 So our presenters are Rebecca Hyde who has 13 years experience working in the federal depository libraries. And is currently the government information, political science and sustainability librarian at St. Louis University. Her interest in financial planning dates back at least to age five when she told her parents that she was saving spare change for college. Lucia Orlando is 16 years of experience working in the federal depository libraries. She is currently a research support services librarian at the University of California Santa Cruz. She came late to the importance of financial planning after taking on debt with her very first credit card, which many of us have experienced probably, I'm sure. So thank you very much ladies for agreeing to do this presentation and I will hand it over to you. Thank you so much for the introduction Linda. As Linda said, my name is Rebecca Hyde. I am at St. Louis University. And I'm Lucia Orlando. I'm the research support services librarian and Gundogs librarian at the University of California Santa Cruz. And we're happy to be with you here today to talk about financial literacy resources available from various agencies of the federal government. We'll answer questions at the end, but feel free to add questions to the chat box as we go. So before we begin, we want to let you know that we are not financial experts, but we both work with financial and economic and data through our work with government documents. We were interested in learning more about these resources after we realized there was a need for it from our students. So we did some research and then thought that more people needed to know about this. So we wrote an article in BTWP like Linda mentioned, and then Linda approached us to expand it into a webinar. So our research and experience in this area has shown us that you don't need to be a financial wizard in order to use or help other people use this kind of information. Instead, it helps to have an awareness of what kind of information is out there and a general idea of which agencies it's what and what kind of programs and services they offer, and where you can go for more information. So why are we going to talk about this? As Lucia mentioned, we get students at the reference desk who struggled with basic personal finance concepts. And we suspect that many of you have encountered the same issue among your patrons. In our libraries, we usually saw this play out in two primary ways. One, we got patrons who were desperate and might overshare about their personal circumstances, as I'm sure has happened to all of you. Or we get students taking an academic interest in the topic, like what factors lead to a savings rate among certain age groups, or what would help people living at the poverty level avoid increasing their personal debt. If a student lacks basic financial knowledge, it can be overwhelming to hand them an article from an economic journal right away. So having some more basic resources to get them started is really useful. And of course, these reference issues don't just apply to students, but any patron who might come into your library. Luckily, we have a great partner in the federal government, and they've created many wonderful online resources and marketing tools that we can use to get the word out to our patrons and answer questions that they might have if they run into trouble or just realize they should be more knowledgeable on a subject. So before we really dive in, let's take a step back and talk a bit, define information literacy, and talk a bit about why it's important. So what is financial literacy? You're going to find that there's no single definition of it. There are a number of definitions out there. You might have already encountered some of them yourself. But we find that the one provided by the government account of the office, the GAO, to be very concise and to the point. This definition recognizes the connection between financial education and actionable skills. In other words, financial literacy requires understanding basic financial concepts as well as being able to apply those skills to financial decision-making and behaviors. So let's talk a little bit about what else we're going to cover in here. So we're going to discuss the importance of financial literacy, the federal role in financial literacy, and then some major programs and agency resources that are available. And those are the commission, and Rebecca will go into that in more detail for you. And MyMoney.gov, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and the Consumer Protection Bureau. And then of course at the end, we'll answer questions and have a discussion. Okay, so I'm going to talk a little bit about why financial literacy is important. Any given day, you can turn on the news, listen to the radio, read your Twitter stream, and you'll find a story that ties in directly to the need for better financial literacy education. It's easy to think that we're financially capable until something goes horribly wrong with our finances, whether we find ourselves spiraling into debt, a victim of identity theft or some kind of scam, or even just unable to make one of our financial dreams happen like buying a home or retiring at 55. Literature from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau often repeats the phrase that managing one's financial life requires a combination of skills, knowledge, and action. As librarians, we can help people with the knowledge and skills part, even if we don't feel comfortable with our own knowledge and skills. We can educate ourselves on where to find and how to use these resources, and hopefully become more financially capable as a result. We can also encourage people to take action, or at the very least, to help them realize how much there is to know and how much more we all have to learn. As you can see from this quote from the 2012 National Capability Survey, one of our biggest weaknesses as a nation is not knowing how little we understand. And I encourage you all to go ahead and take that financial literacy quiz and see for yourself. Okay, so financial literacy is important, but why does the government care about our financial capability? Like it or not, the overall economic health of a nation is impacted by the financial decisions of everyday Americans. And on the balance, it's going to be much better to have people making informed decisions. In addition, consumer protection has been a long-standing function of the government, and the recent mortgage crisis made it clear the government was not doing all it should in this role. While regulation is part of consumer protection, educating consumers means less easy targets for companies marketing unsavory financial products. Who in the federal government is responsible for financial literacy? We expect figuring out who does that to be easy, did you? The federal government is, of course, complicated. There are pages and pages of CRS and GAO reports on what financial education and protection services are offered by which departments, agencies, and bureaus. Something in the missions of all of the entities on this page shown here points to a need for educating the public on financial issues, even if it's only a very small slice of financial issues. For example, the Department of Education has a role in educating students about federal college loans, but really no reason to educate people on credit card debt, credit scores, et cetera. But, of course, college loans don't happen in a vacuum separate from the rest of your financial life. So we have this problem of isolated missions related to financial literacy, as well as a lot of overlap with agencies trying to accomplish similar goals in different ways. Recognizing the importance of personal financial education but also wanting to increase efficiency was part of what prompted Congress to start making some changes to the structure in the early 2000s. While there are so many agencies that have some responsibility for financial literacy, there are really two main players now that concentrate much of the federal activity surrounding these issues. There's the Financial Literacy and Education Commission, often called just the Commission, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the CFPB. In 2003, Congress created the Financial Literacy and Education Commission, not as a new executive branch agency, but as a congressional commission that would include representation of all the federal entities with a mandate to provide some kind of financial literacy education. So basically, everyone on that previous slide. The administrative functions of the commission are housed within the Treasury Department, and the Secretary of the Treasury serves as the chair. But membership of the commission currently includes 21 additional federal entities. The commission's public-facing website is MyMoney.gov, which is where all their financial literacy education tools are collected, and that's what Lucia will be talking about in a few minutes. With representatives from across the government, the commission is in charge of coordinating and creating a national strategy on financial literacy. The current national strategy created in 2011 gives agencies guidance in implementing their own financial literacy mandates while also helping to minimize overlap. GAO reports over the last decade have indicated a fair amount of overlap still exists in the federal financial programs, but that the commission's work has really improved the situation. And just as an interesting aside, the commission's quarterly meetings are all open to the public. The next one is actually tomorrow, and registration is closed, but if that's something that interests you, I would encourage you to check it out. You can see how the commission works in action. The big player to come on the scene was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. The CFPB became operational only in July of 2011, so it's really quite a young organization. In recognition of the major role that this new bureau plays, the director of the CFPB is now the co-chair of the... I'm sorry, not the co-chair, the vice-chair of the commission. Sorry, that was my mistake in the slide. The creation of the CFPB consolidated the consumer protection regulatory responsibilities of seven different agencies all into this one agency. The Dodd-Frank Act also mandated that the bureau work to improve the financial literacy of American consumers, which for our purposes today is the most important part of their mandate. An interesting structural note about the CFPB is that it's technically part of the Federal Reserve system, but the director is appointed by the president, and the bureau operates largely as an independent agency, and the law actually severely restricts the authority that the Federal Reserve Board has on the operation of the CFPB. So now we know a little bit more about the background of the major players, and let's get down to discussing some actual resources. We chose to discuss resources from the commission and the CFPB for obvious reasons, but there's clearly a lot more out there. So we wanted to include at least one other player, and we decided on the Federal Reserve Board, Bank of St. Louis, because we're excited about some of the unique resources that they offer. And don't think that we're just including this because I'm in St. Louis. It was actually his idea to include it, although I agree that they have many wonderful resources. So mymoney.gov, like Rebecca said, this is the main repository where the commission, it's basically where they put their information. It's their public-facing entity, and it's hard to tell by looking at it, but yes, there really are 22 agencies behind this website. So some parts of the site content is created specifically for mymoney.gov, and some portions link out to content found on the websites at the other agencies and partner organizations. So as you can see, in terms of their education piece of mymoney.gov, they divide the basic concepts into five parts. So these are the five financial principles, the spending, earning, and saving and investing, protect and borrow. So I'm going to go around the leaves really quickly just to give you an overview of what they mean by these particular concepts and principles. So let's start with the leaf mark spend. It refers to spending money wisely and like comparison shopping and basically trying not to take on more debt than you need to. This is also where some of their budgeting comes in or the importance of creating a budget. And then earning. This includes the money that you earn in a paycheck, but it also extends to understanding the deductions and taxes that are taken out of a paycheck and the importance of saving for retirement through your employer and things like that. Save and invest. This refers to things like starting a savings account, getting good advice about investments, checking out who's giving you that good advice about investments, starting a savings account, and getting your retirement savings going. Area called protect is about really protecting your identity, taking care of the things that will basically avoid falling for scams, things like that. It also extends to keeping your financial records in order. So little things that some of us at this stage in our lives probably do already, but people who are just starting out might need a little bit more coaching on. Then the last section on borrow means basically tracking your borrowing to do some planning and shopping around for good loans. Don't go for the first deal that comes your way, paying attention to your credit history, and then really thinking about that purchase before you actually do it compared to things like that. So whenever you click on one of these leads, an easy example of borrow, it'll give you basically what I call a brochure level overview of what's going on, basically the information they're trying to convey to you in here. This information advice is short and easy to read, but it's not pictured here, but under the basic description are links to hints and tips. If you scroll further down, well, I guess you can see it on there a little bit better, but as well as spotlight resources with links to other concepts. And then at the bottom of the screen is a link called Read More. And when you click on that, it actually generates a database search using the term from the MyMoney5 leaf that you happen to be on. And this leads to other tools, reports, articles, websites that illustrate the concepts in more detail. It allows refining the search with other keywords, as well as some faceted searching, so you can narrow down by life event, topic, type of resource, audience level, and things like that. So I'm going to move on now to some of the other tools that are available on MyMoney.gov, not just the five concepts, the five principles they're trying to get across. And that next one is tools. I have to say the tools section is sure to be a favorite. This is the section where you can get links to calculators, budget worksheets, planning checklists. We like this one because it essentially provides a directory of financial calculators. Sadly, there isn't an easy way to search for all the calculators and tools produced by the different federal agencies, but this one comes pretty close. So an example of one of the calculators that they have, it's pretty simple to use. Is this Army? This is actually produced by the U.S. Army. It's a debt payoff calculator. Like I had mentioned before, some of the content is unique or specific to MyMoney.gov. It represents a group effort by the commission, and then some of the content actually will link you out to other areas. So in this particular one, it was from the U.S. Army, who by the way, the Army has a mandate on their own to try to make sure that their service members aren't taking on a lot of debt or falling for the payday lenders and cash advance kinds of businesses that pop up around Army bases. So the next one that we really like is the quizzes. And here's a screenshot of the quiz associated with the Protecting area. So I went ahead and deliberately answered this wrong. You can see it's actually highlighting the yes. So it will tell you what the right answer is and then give you a follow-up in there. So the quizzes are usually like, they're doing from like five to seven or 10 questions for each area. It is interactive, so it'll coach you to the correct answer. And it's also a handy place to look for inspiration if you need to write a quiz or come up with some trivia questions. So keep that in mind for a little dual-purposing there. Moving on, there's a section on mymoney.gov called Life Events. And basically, they've got it all covered here. They give you these really brief descriptions. But these Life Events are basically an overview of the different areas and the different parts of your life that are impacted by financial decisions in here. So the detail for each event ranges from that brochure level to web pages and reports. And it also links out to sites like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Social Security Administration, Small Business Administration, things like that. So it's a handy little directory. If you are encountering someone who says, OK, I'm going to start a business. And you might think, OK, you need to go to the Small Business Administration. But you might also want to steer them over here to just kind of get them some background, some basic understanding of what they're in for. OK, I'm going to move on now to one of our favorite sites. And this is the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. So keep this site nearby. I'm going to focus on the resources for financial literacy, but know that this site is indispensable when you need concise explanations of fundamental concepts in economics and finance. If you click on the Economic Education link from the menu bar, it'll take you to a screen that looks like this. And the content is really geared by audience. So there's some overlap between audiences, and it focuses primarily on grade school through college, ordinary consumers, and then educators. So elementary, high school, and some college level educators in there. So the college sources, some of the college sources they have in here are things geared toward being entrepreneur, financial concepts, basic economic terms. Something that I really like in here is their content videos. So you can see on this slide that I actually narrowed this down to college level English sources, by the way, they do English and some Spanish sources, and video casts. June 2014 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Analysis demonstrated that videos were the most effective in improving financial literacy scores and increasing levels of confidence and financial knowledge. So what they did, what they recognized is that recruiting people into financial educational seminars is difficult, and educational programs require full-time instructors and counselors. And that makes running seminars really expensive and difficult to scale up. So they commissioned this report and found the research that those consumers who need help the most are the least likely to seek it out or seek out counseling. And they found that statistically significant support for videos as a way to get that information across. That's why I'm hammering you over the head right now with the importance of videos in here. But they also do a lot of support for educators, for people who are actually engaged in teaching this. So teachers can register their classes to take online classes like this budgeting 101, where they have to manage a hypothetical income and track spending and saving over time. Other modules include fundamental economic concepts like compound interest, inflation, and how the stock market works. The board also has economic education specialists on staff. These are federal reserve staff who do research and do outreach through the K through college educators. Their in-person offerings are limited to the 8th district. That's the St. Louis board's district. However, they do respond to email from other areas. And just so you know, North Carolina is in the 5th district, which also provides some educational resources. So if you're interested in this, you might want to go directly to the education resources at your federal reserve board and see what kinds of things they have available as well. This actually is on the federal reserve board's website. And I have to say I loved it. It's a pretty long poster. It goes down a little bit further, but it was good because it shows basically some of the financial services and pitfalls that you need to be aware of. So it was another example of some of the multimedia that's available on that site. So I don't want you to think that the federal reserve board is only doing videos. They do all kinds of other types of resources like this. And this is something that's geared towards an ordinary person that's not necessarily college students. But I thought it was useful for especially the check caching stores and the kinds of shady borrowers. But further down, they even go into buying a car and why you might not want to finance it through the dealer that you're buying it from. And it's just a really good example and something that conveying information very concisely and easily and is something that I plan on cribbing from for other library types of information. So the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we had a really hard time trying to decide what to show you from this site because there is so much good stuff here. Even though it's relatively new, there's still a lot here. So kind of thinking about how to figure out what might be here as opposed to somewhere else is thinking about the way the CFPB breaks down their target audiences and what they consider key financial moments in a person's life. And they're really tasked with protecting and educating consumers as a broad general group. But they focus on these areas where they feel like they can have a large impact in both their regulatory and educational missions. So you can see there's some overlap here with what Lucia showed us from the MyMoney.gov site. And there are things from that site that link over to CFPB. But there's also things on here that they just haven't really gotten to yet. So when you're on the CFPB site, if you're looking for financial literacy information, you'll really want to focus on the Get Assistance tab in the middle. There's a lot of other great information here. But the educational stuff is pretty much in this tab. And you can see it is organized by those groups of consumers in those life events that I mentioned in the previous slide. So from our reference standpoint, the Ask CFPB Knowledge Base is probably the most useful resource on the site. It has a ton of information, including definitions for lots of obscure and not so obscure financial terms, information on dealing with financial problems, and how to handle complicated transactions like sending money overseas. The Knowledge Base is an excellent way to provide fairly in-depth information without actually providing advice to people who walk up to the reference desk. It's also a great tool to share with your colleagues who may not be as knowledgeable on these issues, but will get questions about them at the reference desk. The Knowledge Base also helps to prop up the main CFPB website as they continue to build it. Since they're still only a few years old, they haven't created separate sites and online tools for each of their main mission areas, but they usually have some questions answered in the Knowledge Base or whatever might be missing from the rest of the site. For example, they don't yet have a fancy page for teaching your children about money, but there is an extensive section in the Knowledge Base that answers many questions on the issue and links to useful resources from other federal entities. You'll find pages like this on pretty much everything financial related. If you have a large Spanish-speaking population, you will definitely want to check out the Spanish version of the CFPB site. This is not an entire copy of the English site, but it is pretty comprehensive and even includes much of the information, but not all that is included in the Ask CFPB Knowledge Base. It's definitely useful if you have patrons who don't speak English, but I think it's also a really great resource for Spanish-speaking international students who might be trying to deal with financial matters that work very differently here than in their home country, and this is a way for them to learn more about it in their native language. They might be excellent English speakers in an academic setting, but they all know there's fear not in a financial education class and they might not know a lot of those words. As a librarian, at a reference desk, as you know, you're a captive audience, and that means sometimes when someone wants to talk about their problems, you're the person they talk to. If they have a complaint that's related to any financial services, directing them to the Submit a Complaint section of CFPB is a great thing to do. You can see in the upper right-hand corner, it's kind of highlighted in green the Submit a Complaint. That's what it looks like from any page on the CFPB website, and you can find it really easily. Submitting their complaint here will allow that patron to channel their complaint in a way that's useful, and maybe you don't even get some resolution. But don't worry, this likely doesn't mean you'll get out of hearing all the details of their problems. One of the tools I just had, one of the more specialized tools I just had to show you was this Compare Financial Aid Offers, which I wish there had been something like this when I went to either undergraduate or graduate school, and it makes it really easy for someone to enter the schools they're choosing along with any financial aid packages they've been offered. And this tool spits out a comparison of up to three schools with total costs, including room and board, and it will even give estimates of the total debt and monthly payments you will have at the time of graduation. It also gives information such as graduation rates for the years chosen, or for the schools chosen, so students will have an idea if it's likely to take me four years or more years to complete this degree. And that really allows students to make a knowledgeable financial decision about where they're going to attend college. So the CSPD realizes that there's no way for them to reach everyone, and they're trying to team up with community organizations that already reach a lot of people, like libraries. So they really have a great website that's been pulled together just with resources for librarians. And one of the other things they offer monthly webinars that are specifically designed for library staff. And the recordings of the webinars are uploaded to the web afterwards for watching anytime. So there's already a, I don't know, maybe it was about not quite a year archive of videos for libraries on there. Libraries can also request free bulk print marketing materials. They say it takes about three to four weeks to receive them, and I'm sure it depends on how much you order in the time of year, but I receive my order of bookmarks from them in only two weeks, so it can be pretty fast. The online resources linked from this page are really extensive, include lots of great sites that are created both by federal public entities and private entities. My only complaints about this list is that it's hidden back here on the resources for librarians page instead of some of them being on their more public-facing page, but I guess they are just hoping that we'll get the word out about these sources and also that we'll find them useful in our jobs. Another great thing on here are the programming ideas. This section has basically everything you need to plan a program for your library. It includes links to specific prints or online materials that will be useful, as well as suggestions for organizations that will provide speakers for you for these programs. Really great resources here. This is definitely, if you're interested at all in expanding what your library does related to financial literacy, even just making more free literature available for people to pick up when they're there, then definitely explore this part of the site more in-depth. I only really touched on a few of the things that are here at CFPB, but I also just wanted to mention that they are always adding new resources. Since they're still so young, they're still really building up their resources. For example, their empowerment website for economically vulnerable consumers was just unveiled a couple weeks ago. They do have a really great LinkedIn group that you can join, CFPB. If you're on LinkedIn, that can be a great way to stay up-to-date with what they're adding. That's how I found out about the new financial empowerment website. If you go here and you're looking for something that's not there yet, chances are it's in the works. In the meantime, you can use that Ask CFPB Knowledge Base to find out more. We hope this information was useful. We would love to answer any questions that you have or have a discussion even if anyone has more information or resources to add, things that they love, that are financial literacy related from the federal government. Thank you so much, ladies. That was fantastic. If you have specific questions as you're going through these resources, I'm sure Ruchi and Rebecca would be happy to answer them. Let me just pull up our page from the beginning again. You can feel free to email us if you have any questions or suggestions. If there are no more questions, thank you very much, Ruchi and Rebecca. This was fantastic. Thank you, Linda. Thanks for having us.