 I'd like to welcome you here on this lovely morning. We've got some snow ambience outside, nothing too serious. I'm Reed Kramer. I'll welcome you here to the New America Foundation. And I direct our asset building program, which, among other things, is focused on incubating policy ideas to help aspiring families chart a path forward up the economic ladder. And today's event is focused on one promising pathway, which is tax time. The event's a collaboration with our colleagues at the Center for Social Development. And the event's entitled The Taxman Giveth, the question mark, refunds, savings, and promoting economic security. And I'll also let you in the audience know, and our friends online know, if you want to join the Twitter conversation, we're using hashtag tax time savings, and you can follow us at assetsnaf. At New America, we've been looking at a range of policy levers that can be pulled as part of the tax filing process for a number of years that can then trigger the savings process. Tax filing, as many of you might know, has some key ingredients that make it a potentially powerful moment to jumpstart the savings process and help families build up savings and assets over time. It has incentives like the earned income tax credit. It has support systems in place, like a network of organizations and private firms that are helping people file their taxes and maximize their refunds. And then it has the wonderful infrastructure of the IRS, powerful, pervasive infrastructure. So a lot is already there. And we also think, though, that it can do a lot more. There's a number of ideas that we've suggested to our policymakers, and they're considering. For instance, we could make sure that everyone has a bank account so that they have a place to save and conduct basic financial transactions. We can make sure that the incentives are meaningful and robust. We can also make sure that everyone that would benefit from filing their taxes would be able to do so. And then we can make sure that the defaults are all moving in the right direction so people end up in a place they want to be without having to think too much about it beforehand. And I think I could argue convincingly for all of these proposals. But some of you might want to see some evidence. People always ask for evidence. And that's fair enough. Of course, we don't always ask for evidence when we were designing our regressive tax code that rewards people for just moving money around. But anyway, evidence is pretty good. And perhaps some of you are in this room who want to see more. Well, you've come to the right place. Our colleagues at the Center for Social Development and Duke University have teamed with Intuit to test out how to jumpstart savings at tax time. And today we're going to hear about their efforts called refund to savings, R2S. It's the largest intervention of its kind. And the goal was to see if simple changes integrated into the tax filing process could help striving families set aside a part of their refunds to promote savings. As you know, for many people, filing taxes is a chore unless you're kind of game to see what Intuit has cooked up in their TurboTax software for the next year, which is a pretty amazing product for anyone that's worked with it. But if you're poor, you really get on the case pretty quick sometimes, because this might be the largest check you'll get all year. This tax season, it's estimated that 27 million families will file for the earned income tax credit. And that functions not just as a wage subsidy, but it generates substantial refunds for millions of low-income families. Unfortunately, many kind of spend their money before it even arrives. And we should ask, though, what if there was a way to turn that moment upside down to get people to save more of their refunds to increase their financial security by paying down their debt, saving for an emergency, or building up a nest egg? What if there's a way to leverage the scale of people that are engaged in this process and extend the benefit well beyond April 15th? So now, thanks to the enterprising people that are involved in the refund to savings effort, we've got some evidence here. One of the punchlines is $6 million has already been saved for families earning under $11,000 a year. It's pretty incredible results. And we're going to learn more about how they got there and what it means for policy going forward. I'll also say that this success is consistent with some other interventions that have been going on in the field, such as SaveUSA. This has been implemented in a number of cities where people have been able to open accounts and have their savings matched at tax time. It was based on work that we incubated here called the Savers Bonus. And today, in conjunction with this event, we're releasing a paper authored by my colleagues Rachel Black and Elliot Shure that apply the lessons from these experiences in the field and examine what the implications are for designing an effective federal policy and taking it to scale. We know there's a need for such a policy. There's billions of the dollars that are allocated through the tax filing system for people that are upper income, middle income, who are making deposits. None of that money is available, basically. Virtually none of that money reaches lower income households. And none of it is going to helping them build the basic flexible savings that we know is most valuable to them. So one option is to create something called a financial security credit, which is described in the paper and a legislative version of which was introduced by Representative Jose Serrano this summer. Jose Serrano from New York. It would give lower income people a chance to save for the purpose that best meets their needs. And it would be incentivized by a direct match. And if they didn't have a bank account already, they could open one right on the tax form. And experiences like R2S and SaveUSA make us think that there's real demand for such a policy and that it could work. So we're very fortunate to have a lineup today that can help us understand what happens when people are confronted by various prompts in the tax filing system, integrated into the Inuit software, and then what this means for future policy efforts. Their bios are all in your handouts or available on our website for those watching online. But let me just tell you briefly what the plan of action will be. First, we're going to hear from Phil Poirier, who's vice president of Intuit's consumer group. And in that role, he oversees a variety of government initiatives for their consumer tax and personal finance businesses. I can also tell you that a couple years ago, Phil was the starting quarterback for the Naval Academy with a couple of victories over their rival to his credit. And then Dan Ariely and Michael Greenstein-Weiss will tell us about the research efforts. And Dan is the James B. Duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. And Michael is a wonderful and longtime colleague of ours. She's now associate professor of the Gordon Warren Brown School of Social Work. And she's the associate director of the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. And then afterwards, they're going to participate in a panel discussion here with a couple of ringers. The first ringer will be Amy Brown, who will moderate the session. She's a program officer at the Ford Foundation, focusing on providing financial services to lower income households. She's been a major force in supporting work that looks at how to make financial services more inclusive. It's a really important agenda that she's led at Ford. And then the other ringers are going to be Rorco Bryan and Ray Bushera. They're both alums of New America who've gone on to do great work elsewhere. Rorco Bryan is a senior policy advisor for consumer policy at the US Department of Treasury, where he focuses on financial access and savings. And I believe he's soon headed off to the University of Wisconsin, I guess via a post at Harvard or something like that. He's done great work. He was hired actually right after he got out of Harvard after he wrote his undergraduate thesis on asset limits in public assistance. And Ray Bushera hired him. Ray Bushera hired me too. He's the founder of the asset building program here at New America. He's an excellent mentor, a colleague, and a friend. He's now senior advisor and assistant vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, where he also directs the Center for Household Financial Stability. So they're all excellent resources and thoughtful people, and we're going to hear from them. So Phil, you first. Thank you. Good morning. My name's Phil Porrier. I'm with Intuit. Ray Bushera did not hire me. And I don't know where the Navy quarterback thing came from with the plant you have, because the only notoriety I got in the Washington Post was an article by David Dupree when I was compared to being slower than a ship in dry dock. But let's move on and talk about tax time savings. So Intuit tends to be known for its brands. Many people don't know about Intuit the company, but they are familiar with the products we have on the consumer front with Quicken and Turbo Tax and Mint, for example. And what we try to do is work very hard to understand the consumer and the customer. And we're very focused on the customer experience and deliver products to them or services that will enable them to be empowered and take control of their financial life. So when you think about what our goal as a company is with consumers, and then you think about tax time savings right off the bat and Reed made a number of these important points, tax time is a great opportunity for consumers because for many it's the single largest paycheck they get every year. And just last week, IRS announced that the average refund year to date is about $3,200. So that number will fluctuate a little bit. And it depends on different segments and what benefits they're entitled to, but it's still a big paycheck. But actually, when we think about the tax experience, we view it as being not just about the refund and certainly not just about the compliance aspect of taxes. But what the tax process really is is that one time of year where, in fact, for many Americans, the only time of year they really take stock of their entire financial picture. So it's all about how can we use that moment to its best advantage to empower consumers and help them have better financial lives. Now from an intuitive perspective, you might say, well, why is intuitive interested in this? I'm in the Turbo Tax business, which is our consumer group. And our primary goal and mission every year we have to hit the January filing season is we need to help people prepare and file their returns accurately, easily, and securely. So that's the primary focus that we have every year. But beyond that compliance element, there's something that we're very interested in, too, which is how can we help people make better use of their refunds? So one of the things we're finding is it seems to us, and I don't think this is going to be news, but increasingly, people are counting on that refund as part of their cash flow for the year. I mean, so for example, the IRS has done a great job over the years of like clockwork opening about mid-January, accepting electronic filed returns, and about 10 to 14 days later issuing refunds. And the refund predictability has been relatively high. In fact, one of the questions we get from our customers is my refund changed, could be higher, it could be lower, it must be indicative of I've made an error without an understanding of everything that goes into the calculation of the refund that might cause that to fluctuate. But the certainty of the delivery of the refund and the relative, certainly, of the amount of the refund has caused people to increasingly, they plan on that. They're making decisions at the end of the calendar counting on that refund. So one of our focuses is, okay, well, how do you help them stretch that refund? For example, we have an arrangement with Amazon where you can get 5 or 10% more on an Amazon purchase card, which when Amazon was only selling books, you might think of it being of limited utility, but if you go up to Amazon now, I mean, they're selling anything from books, to baby food, to clothing, so it actually is a pretty powerful opportunity for a consumer to stretch their dollars. But independent of stretching, as we know today, that Macaulay and Dan are gonna talk more about, it's also about savings, and how do you help them make the best use of that refund, whether it be pay down debt or increase their savings or whatever. And so there's a very real interest we have and how can we find out more about that process and the consumer behavior underneath it. Now the way we're enabling the project is that IRS has a program called FreeFile and under FreeFile it's an arrangement between the IRS and about 14 or 15 companies and nonprofits where tax software subject to certain conditions and restrictions and requirements are available for use on the IRS website or through the IRS website. And consumers who fall within the eligibility requirements can prepare their federal returns for free and for participating states in FreeFile, they can prepare their state return for free as well. The overall limit for the program is $58,000 and below, which covers about 70% of all taxpayers. And then each individual company sets its own eligibility requirements because there are caps on each company to encourage competition in the program. And so the Intuit program is all military $58,000 and below, all EITC recipients and all taxpayers under $30,000. And within our product that we offer in FreeFile, we call it the Freedom Edition, there you go through the process of entering your personal information, your income information, you answer questions around your life that helps us identify deductions or credits you might be entitled to and then you get to that moment at the very end where you've got a number of important decisions to make. Taxes are complicated, filing your taxes is actually relatively complicated. And so we try to make it easy to make a decision about how do you want to file your return, how do you want to receive your refund? And so when we talk about receiving the refund, that's about leveraging the split refund feature that IRS has and also receiving your refund via check or direct deposit. So we're very encouraging of electronic filing and direct deposit. But what McCall and Dan are going to talk more about is how we've intervened in that final section of how do you want to receive your refund to try and understand savings behavior and how consumers think about it and what behavioral economic prompts might encourage them to save. So that's my tee up. Dan is going to be up next, but one thing I'd like to do just briefly is say it's been such a pleasure working on this project. And the thing that's made it so much fun is working with Dan and working with McCall and her team at Washington University, which are really incredible folks. And when you get a chance to look inside the report, there are a number of folks in our development organization and our marketing teams that as we approach this calendar year, this filing season work long nights and weekends and they really are the folks who deserve the credit for the program. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Dan. Sports. And so I want us to take a few minutes and think a little bit about money in general before we think about plans for how to help people save. So money is a great invention. There's no question about it, right? If you think about how society would look like without money, we would spend a tremendous amount of time bartering and we couldn't specialize, we couldn't save. So it's clearly important. But the fact that we could do with money so many different things also makes it incredibly difficult to think about money. So if we lived in a barter society and you had some broccoli and I had some chicken we wanted to trade, you would know how much chicken you want to trade for how much broccoli. You know, in English sometimes there's the expression that the hard decision is like picking apples and oranges. The reality is that picking apples and oranges is a very easy decision. You don't ever see anybody baffled by the fruit plate saying I have no idea which one I want. But figuring out whether an apple is worth $2 and 50 cents and so on, that's a tough decision. And why is it so difficult? It's because money can do so many different things that when you give up a particular amount of money you're not really sure what you're giving up. So the wonderful thing about money is we could do so many things with it. The difficult thing is that we could do so many things with it. Some time ago we went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people who were about to buy a car. We said, what would you give up if you go ahead and buy this new car today? And people had no answer. And we pushed them. We said, look, something has to give up. What would give up? And what was the most common response we got? If I buy a Toyota, I can't buy a Honda. So people were making a trade-off in the same timeframe, in the same category. But they were not saying I'm giving up two weeks of vacation for the next three years and 700 books and 61 letters. They were not doing an inter-temporal substitution across categories. And this is because money is so difficult to think about. And not only is money difficult to think about, we also make it harder to think about it with the advance of technology. Imagine you woke up every morning and I gave you just cash for today. This is it. This is all you have to spend today. Your trade-offs will be incredibly clear. You would understand that if you buy coffee, you can't take the bus and so on. If you gave you the money for the whole week, by Thursday you would realize the trade-offs, but Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, you might make some mistakes. If I gave you the money for a month, it would be more difficult. If I added student loans and credit cards and mortgages, now the question is what trade-offs are you really making? So that's the first difficult thing about money. Money is so good and it's a common good. We could do so many things with it so we don't really understand how to think about it. The second problem, of course, is there with saving, is that it's not just about money, it's also about now versus later. And now versus later is one of the most prevalent problems in society. And you could just reflect on your own experiences to think about all the cases in which we have all failed in making decisions about now versus later. So just as a raise of hands, how many people here in the last month have eaten more than you think you should? How many people in the last month have exercised less than you think you should? Two more questions. How many people here have ever texted while driving? Come on. A minute. And finally, how many people here have ever had unplanned, unprotected sex? Nobody. No, that's amazing. That's amazing. So for most of those things, we recognize that we make mistakes and money is one of those categories. If you see something now, you know exactly what you could get and you know exactly what you're giving up, whereas the goal in the future is incredibly unclear. So you look at all of these problems, the complexity of money, opportunity cost, and now versus later, and this is one of the hardest problems for people to deal with. And because of this, the idea that we could just teach people and they will make the right decision is just not going to work out. It's a very sad realization, but I think there's no escape from that. Actually, there was a recent meta-analysis that John Lynch and some of his team members did on all the research ever carried out on financial literacy and what effect these interventions had on actual outcomes, financial planning, savings, and so on. And the best they could figure out is the improvement was 6%. It went down over time and it was lower for people with lower SES. So we have to recognize that it's a really tough problem and the idea that we'll just tell people about it that's not going to work out. Okay, so what do we need to do? We need to think a little bit about the mechanism. We need to think a little bit about the environment and how we recreate the environment in a way that it would make it easier and simple and desirable for people to behave in the right way. And I'll give you the example of a toothpaste. So how many people here brush their teeth at least once a day? Just saying everybody. Do you think the toothpaste is an important part of this equation? And the interesting thing is the answer is yes and no. Toothpaste has basically no health outcomes. There's really no value, direct value to toothpaste. However, we brush our teeth because of toothpaste. What happened is that Procter and Gamble in their infinite wisdom convinced us that unless we feel minty fresh, something is wrong with us. So when you brush your teeth, you don't think, oh, I really want to have healthy teeth five years from now. You say, I want to be socially acceptable in the next 10 minutes, so let me consume some toothpaste. And how do I consume toothpaste? I brush my teeth. This is by the way why we brush and not floss. Flossing has no other benefits aside from the real benefit of flossing. And by the way, flossing is much better than brushing for health perspective. But people don't do it because it doesn't have this external element. So if you look and the reason to think about tooth brushing, it's one of the best human habits we've developed. There are very few of them. Tooth brushing is one of them. Wearing seat belt is one of them. And then reducing smoking from 40% to 20% is another one. But tooth brushing is really a tremendous success. But again, it's one of those cases when we're not doing the right behavior for the right reason because we care about our health. Five years from now, we're doing it for the wrong reason because we were convinced that we should consume toothpaste. So the same logic we should think about for financial savings. Just telling people you should say for the future, you should say for the future, that's a good thing to do, is unlikely to work out. But giving people different types of incentives, different types of reasons, different, think about adding all kinds of other motivations could help out. So before we move to R2S, I want to tell you a little bit about some projects that we're just starting underway and hopefully will be folded into this initiative at some point. So the first one is at the level of a lab experiment. So we don't have any real proof that it's working, but here is the idea. We get people to the lab and they basically work for a company for a while. So the experiment only lasts a few hours, but we simulate as if they worked there for a year. And in the beginning, we asked them how much of their salary they want to save. And the company is very generous. They offer a 10% match on the 401k and people can decide how much they save and the saving they're going to actually get much, much later. So they don't have that much of incentives too. It's a delayed event. And the average people basically say they want to save 4%. So what happened every simulated month, people put 4% in, the company put 4% in, the money goes to the 401k, and this continues for a few hours of the experiment and then a few weeks later, people get their 401k. That's condition one. Condition two starts in the same way, but the mechanism is slightly different. Every simulated month, the company puts in 10%, the person puts in as much as they committed to 4%, and then the company takes the 6% back. Now it's the same thing, right? The fact is that if you work for a company that matches 10% and you put 4%, you're living 6% on the table. The only problem is that in the regular setup, you don't see it. In this setup, you see it every month or in our case, every simulated month, you see the money goes into your account and being taken from your account. By the way, what we're doing in the experiment is strictly illegal. Companies cannot put money into employees' account and take it back, but you can think about versions like this that could work. The company could tell you the money is in escrow, waiting for you, see how much you want to take. Oh, sorry, we had to take something back. And by the way, in the second version of the experiment, very quickly, people go to maximum match, right? It's just too aversive to see the money coming in and going away. The second thing that we're doing is we start thinking about the piping of how joint accounts look like. So imagine two types of piping. One is we have two separate accounts, two individuals. Each of them get their salaries and then some money goes to a joint account to pay for rent and expenses and so on. That's one mechanism. Mechanism number two, money goes to a joint account and then goes to two separate accounts. By the way, how many people here have a significant other? How many of you have the first piping? Money goes to joint accounts and then to separate accounts and then to joint accounts? How many of you have this? How many of you have the other one? Money goes to a joint account and then to separate accounts? Yeah, so many of you are abstained. You might have different arrangements, but that's basically what we find. A third of the people have some other mechanism and one third have this and one third have that. But at least in the initial studies, which one of those do you think encourages higher savings? It's the one where the money first go to a joint account, where you think about the money jointly. It also turns out that it helps equality between the two wage earners because if you have inequality in how much money you make and you keep your money separately and you contribute to a joint pot, people actually contribute in a more unequal way than if the money first goes to a joint pot. Now, if you think about it, these are the little details of how you do the piping of accounts and this goes back to your comment from earlier. Shouldn't we just have an account, a banking account for everybody? Well, shouldn't we have multiple accounts that would actually and think about how the piping looks like and basically create the piping that would get people to behave better? Okay, so I spend most of my life doing lab experiments, little experiments, sometimes with real estate, sometimes we ask people what they do, sometimes we ask people to imagine. This project within two, it was particularly exciting for multiple reasons. First, it was going to be in a large scale and we were focusing on people that we could not really control very well, right? So in the lab, we have wonderful control over what people do. All of a sudden we don't have much control and we're trying to do a very cheap intervention. Again, when people come to the lab, it's expensive and we could do lots of things. This was going to be cheap, large-scale intervention. And Michal will tell you a lot about what we've learned, but we've learned that life is much more complex than the lab. I think that's one of the interesting lessons. We thought that people would save, for example, in savings accounts. Turns out life is much more complex. And to a large degree, we learned about how people really deal with this complexity of money and all kinds of tricks that people are using. And I think the next step for us would be to figure out what are some of the wisdom in what people do to manage their money and how do we build on that and what are some of the mistakes people make when they think about their money and how do we do that? The last thing I want to again repeat your comment is that tax time is really a golden opportunity. People are getting money, it's a big check. Often it's, some of it is not expected or at least there's some uncertainty about what they're getting and there's a feeling that they're getting back money from the government, which might create a particularly good opportunity to think about this money as separate from the rest of the money. And another thing we want to ask is whether we should try and encourage that. You know, when we started working with Intuit, the engineers at Intuit think that people should have zero money back from the government. Why would you lend money to the government at zero interest? Well, maybe there is a reason, right? Maybe people are using it as a self-control mechanism to force the future self to have some money. And if that's the case, maybe either we should increase that function or maybe we create some other function that allow people to have self-control. Okay, thank you very much, Michal. Okay, good morning everyone. I'm delighted to be here and I want to thank some of our friends at New America who made this event possible and worked so hard on pulling it all together. And of course I want to thank our great, great partnership with Intuit that really is, you know, and nothing was possible without it. And the leadership of Phil and everyone else on the team has been a great, great experience to work with. Some of our funders in the rooms, Ford and any Casey made that work even more possible and more resourceful. And of course the team members, it's not, just my name is there, there's no way to list all the million people who work on that, but I want to single out my team, including Dana Pernia, Blair Russell, Christa is here and Clinton Key who all work really, really hard on this initiative. So Phil started by talking to you a little bit about our partnership and how we brought the industry together with academia to kind of put this initiative and generate learning around saving a tax time and what we can do to increase saving a tax time. And then Dan brought you a little bit of the behavioral economics around saving a tax time and about our initiative. So what left for me to do is to tell you exactly what it is we have done, how we have been doing it and what is some of the early promising results we are seeing. So I will talk today about the result and the intervention that we have done in 2013 because this initiative is going for several years now but today I will be focusing on the 2013 intervention and the 2013 intervention included two key major components. The first one is a very, very large randomized control trial that we embedded into the TurboTax Freedom Edition. So we had some programming changes in the finishing file when we intervened at the golden moment trying to get people to save. We had a very large sample size of over half million household participants in the experiment. To be exact, it was 684,000, a little bit over that household who were part of this experiment in a randomized control trial setting. Another component to our intervention is that we follow up a sub-sample of these people who went to our experiment who filled the tax, the free file edition and we did a very detailed survey on their household finance. So very deep look on their household finance kind of a lengthy instrument and we have about 20,000 households taking this survey at the very end when they finish filling the taxes. But not only that, we had follow up with them six months later. So we were interested in kind of six months a longer kind of longer term aspect of evaluation and six months follow up. So we contacted 20,000 households again. We were able to get a retention rate of 47% which is quite large for a web survey and we were able to get 8,300 of these people to re-interview with us six months later. So this is basically our experiment. Some of you will be familiar with this website. So this is the TurboTax Freedom Edition. So to be eligible to participate in our experiment or to be part of the, you know, to participate in the Freedom File Edition you have to earn less than $31,000 in your adjusted income gross or be on active military duty and earn slightly more or qualified for a earned income tax credit. We developed our experiment building on the IRS tax form 8888. The field, that's a building field that's been working for a long time to create this form to allow people to split the refund between multiple accounts, hopefully saving and checking account. And that's what we were trying to get people to do to split the refund between a checking account and a saving account or a saving bond. So here is when people seeing their final refund. So that's the moment they know, okay, this is exactly how much I will be getting in my refund this year. That's the golden moment when we intervene, right? The money is yours, but not quite in your end yet. Like Dan, I really like to say. And that's when we introduced the prompt. So this is really like the screenshot from our intervention and we randomize it. Different groups receive different prompts. This is an example of one prompt and we ask them, do you have enough money for an emergency? A Harvard study found that most American could not come up with $2,000 for something unexpected. We connect, you stay prepared. So this is one example of our prompt. We also had a family prompt talking about your family and a future prompt asking people to, you know, think about their future and saving for the future. The other techniques, the other economics techniques we used is anchoring. Anchoring is a tendency of people to stay close or at a set suggested goal. So we kind of, you know, created goals for people, how much they should save from the refund. For some of the intervention group, we said you should save 25% of the refund. For other people, we said you should save 50% of the refund. Yet still for another group, we said you should save 75% of the refund. Now we not only made a suggestion for their amount, we also pre-populate the amount for them. So from the refund, we calculate how much is 25% and here you see it's already pre-populated. We already did a work. The amount is already there. All they need to do, and it's not that all, but all they need to do is to put the saving account information. So part of the refund could go into a saving or they need to choose a saving bond. For the people who didn't choose to split, we did final trick and we add them before they can push continue, they needed to push a bottom saying, I don't need to save. So make it a little bit more uncomfortable. So let me tell you a little bit about the people who participated in our experiment. We have quite low income population, quite poor population. You can see that the median household, annual household income is about $13,000 and it's well below the income cap of the Freedom Edition. The federal refund was quite modest with a median of 921, about 40% claim EATC and almost 70% were single. So there are three questions I want to answer today. Let me bring them all up here. Can be able economics techniques increase deposit saving account at tax time? So we're focusing on what happening immediately at the moment. Can we get more people to just deposit into either a saving account or deposit into a saving bond? Does the R2S intervention increase saving six months later? So with our household financial survey, we follow this participant and kind of try to look on a longer term impact of the intervention. And the last question I want to share with you is what factors are associated with savings? So the first question that I will focus is can be an economics technique increase deposit to saving tax time? I will share with you some of overall impact first and then show you some specific graphs. So in overall we found that we were able to increase the number of people who deposit to a saving account by 4800 additional people, additional people who deposit into a saving account. So we estimate that without this intervention, we had about this number of people left the depositing. We also estimate that it's translated to increase amount of deposit into a saving vehicle of about almost $6 million or $5.9 million more deposited into savings. So some of the action is coming from getting more people to split the refund. And this bar graph is a nice illustration also of our intervention just in general. So you can address the number of treatment, different treatment group we have and a control group. So we have one control group, people who just didn't get anything, didn't get a prompt or did not receive an anchoring, just went through the experiment, experienced regular. And that's who we compare to with our different treatment group. And we have, so that's in the green line, the blue bar graph are the different intervention groups. So it's different combination of different prompt and different anchoring, family prompt, the future prompt, emergency prompt and different suggested amount of savings. So one person will get, you know, you should save for your family and we suggest you save 50% of your refund. Another group will get, you should save for your future and you should save 25% of your refund. And as you can see here, while splitting is uncommon, is pretty relatively an uncommon thing still happening. It's about 1% of the people split. We were able to nearly double this a percent with our intervention and all the different treatment group are associated with about, you know, about 2.4% rate of splitting. Looking across the whole population, we estimate and, you know, we find that we increased their saving by about $30 when we, you know, include everyone, people who saved and people who don't save. So that's an illustration of, compared to the control group, how much the different intervention group are associated with depositing into a saving account. But when we zoom in and we just look on the splitters, the people who split and put it into a saving account or saving bond. And that does not include the people who put everything into saving. And it's not include the people who are saving in the checking account that we know from the household financial survey that that's about a third that defining themselves as saving at a checking account, still even six months later. We found a much larger impact and we see that our intervention is associated with between $200 and $300 increase in saving account across the different groups. So the next question I want to focus on, something that doesn't work right with the questions for me, so I apologize. It was supposed to zoom in on each question every time, but you can just follow me. So the second question we want to focus on is does the R2S intervention increase saving at six months later? So here we use a combination of, you know, all the people who went through this experiment and through the randomized control trial among the turbo tax and then using the data when we interview them immediately after and then when we interview them six months later. So this is kind of the people that we really follow on a longer term. So what we are finding is that people who participate in the treatment group, so people who were encouraged to save and both encouraged to either save 50% of the refund or like half of the refund or were encouraged to save 75% of the refund were 30% likely to still having, or chance still having part of the refund save six months later. So these people who were encouraged to save had a 30% chance of still having their part of the refund at the six months follow up. Compared to them, people who were not encouraged to save or the control group had 25% chance of still having the refund six months later. So there was a 5% point impact of the intervention. Now looking on the amount of saving, we found that people who received an anchor of 50% and were encouraged to save half of the refund were 2.6% more save at the six months follow up and people who were getting an anchoring of 75% had a 5% point more save at the six months follow up and that's control to the, compared to the control group. We, ah, something, I'm missing a slide. I think we don't have the right PowerPoint but there is one more slide and I will maybe, it's similar to this one but it's a really important one. I think we're using not the latest version so I apologize. But we looked on one more outcome with the six months or not six months follow up and we look on this statement whether people are certain that they can come up with $2,000 in a case of emergency. This is like a question that got a lot of attention. There were a lot of research recently around this like ability to come up with a $2,000 in a case of emergency. And we ask our sample whether at the six months follow up can they come up with a $2,000 in a case of emergency. This is not the right graph. It's similar result but it's even like larger result so it's not done look on the graph but it's the same ID. People who received a 75% prompt were 56% chance of saying yes, I can come up with $2,000. People who received a 50% or say, oh we're encouraged to save half of the refund said something like I think it's 52, 54% chance of still having the refund. But the control group who were not encouraged to save had a 44% chance saying that they can still come up with the refund six months later. So on that question we had a large like 12 percentage point difference between treatment. The most successful treatment intervention with high goal of saving compared to people who did not get any intervention in terms of how confident they are that they can come up with $2,000 in case of emergency. And again, this is not the right graph so I apologize, just believe me, follow what I'm saying. So the last question I will cover is what factors are associated with savings. And of course there are a lot of things that we find very, very interesting but giving time constraint and I already get my five minutes warning, I will focus only on a few factors. And this include the financial shocks that use of alternative financial services and assets limit. So first looking on financial shocks, we find that 66% of our sample have experienced at least one of the following shocks in the last six months including trips to the hospital, major vehicle repair, period of unemployment or legal fees, expenses that they had. I think it won't be surprising for you if I said that people who experienced these shocks were less likely to still have saving or to save the six months follow up. This is kind of large differences. A very interesting picture comes when we look on debt. So while secure debts such as card or home loans were not associated so much with saving six months later, having an unsecured debt such as medical debt or paid and loan debt were associated with much lower savings at the six months follow up. As can be expected, the use of alternative financial services such as cash checker and rent to owns, et cetera, were associated with much less savings at the six months follow up compared with people who did not use alternative financial services. And finally, we ask our participant to respond to a statement saying if I saved more, I would lose my government benefit. And what we're saying is that people say this is not at all like me are more likely to save and the six months follow up compared to people who say this is very much like me. I totally agree with the statement that if I saved more, I would lose my government benefit. So a quick summary. We find that our interest increased both the number and amount of people deposited into a saving account. We found this impact to stay for six months after we filed when we resurvey our participant in the experiment. We find that anchoring are more effective than prompt. It seems like the action is happening when we give people suggested amount and even pre-populating for them. So acting a little bit for the people. And we also find that financial shocks that and use of alternative financial services and asset limit might be associated with less savings. So again, we wanna acknowledge our funders or everyone who make it possible. And I also wanna tell you that we are just at the beginning of analyzing all our great data. There is so much and we just finished data collection of the follow-up survey in December. The six months follow-up from the 2013 tax time. So there is a lot more to come. So stay tuned. Thank you so much. All right, can our panel come on up? So thank you, Michal, for that terrific overview of some of the early findings from the research. As she said, there's a whole lot of data here, it's a big sample size, a very detailed tax information that they've gathered and also very detailed information from the follow-up surveys. So I think there's gonna be a lot more coming and a lot more lessons, but why don't we take some time now to talk about what those findings mean, right? We are doing this research in order to try to understand what families are thinking and doing at tax time, what some of their goals are, what they would like to be doing better or differently at tax time around saving and figure out ways through policy, through practice, that we can help people achieve those goals. And so Ford, of course, is thrilled to be a part of this project. It's been really fun. It's a great team to work with. One of the best things about being a funder is you get sort of early preview of a lot of this data and it's really great to be here today to be sharing it publicly for the first time. So I think the way we're gonna work, I'm gonna ask a couple of questions from our esteemed panelists and then we'll open it up to the audience so get your questions ready. And the folks who are watching on the live stream, I don't think we're taking your questions directly here, but there is a Twitter feed, so let's keep that conversation going as well. When I answer questions, I really don't care what people ask and answer the same way whatever I want to answer, so people can ask. So we may or may not actually respond to your question, but feel free to ask it. I'll take that for myself as well. But I think I won't start with you, Dan, in that case. I'm gonna start with Rourke, who is our Treasury official on our panel. And based on the findings that were presented this morning, what does that make you think of in terms of policy when you think of the kinds of things the Treasury is working on and thinking about how does this shape your thinking? What are the implications for what we're finding in this research for federal policy around tax time and savings? Sure, sure. Well, first I just wanna thank everyone for inviting me today and really applaud this wonderful collaboration between academia and Intuit here. Intuit, our office is actually working on a separate project with Intuit actually using the TurboTax platform to provide awareness for folks about income-based repayment options for student loans. And they've just been a wonderful partner in that collaboration. And I think it's just a really exciting platform to be thinking about these kind of large scale interventions. It's really clear that I think this work underscores the power and the potential of the tax time moment. Not only because of the sheer flow of funds that are kind of moving from Treasury back to households, but also because it's the time when people are really thinking about their finances and I think in a really kind of full picture kind of perspective. I think that this study also really highlights the potential of the split refund option. I think it's really interesting to think about going forward what lessons can we learn from this intervention about how can we increase utilization of the split refund? Are there people splitting on their own afterwards? And I think that's some of the information that you were able to collect in your follow-up survey which is really fantastic. It's interesting to think through how that Form 8888 is being viewed by people and is it something that we can, is it simply just increasing more awareness or how can we kind of connect the dots to actually make that tool most useful to people? In an broader kind of scope, what I really like about this project and where Dovetails nicely with some of the work we're doing at our Office of Treasury is trying to think through across government programs, how can we think about the leveraging of the disbursement of government payments to actually make people better off? So to increase savings, to increase financial capability. So one of the things that our office is excited about is we recently received funding through the most recent budget that was passed to actually start an innovation fund that's designed to test some of the ideas around leveraging government payments. So everything from tax refunds to we can also think of all the other payments that kind of flow through government. So child support payments, TANF, food stamps, you name it kind of, veterans benefits, social security, SSI. Almost every household receives some sort of payment that kind of, in some way, makes its way through the government and often that's transmitted hopefully to direct deposit or if not onto some form of a plastic card and that's pretty much where we leave it. And wouldn't it be nice if we can think about how to put in interventions such as this, so nudges towards savings, which I think would be really powerful, especially in a program like child support. Or when that's not possible, can we think of opportunities to attach kind of perhaps benefits payments with a match that with a personal financial management tool so help people be able to kind of spend the benefits over the course of the month. And so what I really like about this study is it's helping us to think bigger about where there are opportunities to leverage these kind of massive flows of funds, kind of through the government to households in smart ways to help people help themselves, help them kind of reach their own goals to savings or better money management or whatever it might be. So we're starting some work internally trying to kind of in the near term see where there might be strategic opportunities to start testing that, improving that concept. But I'm really excited, I think that even this study kind of is serving as a foundation to in the out years as we think of some of these kind of bigger demonstration efforts, we can really think about opening up kind of a lot of government programs to innovations like this. Great, I think that's really interesting. And it ties back I think to some of the things that Dan was talking about earlier around there being sort of two ways to think about intervening. There's kind of the messaging and how things are framed and set up, but there's also the plumbing and government has a big role in a lot of that plumbing. So that's some exciting opportunities there. I think I'm gonna turn to Ray now. So for those of you who know what Ray is doing now at the St. Louis Fed, he's thinking about household balance sheets, which is broader than savings, broader than tax time. And so I wonder from your perspective what your takeaways are and how this sort of helps you think about family balance sheets. Sure, thanks Amy. And I wanna thank Amy and the Ford Foundation for making it possible to hire Reed and Rourke and other great people and work with McCall. I'm not a grand seeker anymore, but nonetheless it's great to be working with you all here. Well, let me just give four brief takeaways from a kind of a balance sheet perspective. First is that I think we're right to think about the balance sheet. There's been a movement in our field from asset building to savings and assets to sort of the health of the overall balance sheet. This occurred in the last several years in response to the Great Recession where high levels of debt basically brought down families and brought the entire economy down. It's no accident that it was called a balance sheet recession. And so I think that's the proper framework. And especially in light of the finding that McCall highlighted about the high levels of unsecured debt in particular being associated with low levels of savings and the finding which I'll say a little bit more about in a minute that when asked what people wanted to do with their refunds, the highest percentage actually said to repay debts. So it's great that R2S is having these findings which I think cooperates confirms that it's proper to think about the entire balance sheet, the health of the entire balance sheet. Secondly, there's an enormous financial inclusion opportunity and the financial inclusion from a balance sheet perspective is the it's a sine qua non of a healthy balance sheet. You can forget about the rest of the balance sheet if you don't have quality financial services, quality products at the right moment under the right conditions. So forget about the debt part, forget about the savings and wealth accumulation part, forget about the net worth. If you don't have financial inclusion you're not gonna get any of that. And McCall didn't mention it, she didn't have time but among the unbanked in the survey, there was enormous interest in new checking accounts, new savings accounts and prepaid cards. And I think anything we can do to leverage that interest through R2S is a fabulous opportunity. And the scale here is potential probably nothing more, nothing would move financial inclusion along further than if we could open up tax accounts right at tax time. And if we can move in that direction in R2S informed said I think that's an enormous benefit for our efforts to strengthen balance sheets. Third, we're learning from the US financial diaries project from Pew from our own research at the St. Louis Fed that it's primarily financial stability that families want more so than economic mobility. I think we've all thought that moving up in America is the main thing, it drives America. And I don't think that's really gone away but what's clear from many of the findings from these different research efforts is that the vast majority of families want stability over mobility. And very interestingly, savings is critical to achieving both the stability and mobility. When families have stability, they're more likely to think about mobility to have the money to make investments in mobility. With emergency savings in particular, they can manage financial emergencies, economic shocks much better than they could have. So it's this nexus of stability and mobility that I think is really very interesting. And R2S clearly has an opportunity by generating at least at this point, shorter term savings to help families achieve the stability that they really want and keep open the possibility of mobility in the future. So I think that's really very encouraging. The final thing I'll mention, which is not directly related to balance sheets, but like RORC, I think efforts to improve the uptake of Form 8888 is just critical. The finding that R2S seems to nearly have doubled the number of people who save is really very powerful, but the fact that only 1.3% of people split in the first place. An idea that we've been floating around is could you somehow make Form 8888 the default screen so that people don't have to choose to split first? Could the screen that they see be Form 8888 so that the choice is not whether or not to split but simply how to allocate your refund? So I think we should think about defaults at a different level as well in terms of the IRS process because the effects are quite strong when people do decide to split, they're very powerful, but how can we get more people to split in the first place? Yeah, I think you're reinforcing certainly the fact that there are a lot of lessons here and a lot of takeaways and a lot of places that we can go from here and thinking about policy alternatives and ways to help people achieve their goals. I think it's also just really interesting in some ways this was a narrow intervention. It was focused on getting people to put more of their tax, more people and put more of their tax refund into savings. And what it has opened up though, once you start talking to folks and hearing what they're doing in their lives, it's opened up this broader balance sheet conversation with so many folks focused on paying down debt. I was astonished at the, if you look in the report that was, I think the full thing was available outside, the percent of people, it was like a third of people who used their tax refund to pay down debt. And in fact, when they asked people right after the, right when they finished their taxes, how much are you planning to use to pay down debt? They said about 25%. And then when you ask people six months later, you would think that they're being optimistic in their intentions, but in fact, they used more of it to pay down debt than they had planned to. So clearly, and this is something we're learning from the financial diaries research as well. And if you're not familiar with that, check it out. It's US financial diaries being done by the folks at NYU Wagner School. And I think another policy implication is could Treasury look a little more into the option of paying down debts directly at tax time? But there's a lot of psychology and culture that surrounding savings and debt, both. And they're competing, I think, in people's daily lives. People wanna save, they know savings is important, but the debt is hanging over them and it makes them feel really stressed. And it may be there are things we can do to help people sort of in figuring that out. I wanna get back to Phil. So you've done taxes for a while, you've been into it for a while. You know a lot about just from experience about tax time and what people are doing. And I just wonder what from you, seeing this research, did anything surprise you? Were there things that you said, oh, I didn't realize that that was sort of how people were thinking or acting? I think the surprise I had was in two areas and then I think there's kind of a diamond in the rough here. But one area was the effect that the anchors had. And not even just in 2013, but in 2012, I think we had 25% and 75% anchors. And as we were talking about it, I was saying, well, let's 25 and 35. And Dan, of course, being pretty reserved, immediately said, well, how about 90 or whatever? But we pushed the 25 and 75 and the amount saved. I mean, it made a huge difference. So that was one surprise to me as the extent or the full impact it had. On the flip side of the coin, the thing that was also surprising to me was the split rate. Because I thought, we'll put in these prompts and I'm sure the split rate will go to, I don't know what the right number is, but I figured 10%, 15%, whatever. And although it's statistically significant, it doubled, but it didn't go to 10% or 15%. And so I think the kind of the diamond in the rough here is what we're learning from the Household Financial Survey because I think what's really important for us to do and what we try to do it and to it is listen to what the consumer's telling you. I mean, you may believe they should be doing something different, but they understand their lives and these are the decisions they're making. That doesn't mean they can't make a better decision or a different decision, but what they're telling you is very important. And so I think poking at what is it that will cause people to save more in whatever way they choose, whether that's take it into their main account and then use their online banking system to split out to different accounts or whether it's to use the split refund and find ways to make that more seamless. All those things I think we need to be open to and not be biased towards a particular approach, but be open to the learnings. And that's really, so in that respect, the Household Financial Survey is a real eye opener. Great, so I wanna open it up to the audience, but I just wanna end, I wanna give Michal and Dana chance given that there's so much data here and there's so, I mean, just in that brief presentation you raised a dozen or more different questions, possibilities, ideas. If you were, and I'm sure everyone who's here and everyone who's watching the live feed is gonna stay hooked on this and follow the results as they come out. But if you were gonna give people sort of one or two big takeaways today that they should go back to their policy thinking lives to try to sort of mull on and use and do something with, what would you pull out? So I will start with, we need to behave for people, behave on economics. I think what we have learned by the prompt and the anchoring is the easier we made it. So prompt didn't make a lot of impact. We tried to get them to think about their family, to think about the future, to be, you know, to do the right things, but I don't think we had as much impact as once we intervened for them. We calculated them out, we told them what it is they need to do. We pre-populated it, we made it easy. We kind of, so it was, we didn't fully opt them out and we didn't fully like throw them into a saving account but we helped them gather and we were a lot more successful. So, you know, we need to still finding ways and an institution to do things that make it easier, that kind of do the work for people, that kind of do it more automatically. So I think that's where the field, that's where we will be able to make impact and what else can we do to make that? Yeah, and I would echo that as well. Now, we try to do things easier but what's so interesting about the survey is that the demand, the desire for savings is really incredible, saving and debt repayment. These are not people who don't want to do it. There's really a large number of people who really want help in doing it. We thought we would help them a lot but we didn't help them enough. So you think about the extra step of having another account, turns out that's a big barrier. You know, people put money in savings as a way to think about money in checking as a way to think about savings because they don't have a savings account. So the demand side, I think, is there ready? And by the way, when we, in the pre-survey we did, when we asked people about pre-commitment devices, people were really interested in pre-commitment devices and particularly the people with the lowest income of this low income group were interested in that. So I think that for me the realization is that we have high demand and we're not making it easy enough for people to actually act on it and that's why I think, you know, we need to figure out how we open accounts for people. How do we make it even easier? We thought we made it much easier. It's not even close to being easy enough. Just to add on that, 62% of our population said they want to save. So at the tax time, at the moment going, we ask people in the House of Financial Survey, do you want to save your refund? 62% say they're planning to send the refund. This is a lot of people and, you know. And just on the point of making it easy, the sort of the flip side of that is how easy it is to get derailed and this is my favorite story from the process of doing this at one of our early meetings with Intuit. They were talking about what we could do on the tax form and how to make it work and one of the things, the sort of insider Intuit information that they said that just sort of blew me away and it has stuck in my mind is if you've ever done TurboTax online, you know, most of it is sort of clicking with your mouse, click here, click here. They said that if people have to go from clicking their mouse to using the keyboard, just that letting go of the mouse and moving their hands to the keyboard, they lose people. They don't complete the tax return, they just, they give up. And that to me is astonishing how if that small of a thing can be a barrier, then it's just, it's so easy for people to get derailed and I think it sort of puts a lot more emphasis on the idea of what it really means to make it easy for people. All right, audience, raise your hand high and a couple of ground rules. Please wait till the mic is in your hand to speak so the folks on the web can hear you. Please say your name and affiliation and we're gonna make an attempt to keep these two questions for the panel as opposed to statements or fresh ideas. Okay, yes my friend. Good morning, Anthony Santiago, National League of Cities. I have a clarifying question and then a follow up on figure 15 where you have the follow up survey six months later, the percentage of those who still had savings versus who didn't. The number is three times greater for those who self-identified with this loss of benefits, this public benefits. So is the assumption that those who didn't save at all had this fear, this identification of loss of benefits and then as, you know, what are you thinking in terms of innovation or what can be done to kind of address this? Because it seems rather stark. So this is not causality, this is association, you know, we didn't intervene, but we ask people respond to this statement and then we knew whether they have savings or not or we made, you know, this correlation and we do find that assets limit seems to be a barrier and we know that from other research as well. I think Rok did his dissertation on thesis on that, right? That's what this is. We know that and I think there is a clear implication, policy implication that something need to be done on asset limit, they need to be reduced, they need to be removed, they need to, they are serving as disincentives. That's my takeaway. Great. In the back, there's a hand. Thank you, Bill Gale at the Brookings Institution. Great presentations all around. I had a question for Ray, actually. It's nice to see you back in DC. You were talking about the relationship between financial security and economic mobility and I couldn't tell if you were trying to sort of reformulate the relative importance of the two or whether you were sort of stating what I thought was the common view which is that financial security is sort of a necessary but not a sufficient condition for economic mobility because without financial security it's eventually you'll lose your job or you'll lose your health insurance or you'll get sick or something will happen to knock you off the rails. So I was just curious to ask you to elaborate whether you were somehow trying to reformulate the balance saying that we should pay more attention to one less attention to the other or if you were saying the usual thing I thought we all said but saying it in a different way. I don't think I'm out to reformulate anything. I'm just struck by the high percentage of people who prioritize stability over mobility and the numbers seem a lot higher than they used to which I think is a reflection of the lingering effects of the recession, structural changes in the economy, insights from the financial diaries project, new research coming out from Pew and others that the emphasis I think needs to shift a little bit more towards stability than it had in the past rather than just thinking American dream, getting a home, saving for college, retirement. I think we've put a lot of emphasis on that and I don't ever wanna let go of that but I think that we need to pay more attention to stability if we want mobility than I think we had to in the past. Great question. I saw another hand. Yes, that's where I saw it. Hi, Jake Hassel's work from Senator Charles Schumer's office, really enjoyed the presentations. I think it's a great study. So as you guys have acknowledged, you've got I think really substantial effects here but from a very low baseline of people who are likely to save. What I'm wondering is what would this look like year over year? So it depends, it is a small effect when you look at the number of people who split but lots of people are saving in other ways, right? So people think there's a question of what looks like splitting to us and what looks like splitting to people. Right, so they're doing it through another. They're doing it in checking. Well, they decide you had enough time, I guess. Yeah. But it's true, it's very depressing to look at that number but people are just splitting in odd ways and the question is why are we not getting them to split in the ways we think are better for them. So, but the question I was getting to was do you think year over year, would this cumulatively reach more people? Do you think that two or 3% would kind of snowball or are you sort of getting the people that are gonna opt into this on the first wave and the people that aren't doing it are just gonna be more difficult to get to? Can I speculate? So it's easy to speculate about future data. So first of all, I look at the number of people who think that they are saving and then I look at the pent up demand, the number of people who say they want to save and these are big numbers and the question of course is how do we get that pent up demand to be part of this process and whether they could do an official split between checking and savings or they don't have a saving account and they need to think about internal splitting. I think there is clearly the pent up demand for doing more of that and the question is how do we get that? Another important question is lots of people have plans for what they're going to do with this money. So another question is when do you get those people? So we think the tax time is a good time but if you planned on every dollar of what you're getting it's no longer a good time. So another part of this is to say should we at that time remind people that this is a good saving opportunity and ask them if they want to withhold more of their income for the following year so that the following year they could participate in that. So I think there are lots of barriers there and for me it was really surprising I think how much demand there is and how big the barriers are and how we really need to think in a very different timeframe. So the people who are using a third of their refund to pay down debt, that's great, right? Can we help them somehow doing it the more efficient quicker way? I think there's a tremendous amount of opportunities. I don't think it's limited to the small number. I think that just the way we're formulating it right now is incompatible with the way people have their finances set up. And just to add on that, we totally see that in the House of Financial Survey. So people who define themselves that they were savers and are still six months later having the saving we ask them, so how did you save? A third said they saved in their checking account and still have it. 66% said they saved in the saving account and they moved by themself after. So I think part of it is also how we decided to define success in our intervention or the outcome which is depositing into a saving account at that exact moment and not like the day after you get it or a month after you get it. I think we also honestly we kind of reduced the impact might be reducing the impact of intervention just because of how we're focusing on measuring but it's also bringing the larger discussion that we'll be having, continue having and thinking about future years. Can we open account next time? Can we make it easier? What else can we do to get them to put it in the saving account? What can we do to people who don't have a second of account to open a saving account? So there is so much that we have learned and so much more now that we are excited to be thinking about and address that. I think the other thing to remember is that this is a relatively low-touch, low-cost intervention with the potential for scale because it's in the tax system and we have scale in the intuit because a million people use it every year but the tax system is at scale nationally and so if we can double the number of people who save and have them save 30% more and if we can fine tune this a little and maybe quadruple it, it might be still small from the right in total as a percent of the population but if you scale it across everyone who files taxes it could make a huge impact on the national balance sheet. And so thinking about even those small fine tune ideas can, especially if we see that they have real impact on people's lives, right? If they're able to keep those savings and if those savings actually help them deal with financial emergencies and be able to start thinking about longer-term savings then that could really be impactful even if it sort of stays at a relatively modest level. I mean, I would just add to Amy that it's interesting how we've come to this realization that you don't always need new money like new match money to generate new savings and for years the field thought that if you didn't have a match people wouldn't save and in fact we're learning that the match may be important for other reasons in accumulation perspective and equity perspective but from a savings perspective there's a lot you can do without actually the government spending money and that's important in this fiscal environment. Amy, can I just follow up on Macaulay's comment about success metrics, it really is important. So separating the what from the how. So the what we're trying to accomplish is savings. Splitting is a how. And so splitting is one how, how do you optimize that but there's lots of other things and so that's why I go back to kind of the hidden insights. So how many people in the room have ever used a post-it? I mean, I use post-its, it's a great product. It's a failed product. Post-its came about because 3M was trying to create an adhesive and it didn't work. It was tacky but it didn't really work as intended and then all of a sudden the engineer who was developing it or the scientist realized huh, it works pretty good. So I think what we have to keep doing is we're not gonna give up on the split. We have to look for those hidden insights. We gotta find the post-it. And the consumers and the household financial survey and everything else I think will help us uncover what those opportunities are at tax time. Not only in the savings area but what other financial literacy or financial capability opportunities are there to build off that? Because I think we're at the very beginning and I think five or 10 years from now will have a much different point of view about what the opportunities are. I think we have time for one last question. Do we have one? All right, to be continued. Thank you everybody for coming. Thank you so much to all our panelists and thank you to the folks at New America for pulling this all together. It's been a really terrific event. Have a great day.