>> Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Brittany Taylor, and welcome to today's webinar on financial health assessments for counseling and guidance. We are thrilled to have you all joining us today. And we have a very, very full agenda and a lot to learn, so a won't take up a whole lot of time with introductions. But before we begin, I'd like to go through a few logistical features that you can learn and enjoy today's webinar most effectively. The audio for today's webinar is being broadcast for your computer, so make sure your speakers are turned on or your headphones are plugged in. And you can control the audio broadcast via the audio broadcast panel for today's webinar. If you accidentally close the panel, easily reopened. You go to the communicate menu up at the top of the screen and choose join audio broadcast. If you do not have sound capabilities on your computer, or if you prefer to listen by phone today, you can dial the numbers listed on the right-hand side of the screen on the box. I'll read them off for you. The first number is 1-650-479-3207. Or if you prefer toll free, you can dial 1-855-244-8681, and enter the meeting code, or 00942084. And please note, you do not need to enter an attendee ID even when asked. We are providing realtime captioning during this webinar. To access the captions, click the media viewer button in the upper right corner of the webinar platform. For Mac users, the media viewer panel will automatically be open in the lower right corner of the webinar screen. If you want to make the media viewer panel larger, you can minimize other panels like CAT, Q & A, and/or participants. We are going to be taking questions for today's webinar. So if you have a question, please use the Q & A box to send any questions, and we will direct the questions accordingly during the Q & A portion of the webinar. That will be towards the end of the webinar. And if you're listening by phone and not logged into the webinar, you can e-mail questions directly to me at btaylor@ndi-inc.org. And please note that this webinar is being recorded and materials will be shared with participants. If you experience any technical difficulties during the webinar today, please use the chat box and send a message to me. Or you can e-mail me at btaylor@ndi-inc.org. Again, that's my e-mail. And with that, I am thrilled to introduce to you again our speakers tomorrow today's webinar. Today we are joined by David Leon. He's the Ticket to Work Coordinator and Grants & Special Projects for the Virginia Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services. And Elizabeth Jennings from the LEAD Center, a project of National Disability Institute. And with that, we're going to get into the meat of our agenda and webinar objectives in a moment. But before we do that, I'd like to talk a little bit about what has brought us here today.

>> Thanks, Brittany. This is part of a series that is sponsored through the Career Pathways for Individuals with Disabilities Project. And this is funded through a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Education. It is led by DARS and DBVI to help Virginians with disabilities enhance their marketability in high-demand jobs by helping our clients go into advanced manufacturing careers with career ladders. And with CPID projects, develop the pre-training program to prepare students at WWRC, and that includes some financial empowerment training, and where we began the work with these financial help assessments.

>> Thank you, David. And in addition to the work being done under the CPID grant, today's webinar is also being supported by National Disability Institute. The mission of National Disability Institute is to drive social impact to build a better economic future for people with disabilities and their families. Our website is below, and via that website, you can access a lot more information on financial empowerment. And we are also here today as part of the LEAD Center, which is a technical assistance center funded by the Department of Labor's Office of Disability Employment Policy, with a mission to advance sustainable, individual and system's level change that results in improved competitive integrated employment and economic self-sufficiency outcomes for individuals across the spectrum of disability. And the website for the LEAD Center is below, and please note that this is where all of the webinar archives from this financial empowerment series will be posted for you to ask that. As I mentioned, we have a really full agenda today. So our first will be to review today's webinar objective, which we will do shortly. And then we're going to jump right into it and talk a little bit more about the financial health assessments. What is a financial health assessment? How are you as the State of Virginia going to be utilizing financial health assessments? I know we may also have folks on the line from other states. And this will be a really great opportunity for you to see our best practice being done across the country in terms of using a financial health assessment. We're also going be looking at some case scenarios so that our vocational rehabilitation counselors who are on the line today have a little bit more of a sense of, you know, how is [inaudible] used when you're meeting with an individual. And then we'll hear a little bit more from a VR counselor who was using this and has been helping to bring this into the State of Virginia as well. And hopefully by the end of today's webinar, you'll have a little better understanding of the components and use of a financial health assessment, be able to view the larger picture of how counselors and case workers using a financial health assessment can help individuals improve their financial well-being and advance their employment goals. And that's really key because a lot of this is really going to be driving employment goals forward. Learn how Virginia is implementing the use of a financial health assessment with a split service. And learn about other resources available to increase your understanding about financial empowerment. So with that, I am going to turn it back over to David Leon, and he will jump us off into sort of setting the framework of why is all of this important and why we're all here today.

>> Thank you, Brittany. I always like to start, and I believe we've started most of these with a little piece of the Rehab Act. And again, it's just a reminder that the purpose of this act is to empower individuals with disabilities, to maximize employment, economic self-sufficient, independence, and inclusion and integration into society. And we really are trying to begin to stress that economic self-sufficiency piece in Virginia. And our hope is that the financial health assessment and the related tools will help to do that. And we got here because a few different things. We realized that our clients needed additional services and community supports to maintain their employment once their VR case is closed. We also hope to reduce recidivism and duplication of services within the VR system. And we wanted to help increase the likelihood that our clients would not only keep their jobs, but allow them to build savings for the future and become more stable in those jobs. One of the big changes is that for VR, we are now measured on a client's earnings at the second and third quarter after exit. And we feel that helping with our clients' financial well-being will aid in their successful wages later after case closer. So the purpose of the Financial Capabilities Webinar Series is to address a major barrier to work. And that is a lack of financial resources. And our goal is to equip current WISA's, DARs and DVBI staff and vendors with the education and resources necessary to build the financial capability of customers and maximize their potential for long-term success. If you heard at the beginning, we have partnered through the CPIV grant with NDI and the LEAD Center, and it really has taken a village to create this set of services.

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We've also partnered with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And through this webinar series, we hope that our participants will learn to better understand the financial lives of the customers they serve and the impact on their employment goals and job search. We'd like to shift the focus from employment as the goal to employment as a stepping stone to economic self-sufficiency. And we hope to connect our customers to financial opportunities so they can capitalize on the economic self-sufficiency that can come through employment. I also want to make sure this is the third webinar in a series of three. The first webinar was entitled Financial Empowerment: The Missing Piece to the Employment Puzzle. The second webinar was on resource mapping and a good strategy to build enhanced collaboration and referrals. If you've missed either of those webinars, those, along with this, will be available through the LEAD Center's website. And again, our hope is to help connect staff with the appropriate resources in their communities to assist clients wherever they are within the continuum of the financial capability and well-being.

>> Thank you so much, David. And I think that's a lovely way to set the stage. And it's been a very long road, but a very intentional one. And without further ado, I want to introduce, again, Elizabeth Jennings, who's going to talk us through the specifics of what is a financial assessment, and why does it matter, and what can it be used for. Elizabeth.

>> Great. Thank you so much, Brittany. Thank you, David. Welcome, everybody. It's really exciting to be on the line with you today. I'm happy to share with you a little bit about financial health assessments, why they're important, and I just want to take a moment to congratulate the State of Virginia for taking this and practice a step forward in viewing financial capability as an important component to employment. So many of you on the line may be new to the concept of a financial health assessment. It really has two roles for the individual, the job seeker, the person that you're serving, your customer. It's a tool that includes a variety of financial capability questions and allows the individual to assess their current financial health. So for many of us, we go day to day and we may feel the pressure of our personal finances, but we may not be sitting down to really assess what, how is this impacting my life, what are some key questions I need to ask myself about my finances, and what are some pathways I can take to improve this issue in my life. For VR counselors, employment specialists, even work-incentive specialists, and other human service professionals, it's a tool that is going to help you to understand the individual's current situation. And it's ultimately going to help you to connect them to opportunities that will guide them in addressing their financial needs and reaching their goals to improve their financial well-being. There are multiple benefits of using the financial health assessment. One is identifying some barriers to employment and to other goals that the individual may have. Later on, we're going to share with you a case study of real-life answers to financial health assessment. And we're going to hear from Erica Schwartz, who's applying financial health assessments, and is going be able to share with you her experience. But this issue of helping people to identify some of their barriers to employment is really key when you're looking at providing employment services. And what's most critical is the financial health assessment can help you to understand something about the person's current state of mind. So if you see somebody who's in a financial crisis through the use of the financial health assessment, it can really help you to understand that this person may today really be in a moment in time where they're looking for a survivor job. They need a job that's going to immediately provide them income. They're going be willing to take the first job possible. And it can help you to understand that today they may not be interested in things such as career pathways or additional training or other opportunities that would improve their employment circumstances over an extended period of time. So the financial health assessment can help you kind of identify somebody who's got in a mode of needing a survivor job, and how you can support them in understanding that that may be a good first job to get right now, but when might be opportune for them to be thinking about a career pathway. It's also the financial health assessment helps you to identify community resources that the individual may be able to use. So while we don't expect for everybody to look at a financial health assessment and provide all of the services yourself, we did provide a webinar on resource mapping as a supplement to the financial health assessment to help you be prepared based on the answers that you see to support someone to connect to other resources and services that can help them to diminish their financial stress and get--be better prepared to obtain and maintain employment. A really important component or benefit of the financial health assessment is that it creates a way to start the conversation with the individual you're serving about their financial struggles and their financial goals. We have a really strong belief that people are not motivated necessarily by just the social status of having a job or the income that employment generates, but that people have other financial goals and other personal goals that are drivers for them. So when we go to a case study later, you're going to see that one of the goals of the individual was to send their child to college. That can be hugely motivating as you're trying to support the person in making more robust employment decisions that are going to go beyond a short-term gain in employment. The financial health assessment also provides the individual with the awareness of their current situation and gives them an opportunity to work on several of the items that they may not have been thinking about, which are going to assist them in their financial capability. And this is important for a couple of reasons. One reason is that some of the things in our personal finances actively create barriers to employment. So, for example, I may not have the transportation that I need because I don't have the small dollars that I may need to fix my car. I may be somebody who has a very negative credit profile, and that could prevent me from securing certain jobs in certain arenas. Also, my credit may be having a negative impact on the stability of my housing. Maybe I am not in very stable housing, but it's preventing me from being able to rent somewhere. So there's multiple things that can be going on in personal finances that somebody may not be connecting to as creating barriers for them. It's also important to note that the financial health assessment is the first chance to be thinking more broadly with the individual about what their goals are, and sometimes individuals are not having a very easy time securing employment, so having--achieving goals in other areas of your life can build their hope so that they have that personal grit to keep moving forward along the employment path. It also can be very helpful because the financial health assessment is helping you to identify multiple ways that a person can improve the current financial situation that they're in, particularly if they do choose to do a career pathway, that they have some financial crisis going on. So we also have identified for you some opportunities in which you can incorporate the financial health assessment. You can kind of think of these as just just in time moments that the financial health assessment can be used with the individuals that you're serving. One is during the initial intake process. So the financial health assessment could be something that's done across the board for everybody who walks through your doors during the intake. During that moment in time, the intake person is often asking the person questions about services they're receiving, sometimes about their income, and so it may be found to be a comfortable moment in time to provide people with the assessment. You can also do it as part of preemployment questionnaires. This moment in time helps you to give a broader assessment of what's going on, what are some of the things that need to be thought about in employment planning. You could also do a financial health assessment during an employment training program at the beginning or at the end of it, but at a moment in time where people are starting to think about what I want my employment to look like, what kind of budget do I need, what am I going to be looking to get as far as income goes from my job. And all of those can be kind of--the financial health assessment can help the individual think about those different aspects. If you were doing financial education classes, doing it at the beginning of or as part of a financial education class, makes great sense. People are there to think about their finances. And this will help facilitate some of that thinking. And then we view this as an important component of work incentive counseling, and support the thought that this is a great tool for WISAs to have at their fingertips, that they can use the financial health assessment as another way to gather information and to better assess not only some of the fears of loss of Social Security benefits, but what are the other financial things going on in the person's life that would have an additional impact on the individual's frame of mind around whether or not they feel that they can take the risk of giving up some of their cash benefit and/or some of their healthcare. I'm going to hand it over to David to talk to you a little further about the financial health assessment tool created specifically for the State of Virginia.

>> Thank you, Elizabeth. And what we're going to do is actually go through the financial health assessment tool. I want to start with our VA DARS counselors here on the line with the procedure code we've added to AWARE, which is A3023. It's the financial health assessment. I've included the job category, the service category and procedure category, which would be used in AWARE to create an authorization. And I want to stress, because we have WISAs, we have counselors, and other staff that may be utilizing these tools. Michael Pointer and I will be sending out a list of layers to have gone through the additional trainings that we are requiring to be able to offer this tool. I also want to stress, it is available to clients that our counselors send to WWRC. And now we're going to go through the questions that are on the financial health assessment. It starts with what are your top three concerns or issues happening right now in your life? And we went with finish this sentence. I often struggle with, finding a job, paying bills on time, paying off debt, negative or no credit. And we go down, and we try to include other on several bases. But remember, if you're using this with a client and it leads to more conversation, it is okay to add things and ask more questions with that--if the client begins talking. You may also have questions that where someone is in the search, or where that client is currently, may not be applicable yet. But you can still ask, you know, well, when you get to this point, what do you think would be the things that you struggle with? So part of our hope is that really this is a way to begin a dialogue to create greater rapport and understanding with your clients about financial issues and how they may impact employment. Questions two and three involve what are your sources of income, and are you worried at all about how money will affect eligibility for SSI or SSDI or any other programs. Part of the reason for these questions, specifically about eligibility for SSI or SSDI, is you might learn that your client is receiving other types of aid that they didn't alert you to during the additional eligibility or intake process. And you might also find out that there are other people involved in a client's financial issues or that they had debts they might not have thought about in that way. For question four, it's how often do you struggle with paying any of the following living expenses. We could have added 20 other categories, and we thought about adding together. But if you are working with someone with doesn't who any of those, it's still a great time to say, is there anything else you might be having trouble paying for, because there are all sorts of pay-as-you-go type services that a client may have ventured into. And again, it's a chance to find out where somebody is at or what things might be problematic for the future. We added this question specifically because of research we did on our federal [inaudible] 2016 closures. We found out that over 98% of our clients qualified for not only pre-tax preparation, but free eFiling in Virginia. So we wanted a question that those folks who have work or are already working, that if somebody says they're paying someone to prepare their taxes, our hope is that in the FHA report that comes back, there will be information related to where in that person's local community we can send that client so they can get their taxes prepared and filed for free. If we can help someone save that small amount of money, that's a great way to begin an emergency savings fund. It's a great way to help somebody start thinking about being in a position to address issues that would otherwise become a financial barrier. We added a question about debts. And again, part of this is to get to know our clients and understand what things they're facing. So we may be working with someone who has credit cards or student loans or payday loans. We may be working with someone who has unpaid medical bills or a car loan or utility debt. And again, any of these are opportunities to get more information and see if there are ways to help. This is a really important question. And it comes up in so many ways. We asked, have you ever been refused any of the following because of bad credit, and we list a group of items that as many of you know from helping clients get jobs, many applications ask on the application, and when you sign, that you are okay with a credit check. I believe the study was 2013 that found that 37% of employers require a credit check as part of the employment process. So it's good to know if that might preclude someone from certain jobs. We added question eight because of our work with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and we wanted to make sure that clients knew that they did have rights and what to do with that if someone had tried to take advantage of them related to financial services. If you went through our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Your Money, Your Goals training, or are using a staff that has gone through training, they will know how to talk about this with the clients that have a financial health assessment. Part of our goal was making sure that nobody had to be a certified accountant or financial planner to have conversations about money. So we really have tried to work with tools and organizations to help make this a more comfortable experience to get the better outcomes. Questions 9 through 11 all have to do with checking and savings accounts and bank accounts in general. We could have added more probing questions. What I'd like to point out, if you are working with transition students [inaudible] one of the questions we did not add as a separate question, but is important to think about, does somebody else have access to our account? Is somebody else's name on that account? If you're working with a transition student, maybe the account is a joint account with mom or dad. Maybe there is a rep payee who's also on that account. And again, it's a way to get a little more information. And these are great things to know ahead of time when going towards employment because most jobs are going to ask about direct deposit, and it would be nice to have that information ready, or at least know you're going to need to get that ready for when that job offer [inaudible]. Question 12 is about money set aside to cover emergencies or unexpected expenses. And we felt that was important because there's a myth that if somebody can't save three to six months of savings, that there's no reason to try. And in reality, many emergencies that our clients face are significantly small amounts of money that if we can get someone in the habit or create a plan to help them begin to save small bits of money like that B that would have been a part of our tax preparation service, that might be enough to cover a change in medicine curb pays or an issue with the car that's under $100. So there's a lot of reasons we can begin this conversation and help someone to put in place some safety net type items so they can be successful and avoid a small pickup turning into the loss of a job. Question 13 is really to help us get at some of the behaviors our clients already exhibit related to how they handle finances. So we are asking, how often do you use any of these other services to buy things or make payments or get cash? And part of it is if you have a client who is regularly using payday loans or pawn shops or check cashers, money orders or prepaid cards, they're probably spending very scarce resources for those services, because those cost more than utilizing a bank account. And again, it's a chance to enhance our counseling and guidance with a client to help them become more self-sufficient, and maybe make them aware of other options or the benefits of other options. Questions 14 through 18 really focus on credit. And one of the fascinating things is we've rolled out these services are when we did our initial group of clients to get the financial health assessment at WWRC, across the board, those clients felt credit was a bad thing. Many of them instead, if they didn't have credit cards, and because of that, they thought they had zero credit. So it's a change in conversation to make sure our clients understand that credit is actually an aspect. Your credit score can allow you to get better rates on loans. It can get you into more housing situations. So each of these questions hopefully will help steer towards that the other thing people seem to know is how to get to their credit reports. And because of the work that was done at WWRC related to this, a staff person there then chose to use the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's unit on credit and created a whole lesson plan so that the group of folks in the MTT training were able to understand the benefits of credit and how to get to those scores. It was really an empowering moment for that group of students. Question 19 is have you ever made a personal or family budget? And again, part of our goal is let's help someone figure out ways to avoid getting into trouble in the first place. If they haven't, it's a great opportunity to bring in a variety of budgeting tools to help someone start that. They can also then use that for saving towards something. And again, back to the emergency funds, and that sort of item, we ask the question, if you had an emergency and needed $1,000, where would you get that money? And it tells us a little more about where a client may potentially be. Because if they already have some savings, that's incredible, and a great place to start. Maybe they have some assets. And maybe they have a very good family where they're close and they have someone they could borrow that from. They might say, I have no idea where I'd get that money. And in that kind of situation, it's a great way to begin talking about how we can move this conversation and move a client's behavior towards more self-sufficiency. Question 21 is pretty basic. Have you set any financial goals for you and your family? And you know how much money is needed to reach them. We talk a lot with our clients about employment and what they want to do. We talk some about how much they want to earn. But this really lets someone think about future planning related to their finances. Question 22 goes into more detail. And we ask a client to choose the top three goals they want to work on right now and the top three goals they'd like to work on later. And you can see through the list, it could be as simple as getting a job or better job, paying off debts. Or it could be going to college or purchasing a home or starting a business. And then we have the same items in both categories because hopefully this will come across as a continuum, much like going to work and our clients will see that they're on the path when employment is not just the end goal, but quality of life and self-sufficiency is. And now we want to go on to an actual case scenario of using the FHA. And I'm going to turn it back over to Elizabeth for this piece.

>> Great. Thanks so much, David. I'm going to just take us back to a couple of questions just to add a few thoughts, as you and I discussed previously. So one is that these questions on banking, as David mentioned, are really important for understanding how people will accept their earned income. It can also play a role in how they're currently receiving maybe a public benefit that they're getting. Lots of folks get a prepaid card. There is research that shows that people with disabilities are much further behind the general population in having a relationship with a financial institution, and then even further behind between having a checking account and having a savings account. So this can be really important. Some of the research we found is that people feel that they do not have enough money to have a bank account. So you may find that individuals are using prepaid cards and kind of have a way that they manage their money that works for them. And so you want to remember that this financial health assessment is to be done to help with planning and to help with connections to services, but not to have a value judgment around them. Because people have found that ways to manage very small amounts of money. And if you're someone with much more limited income, you're much more likely to know exactly where all of it goes. Another one is question 12. You know, there's a lot of misinformation out there about what you're allowed to do as far as saving money. And so some people have retained a habit of not saving money. Sometimes they save money, bullet they don't keep it in a safe place because they're afraid that it will negatively impact a public benefit. So this not only provides a chance to think about emergencies and unexpected expenses, but also looking back at some of the goals the individual has for themselves, and now how new income can create a new savings behavior and may lead to further conversations around things like able accounts, pulled trust or special needs trust. I wanted to quickly note on question 13 that some people are using money orders as a way to effectively manage their money and make sure that they are able to pay rent each month. So some people, if they get two payments a month, say two paychecks, they'll take half of the rent out of the first check through a money order and half a check out of the second one through a money order so that they can make sure that they can pay. So again, it's not to complicate things, as I see some of the questions coming through. It's not to complicate things, but just to remind you that these are starter questions for a conversation. And I think you're going to find really interesting information about how smart and savvy the people that you're serving are so that--and how they can employ some of that savviness to their job search. And then I just wanted to check one more here. It's question 20. One of the interesting aspects of question 20 is this is a key way that you might learn more about that person's circle of support. So while the question is really about money, the answer can help you better understand who are the people that this individual relies on in their life. Maybe not because they can provide the thousand dollars, but because they mention them as somebody who would want to give it to them, but may not have it, or may be able to support them in some of the ways that they note. Okay, so let's go to an actual case scenario of using a financial health assessment. And in the testing that DARS did to see what additional questions needed to be covered or whether or not these questions were understood by the individuals who were being asked, James is one of the people who responded. And, of course, we've changed his name. So some of the responses to James we're going to walk through so that you can understand how this impacts employment planning. So James' top three concerns were finding a job or a better job that will support me and my family, paying off debts and having negative or no credit. When asked if you have a checking account, James said no. Has he ever looked at his credit report? He said no. Do you know your credit score? James reported no. But when asked, have you ever been refused something because of bad credit, he reported yes, he had been refused a job, an apartment and a car loan. So while we are not sure about James' personal understanding of his credit, we can tell that his credit file may be very thin or may have negative reports on it because it has negatively impacted him as he has moved forward in securing not necessarily goals, but some basic needs like employment and housing. Going on through his answers, when asked, have you ever made a personal or family budget, he said no, but he would like to learn how. So that's really great information to know that James not only would benefit, but may be receptive to some connections to further his financial empowerment or his financial health. The top three goals he wants to work on right now, getting a job or a better job, making my finances better, and buying a home, and his top three goals to work on later. Sorry, that's a little typo on our part. Improving credit, saving for the future, starting my own business, and sending my child to college. So with all of this information, if James comes in, some of the challenges he's had in securing employment may get focused on, or what he can or can't do regarding his public benefits may get focused on. But knowing this information, you can see that James not only has really important short-term goals, things he wants to work on right now, they're not necessarily short-term, but also he has this longer view of his financial future that we wouldn't have been able to capture without the financial health assessment. And this long-term view gives us a much better understanding of ways that we can support James not only in the short-term of what's our plan for employment right now, but helping James think long-term about his career pathway and how he may start off in one spot in employment, but how he might want to move and build his skills and build his experience so that he can reach these longer term goals that he has for himself. So you can see that can be really powerful in supporting James for both long-term goal setting and short-term goal setting. And we want to invite Erica Schwartz to build this out a little bit further for us. For those of you who don't know Erica Schwartz, she's a VR counselor for the Virginia Department for Aging and Rehabilitation Services. She's been with Virginia DARS for five years. And her caseload is combined with adults and high school students. And she's been part of the agency's 2017 skills for leadership cohort, which has been working on initiatives related to financial empowerment. We are just so thrilled that she agreed to join us today. And I'm excited to hear from you, Erica, about your experience using this financial health assessment.

>> Thank you, Elizabeth. And I'm happy to be with you all today to share some of my thoughts on how a financial health assessment can be useful for counselors and their consumers. As a counselor, I view a financial health assessment as a user-friendly tool to initiate a conversation about financial health with both the adults and young adults that I serve. Most of the time, adult consumers walk through our doors needing a job as quickly as possible. And typically the leading factor and the sense of urgency is the need for income. So even though our focus at DARS is to support our consumers with employment, our consumers' financial instructors and goals are very relevant to their plan for employment. So [inaudible] is a sensitive subject, the topic of finances. But I like that the financial health assessment does not ask for specifics in that many of the questions focus on the [inaudible] topic. So, for example, it asks consumers about their awareness of their credit score, but it does not ask them to share it with us. When it asks about debt, it doesn't require consumers to specify how much debt they may be in. Do I feel it empowers my consumers to decide how much guidance they would like on the results of the assessment and what topics they would prefer to elaborate on, with an emphasis on pre-employment businesses, there is definitely a lot of potential to use the financial health assessment for guidance and planning. For example, a number of my high school students plan to attend college after graduating from high school. But many of them do not have a full understanding of how they will pay for it or what it will mean for their future if they take out a student loan. So counselors can encourage the use of the financial health assessment with students and ideally their parents to start talking about and preparing for their future. One of my consumers completed a financial health assessment while participating in a vocational training program at Lewiston Workforce and Rehabilitation Center. He is a young man who has worked a few part-time jobs and was working on a [inaudible] career in a competitive field. After reviewing his result from the assessment, I realized a couple of things. One, he is very fortunate in that he did not have any current financial stressors. He worked a part-time job while in high school and was able to save a lot of his income earnings, mostly due to the fact that his family is very supportive. Second, he wanted to obtain a job that provided him the ability to be self-sufficient. And finally, he had--he didn't have an idea of his credit score or if he even had a credit score to begin with. So after he discussed this with his parents, they realized that it had never really occurred to them to help their son to build his own credit. So they felt that the financial health assessment was helpful since it brought some topics that many of the family had not discussed, and it resulted in them planning for ways to help my consumer to become more self-sufficient. One way that I've used the financial health assessment results for this particular consumer was to initiate a conversation about his salary expectations. So on the financial health assessment, he noted that his goals were to earn enough money for leisure activities, as well as to find a job or a better job that will support him and his family. So I wanted to know more about his wants, and more so his needs, and how much money in the future he needs for the leisurely activities. So I gave him a budget spreadsheet from CFPB's Your Money, Your Goals, and I encouraged him to complete it with two different scenarios. So the first scenario being if he remains living at home. And the second, if he moves into his own apartment. So by record seeing the budget spreadsheet, we were able to identify the minimum amount of income he would like to have in order to support himself and to live the lifestyle that he would like to have. And also with this information have allowed me to counsel him on the entry level employment earnings for the type of work he was pursuing, and he was able to see how his salary expectations aligned with his chosen career path. And as a counselor, I don't just see the financial health assessment as being a one-time use. In a previous slide, Elizabeth went over suggestions on when to incorporate the financial health assessment. And I agree that the assessment would be most helpful at the times that were mentioned. And in addition to introducing and at the beginning of services, I would also revisit the financial health assessment once the consumer is employed. Because I would question whether anything has changed and would they benefit from other community resources now that they are working. So the financial health is a great, easy tool to initiate those important discussions with our consumers about their financial health. And I think it's important to remember that as their health providers, we may be the only person in our consumer's life that is empowering them to adjust their financial stressors and goals.

>> Wonderful. Thank you so much, Erica. I think that's a really nice way to just frame how you've been using it and how helpful it's been and how much it's empowered you as a vocational rehabilitation counselor, but also those that you serve to think about their finances and to further their employment outlook and opportunities in a much more comprehensive way. David, I'm going to turn it back over to you. And this is just kind of a nice way to wrap up our conversation about financial health assessments. And I'd like to remind everyone before we do that, if you have questions about a financial health assessment, how it's going to be used in Virginia, any other questions, this is a great time to post them into the chat box while David is sharing some important thoughts.

>> Thank you, Brittany. Also, thank you to Elizabeth and Erica. Part of what I'd like to end with is that, again, our goal is to make sure we can help our counselors and nurses and our fix to work partnerships at the end, create opportunities for better and more [inaudible] with their clients when they're choosing their careers, create stronger rapport, and hopefully affecting and promoting better outcomes that are geared more towards self-sufficiency. So our hope is after you've listened to this and participated, hopefully in all three of these webinars, that you will continue to educate yourself on the benefits of financial health assessments and supporting the clients you work with to build their financial capability, recognize that it's a strong first step. We've also had a group that is working with clients that are currently earning subminimal wage, and they started to use the financial health assessment and some of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau tools as a way to help begin to teach those clients they're working with more about money and financial issues in general. We also hope that you can connect your clients to financial capability strategies by using the tools provided both through DARS and the community providers, and we want to make sure that you don't underestimate your power for encouragement. For those of you that have been able to go through the motivational interviewing trainings that were also a part of the CPIV grant, part of that, what that training teaches, is how to tap into an individual intrinsic motivation for change. And if you could see from both Erica's example and the case study that Elizabeth shared, when you understand what a client hopes to get or achieve, those are great tools and key points to utilize when reinforcing the value of employment and helping someone maintain that energy and enthusiasm towards reaching their goals. And the last thing I want to make sure of, folks, here is that the goal with this financial health assessment is not to create a list of needed services that you then have to provide yourself. As Erica mentioned, the family of the client that received their health assessment realized that there are topics they had never thought to talk about with their [inaudible] and there are resources around the state that will provide many of the additional tools or follow-up services for free or at no cost. And our hope is to help connect our counselors or their clients to those resources around the state. And my hope is you've enjoyed this webinar, and I'll turn it back over to Brittany to see if we have any questions.

>> Wonderful. Thank you, David, and we do have some kinds of questions. And I've had a few come in. We have about four or five minutes for them. The first one is I am a WISA, but I'm not sure if I have completed the training needed to offer this service. Can you share your thoughts on that? Maybe David can answer that one.

>> Sure, thank you, Brittany. We have embarked on a community financial empowerment credential or certification that requires WISAs to go through two different trainings and these online webinars. These online webinars will be archived. If you have gone through both the original community financial empowerment trainings, which were held in June, and the CFPB training, and these three webinars, you will be in a position to immediately be on that list. We plan to host more of the community financial empowerment trainings going forward. But we hope to, as our list gets created in the next week, have roughly a third of our WISAs around the state already on that list. And in the meantime, if you want to use these tools yourself and not bill, but with other clients that might not be a part of our agency, perhaps you're a part of a ticket to work employment network, we encourage you to use these as you feel comfortable. DARS will require a page to two-page summary of the answers and potential resources in that person's community. But that's how you would know. If you've gone through the community financial empowerment training and the CFPB Your Money, Your Goals training, and these, you would be eligible, and we've been keeping a list as we've gone forward. But if you're not sure, you can contact myself or Michael Springer [phonetic] and we can tell you which pieces you still need.

>> Wonderful. Thank you, David. I had another question come in. And I think it's a really good one because I know everyone is very busy, and including the individuals that are receiving these services, so how long does it take to complete a financial health assessment? David or Elizabeth, or even Erica, if you want to share your thoughts on how long it took when you were using it.

>> I can start. This is David. When we've done the first two rounds, to ask the questions and go through that with a client roughly took 20 to 25 minutes. It took a little longer when someone had a lot of follow-up questions. And then to write the narrative to go with that took a little over an hour for the ones I did. I will say the first two, because we had a group of I think we've now done 20 in the development, it definitely, the narratives got a little easier because I learned where resources were located. But the whole process of meeting with the individual, asking the questions and writing everything up and then giving it back, we anticipate about two hours total time.

>> Great. And Erica, is there anything else that you would want to share about the time?

>> Yeah, I think the only thing that I would add is it tends to, I think on your consumer, because if you have to, you know, some people you can read the questions verbatim and get the answers that you're looking for. And other times, you know, you might have to change the verbiage or ask the question in a different way. So, you know, similar to David, but I think it depends on the individual that you're working with.

>> Great. I think we have time for maybe one or two more questions. So I'm going to move on to get as many in as we can. The next one is do you do a financial health assessment just once upon intake, or should it be retake and periodically? And Erica, I know that you touched on this, that it was something that was being done periodically. But can you just expand on that a little bit more, maybe Erica and David and Elizabeth?

>> So I would say I wouldn't always necessarily redo the financial health assessment. But you could, and I would consider bringing it out and making looking at a few targeted questions, you know, like a mentioned things may change when someone starts working and receiving a paycheck. So at that point, you know, were there any other potential resources that now we need to introduce into the mix to help our consumer? So I guess I see it as being, you know, you could do kind of a piecemeal and revisit those topics that might be, you know, pertinent at that point in time when things change.

>> Erica, that's a great point. And I think part of our hope is exactly that. By having a breadth of questions that are in that initial assessment, maybe when someone gets to employed status or the job is on the table, he might pull that document back out and say, hey, now that we're going to have some earnings, is now a good time to look at a budget? Is now a good time to look at creating a spending plan or beginning to identify what you could potentially save for other things that you're going to need? It's also a good time, because employment changes other situations, so revisit those particular pieces, you may also pull it back out if somebody's applied for three or four jobs that they didn't get and you realized they had never looked at their credit, you might decide, this is a time to see if credit score was something that impacted those decisions. So our hope is that the assessment is comprehensive enough to allow any counselor the opportunity to use their judgment on when certain pieces are reintroduced.

>> Brittany, it's Elizabeth. I just wanted to add one thing I realized you're going to close out, and a couple folks had questions about level of knowledge and connecting to other supports. So I wanted to quickly encourage folks to look at the resource mapping webinar that we have provided. It's not expected that people will suddenly become experts in financial health, but that you will have good information to guide your employment planning. And through resource mapping, you'll know who are the groups in your local area that you should connect to as people need additional support either with their credit or in preparing a budget or in meeting some other financial need.

>> Great. Thank you, Elizabeth. And I think it's always nice to end with a reminder that there are so many resources out there for everyone to be using, and more and more are coming out into the field every day as it becomes a broader conversation. So in terms of sharing some resources, I have listed David and Mike and Erica from Virginia DARS. Their contact info, if you have any questions about what was shared on today's presentation regarding the Virginia financial health assessment, if you have any questions about where to turn for resources on financial health assessments, or, you know, budgeting tools, or anything like that, through the LEAD Center and through NDI's REI network, we have just a whole host of webinars and tools that are free for you to use and encourage you to reach out to us and let us know how we can help you with finding those, or you can just peruse the websites on your own. They're really easily searchable as well. I would like to, again, thank Elizabeth and David and Erica, that was just an incredibly huge amount of information and really exciting. And as Elizabeth said, Virginia has really taken this to a whole new level and want to congratulate all of you for what a giant leap forward this has been. All of the financial empowerment webinars are going to be included on the website at the LEAD Center website at www.leadcenter.org. And we will be sure to share those resources with you when they are posted. I know that we're about a minute over time and appreciate everyone hanging in there and being a part of today's webinar. And I hope to hear from you all very soon. Thank you all.