What Financial Health Means to Me (and My Readers)

Using our Compass Principles as a framework for quality, we: Who is CFSI? The Center for Financial Services Innovation is an authority on consumer financial health, leading a network of financial services innovators committed to building better consumer products and practices. Using our Compass Principles as a framework for quality, we: Connect We foster dialogue and collaboration through CFSI events and networking opportunities. Inform We provide deep consumer insights and industry research. Innovate We seed and test promising new ideas. Advise We offer consulting services to both for-profit and nonprofit providers.

How We Define Financial Health Financial health comes about when your daily systems help you build resilience and pursue opportunities. At CFSI we believe wealth is about how much money you have and health is about what you do with what you have. Financial health is measured in how consumers save, spend, borrow and plan in order to manage their day-to-day financial lives, weather life’s inevitable ups and downs, and seize opportunities that will lead to financial security and mobility over time. Just as people who eat balanced diets today are more likely to avoid disease and be more physically active later in life, people with reasonable savings levels today are more likely to avoid bankruptcy and have the ability to meet unexpected expenses and plan for retirement. At CFSI, we conducted a nationwide study to measure financial health in America. Day-to-Day Resilience Opportunity

138 million adults are struggling financially Financial Health in America And here’s what we saw at a high level… It turns out that 43% of Americans are financially healthy while 57% of Americans are not. That’s 138 million adults that are struggling financially. 138 million adults are struggling financially Source: Understanding and Improving Consumer Financial Health in America, CFSI, 2015

27% of Americans report having less than $1,000 saved for retirement. Consumer Challenges 43% of Americans describe themselves as struggling to pay bills and credit payments. 30% of American households say they could only make ends meet for three months or less if they were to experience a sudden drop in income. 27% of Americans report having less than $1,000 saved for retirement. When you look more closely at the elements of financial health opportunities to improve the financial lives of consumers become more clear- 43% of Americans describe themselves as struggling to pay bills and repay debts. Nearly a third of households say that if they experienced a sudden drop in income, they could only make ends meet for three months or less. What’s even scarier is that over one-fifth have no idea how long they could make ends meet if they lost their job.   More than a quarter of Americans report having less than $1,000 saved for retirement. Of those, nearly half are 35 to 65 years old, prime working years. Source: Understanding and Improving Consumer Financial Health in America, CFSI, 2015

You play a key role in improving consumer financial health Why is CFSI at FinCon? We partnered with FinCon for the first annual #FinHealthMatters Day on June 29th this year – winners are here at the conference! FinCon’s focus on media and finance makes it a great place to talk about financial health You play a key role in improving consumer financial health We want to develop a deeper connection with bloggers in the PFM space So you see how we frame financial health, buy why are we are here at FinCon?

#FinHealthMatters Day Results The first #FinHealthMatters Day was a huge success…. Over 100 financial health essays were posted on June 29th (thank you!) More than 2,000 tweets were written with the hashtag #FinHealthMatters Over 900 individuals tweeted This resulted in nearly 9,000,000 impressions

What Does Financial Health Mean to You? #FinHealth Matters We heard from over 100 bloggers what financial health means to them – and saw it in images and graphics you all created.

What is FinX? PLAN TRANSACT REACT FinX is an in-the-field activity that provides participants with a deeper understanding of the complexity of consumers’ financial lives. The workshop is an opportunity for participants to learn about consumer financial challenges by becoming embedded in a real-life experience where they must make some of the same decisions that struggling consumers face on a daily basis. Over the course of five hours, participants move through CFSI’s process: Our #FinHealthMatters Day contest winners had the opportunity to participate in a FinX workshop yesterday and I want to share with you a little more about their experience and learnings. But first, I want to give you and overview of what FinX is. <<see slide>> CFSI sets the stage and provides consumer context through exclusive primary data from CFSI’s proprietary research. Participants use an activity guide to explore local neighborhoods to complete activities. Participants share their learnings in a guided debrief. PLAN TRANSACT REACT

Past FinX Participant Reactions Here you can see what some past participants of our FinX workshop felt after undergoing the workshop- and now we will have the opportunity to hear from a few of your peers that participated yesterday. Tie reactions of participants to work CFSI does (FinLab, Compass principles, FinHealth measurement, etc.) and link to broader finhealth challenges and opportunities Source: Understanding and Improving Consumer Financial Health in America, CFSI, 2015

Managing Director, Communications Let’s stay in touch on financial health! Shannon Austin Managing Director, Communications saustin@cfsinnovation.com

Thank you! Connect with us @cfsinnovation. @TheFinLab #MyFinX cfsinnovation.com @cfsinnovation. @TheFinLab #MyFinX #finhealth, #FinHealthMatters LinkedIn: Center for Financial Services Innovation