that's based on your family size, they, you can get free weatherization services to weatherize your home if it hasn't been weatherized in 15 years or more. So yeah, so these are programs that really are designed to help many of these women in particular, but just everyone achieve better economic self-sufficiency. Great music, Liz. Yes. Do you want to offer to pull reports for folks? Do you want them to just maybe put an asterisk? Yeah, that would be great, yes. If somebody does, we're happy to, when I get back to the office, pull your credit report if you want to have somebody sort of look at it and give you some professional advice. Just come up here and put a little asterisk next to it and we can help you. So just a couple more slides. So I love quotes and I love Maya Angelou, so she always makes her way into my presentations, but I think the one thing that I, the one quote of hers that I really resonate with is forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn't know before you knew it, right? Experience is the best teacher and we have to learn things before we can bring them into our lives, right? So learn from the people around you, feel comfortable and open to having a conversation. There were a few of you that are recently widowed and you might live close to each other, so have conversations about how to help each other, right, and open up that line of conversation. So just in summary, some of the things that we talked about, talk to people in your life about finances, find your people, you will be surprised at the number of ideas that might come up that you would didn't think about and it's because it didn't come from your experience. Our experience is unique to us so everyone else has a different experience. And one thing I would suggest and I didn't have this in here is there's an organization called Choose Financial Independence, it's Choose F.I. And it's every week you get an email of just the things, the creative things that people are doing to make a 1% improvement in their bottom line. So it's Financial Independence, Retire Early, F-I-R-E, Fire Movement, you know they're talked about. So it's Choose F.I., it's a great organization, there's lots of podcasts, lots of information and just ways to just streamline your budgets. Know your credit scores, know your numbers, know your steps to improve your credit score, know your net worth, measure it. Net worth is something I suggest to my clients that they do once or twice a year, don't need to do it every month. It gets impacted but it's a good to just kind of see the trends happening and establish a budget or a spending plan, whether you do that on a piece of paper, whether you do it in an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet or whether you do it in YNAB or EveryDollar or Mint, whatever works for you, do it and keep it up. I still use spreadsheets, I'm a spreadsheet kind of girl. So I use spreadsheets and I have a lot of them. So whenever my clients are like, oh I'm doing this, I'm like, oh I gotta spreadsheet for that. But just do it, do it and make it a habit. Set and monitor financial goals, you can take the handout if you'd like it and know where to obtain assistance if needed. So we've talked about all those organizations and there are plenty more. So just look for them, find them. Our contact information is here and as we said, everyone who signed in and gave us your email will send you this presentation so you don't have to write copious notes but we'll PDF and send this out to you so you have it. And if you do want Liz and her organization to pull a credit report, feel free to stop up here and put an asterisk by your name and we'll get that taken care of. So thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you.