If You Teach a Man to Fish ... Empowering Communities After COVID-19

This week, Real Money, Real Experts welcomes Dr. Billy Hensley, CEO of the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE). Billy has a distinguished career in personal finance, philanthropy, and higher education and now leads NEFE in bringing financial access to all Americans.

Co-hosts Rebecca Wiggins and Dr. Mary Bell Carlson talk to Billy about how career, the impact of COVID-19 on personal finances, and the role that all financial professionals can play in lifting up communities.

*Show Notes*
00:45 About Billy
02:21 Personal Finance Access Issues
05:40 Growing Up In Appalachia
09:25 A Holistic Personal Finance Ecosystem
13:24 Knowing Yourself to Find Opportunities
15:17 The Future of NEFE
19:23 Creating Opportunity -  100 AFCs
23:53 Impact of COVID-19
27:30 Your Two Cents

Show Note links:

NEFE Website 

https://www.nefe.org/

NEFE Personal Finance Ecosystem

https://www.nefe.org/about/our-philosophy/ecosystem/default.aspx

Racism, Bias and Economic Inequality Impair the Financial Well-Being of Millions

https://www.nefe.org/press-room/news/2020/racism-bias-economic-inequality-impair-financial-well-being-of-millions.aspx

With This Crisis Does Financial Literacy Even Matter?

https://www.nefe.org/press-room/news/2020/with-this-crisis-does-financial-literacy-matter.aspx

Politics is Hindering the Effectiveness of Financial Education

https://www.nefe.org/press-room/news/2019/politics-hindering-effectiveness-of-financial-education.aspx

Want to get involved with AFCPE®?
Here are a few places to start: Become a Member, Sign up for an Essentials Course, or Get AFC Certified today!

Want to support the podcast? We love partnering with organizations that share our mission and values. Download our media kit.

Transcript

Intro: 0:03

Welcome to real money, real experts, a podcast where leading financial counseling and coaching experts share their stories, their challenges, and their advice for helping people manage money in the real world. I'm your host, Rebecca Wiggins, executive director of the association for financial counseling and planning education or AFCPE®. And I'm your cohost, Dr. Mary Bell Carlson. I'm an accredited financial counselor defeat and the CEO of chief financial mom. Every episode, we're taking a deep dive into the topic, fix the personal finance professionals care about helping clients, building community and your professional growth. Welcome everyone to the Real Money, Real Experts podcast. I'm Rebecca. And this is Mary. Thanks for taking the time to join us today. So today on the show, we're talking with Dr. Billy Hensley. He is the President and CEO of the National Endowment for Financial Education or NEFE. Prior to that, he served as NEFE's Senior Director of Education. Before his time at NEFE, he was a Research Fellow at the University of Cincinnati, an Assistant Director for Ohio College Access Network and a Program Associate at Knowledge Works foundation. He was named to the CNBC Financial Wellness Advisory council in 2019. And he's also on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning, AFCPE®'s research journal. Billy has a distinguished career in educational philanthropy and higher ed administration. He's also been a longtime member of AFCPE®and is a true advocate for the work of our professionals. I have so much respect for Billy and his bold leadership. I also have to say he is a good friend and mentor of mine, and I always enjoy our conversations. So I'm really excited to have him on the podcast today.

Billy Hensley: 1:51

Thank you. Thank you, both what a warm welcome and, you know, it's funny, I would say the exact same thing about Rebecca. So I guess, you know, a turn around here is fair play on here, we will mentor each other and become each other's echo chamber, how about that.

Mary Bell Carlson: 2:05

Billy, we're so glad to have you, and I want to know a little bit about your background. You grew up in a poor coal mining town in Eastern Kentucky, and I know that this upbringing shaped your values and your outlook on the profession of financial education. Tell us how that has affected you and what you do today.

Billy Hensley: 2:21

You know, your culture, your values, what you learn as a child is always going to permeate your life and growing up in a rural area where most people worked to just keep food on the table was just part of life. You know, it wasn't a place where people talked about things like 401ks and 403bs and mutual funds. It was really, your life was driven to put food on the table. And if you were successful, maybe you could save up and buy a boat so you could fish and things like that. I mean, you know, it was simple in many ways. But I think what really permeates my view of the discipline is related to two things. One, the language that we use in this space, and how unrelatable it can be for working class blue collar or whatever the label you wanna put on hourly workers and people who mostly live paycheck to paycheck. We just didn't relate. We don't relate to the language that this discipline uses and it's, you know, it's human nature to some extent to resist and avoid what you don't understand or think that's for someone else."Oh, that's for rich people." And so you, you skirt the issue. And none of us like to be seen as not knowing to be seen as unsophisticated when it comes to a particular topic. And a lot of that comes from the way it's been presented, that it's do exactly what we say without understanding the context of the individual or the community. And the other side of that is the second point that I mentioned relates to this savior mentality that also permeates our industry in a sense that we're going to swoop in and save the day. And I used to sort of joke about the, the two'Ls' in Kentucky, Lexington and Louisville, which directed and guided everything in the state. At least it felt like, and it just didn't fit with our, you know, our Appalachian culture and values with the coal mining region. It just wasn't always the same feeling. And then there was that indication that, you know, we're going to kind of come in and, and tell you how to do things. You poor unsophisticated hillbillies, and I'm still incredibly sensitive to that. And think about in terms of how do we help people build sort of life plans around their own communities and their own values that, that help them, you know, achieve goals without saying, you have to do it my way because I make more money and I'm, you know, I'm wealthier and I know what's best. How do we marry technical knowledge with local values and context? So those things really permeate everything I do in the space and trying to give voice and understanding, and encourage flexibility to some extent for our industry.

Mary Bell Carlson: 5:23

Billy, I've got a question for you. You're now the CEO of NEFE, but you just told us about your upbringing from the Appalachian state. Tell us how you went from your upbringing to being a CEO. What is that path that you've followed?

Billy Hensley: 5:40

Oh gosh. You know, fundamentally, I've always been a person who walked through a door when it opened. I was never afraid to do that. My parents always fostered and encouraged that in me. My family always valued education and what it could do, you know, and I was fortunate that my family, you know, both of my grandparents, actually, my grandfathers, I should say, you know, started small businesses and were able to provide for their family in a way that they couldn't, especially my mom's family. I mean, I literally went from my family, my family line, my grandparents, both of my mom's parents grew up in literally dirt, poor cabins in the, in the hills, but they always worked really hard and they knew the value of hard work and what that meant. And I also learned and recognize that, take advantage of things like opportunities and, you know, and I always looked at, I guess, activities at school as a venue to learn something new and to see something new. And the more I got to see through things like band trips and academic team trips. And I was in a program called Upward Bound, which was for kids whose families didn't go to college. And it exposed me to many things that I would not have seen or would have taken me much longer to see. And I followed those things and I went to college. I went to a small private college that actually fostered my development. I think I would personally would have gotten lost in the large state university system. Going to a small, private liberal arts college where I was a known entity and the professors encouraged me gave me more confidence to pursue those things. And so each little step was a step outside of my comfort zone. None of it was too fast. And then I ended up in Denver and at NEFE, which became a marriage of everything I had done: research, philanthropy, education. It's like everything I'd done up to that point had been poured together into a job description. And it felt great to be able to apply that and the more I learned, you know, I just utilize that confidence that had been instilled in me by my family, you know. And I think that there's a notion that Appalachian kids and Appalachian people are unsophisticated and have little experience, but we're actually very independent people who want to be self sufficient. And I think that really fundamentally drove a lot of it. And now as an adult, you know, I'm 44. I went, went to school, went to graduate school, all of those things worked together. But I also, now I'm able to recognize the privilege that I had to be able to make these decisions that, you know, my accent was off-putting by some, you know, poor grammar probably was off-putting by some, being openly gay was off-putting, you know, by some. But I do recognize as an educated white male, that I had privileges that allowed me to probably move into this quicker than I would have been able to otherwise, or in a different time.

Rebecca Wiggins: 8:56

That's such a great segue actually to one of the other questions I had for you, which is really about the importance of integration across our field. And I know we've had lots of conversations about the importance of this and working together and even just the different interventions and approaches. And so will you share just a little bit about NEFE's personal finance ecosystem, and why this holistic view is really important for better impact and outcomes in our work as a field?

Billy Hensley: 9:25

When I came to to NEFE, and came to this industry I, you know, I came from college access. I came from education a nd educational research. And this is all part of education and what we do, but I was bewildered at how rarely we used educational p rinciples when we were talking about something called financial education. And then I began to struggle with the unbalanced weight that was put on the individual intervention of something like a personal finance workshop or a financial coaching session. And the expectation that was placed on that without understanding the numerous factors that i nfluence that. So I just took what I learned from education and placed that into my own understanding of what we were trying to achieve. And then NEFE began to try to elevate that d ialogue in a sense that that worked well for our industry and the industries that touch us. And then that's where the phrase of, or the terminology ecosystem came from. Cause that's really what it is, is that, you know, you remove one keystone from that ecosystem and the ecosystem begins to change. So what we wanted to understand was how do these things interact? And equally important, how do you measure success when you're putting the full weight of someone's financial health and financial success on, did they, or did they not take a financial education class when they were 15? It just, it felt like an undue or unequal or unsophisticated way to measure success in the discipline. So this is what we're trying to articulate as a framework. And it's the same in education. You know, you look at school districts that are struggling or that are doing well, or maybe the math scores went down. And so we try to understand why that happened in a school district. We don't say, well, let's just stop doing math because it's hard. And you know, the math concepts are too complicated for the individual, instead of saying, how do we improve math instruction in that school or in that district or in that state. And so we just use those kind of concepts and overlay that with the personal finance world. And I think it's a good parallel. I think health actually is another good parallel where we can learn how do we strengthen the individual components or the individual team members. So let's say financial education is a team member, financial coaching is a team member, financial counseling is a team member, consumer protections is a team member, good policy is a team member. And as a group, you know, we're looking at how do we work together to benefit or get the score or win or whatever analogy you want to use. And that's how we sort of ended up in this place, because we want to not throw out any component of the ecosystem with the undue burden by saying that each individual aspect of that has to solve the problem of financial fragility in the United States.

Mary Bell Carlson: 12:38

You know, I find that so inspiring though that you didn't just expect to stay where you are, that you saw both the opportunity that your family provided, meaning their hard work, their ethics, the values that they taught you. But it's also pretty incredible as well, that you were able to get a PhD. And so I'm guessing you're probably the only PhD in your family, if not only college graduate. That's incredible. And I think that gives a lot of hope for people that maybe feel like, well, I'll never become a CEO someday, or I'm not able to do that because of my circumstances. And it really isn't that, it's something that if you want and you train for, and you work hard at, that those opportunities are still available and hopefully those doors can open along the way.

Billy Hensley: 13:24

Yes. And I, and I would add to that, knowing yourself is important. And, you know, as much as you can learn about yourself and seeing yourself objectively, about what you do well and playing to those strengths. You know, my, I say this with the caveat that knowing yourself as essential. But I always knew that I was good with people. I was good at speaking. Speaking in public never made me nervous. Being in front of others never made me nervous. My eighth grade teacher used to joke that I was going to either be a minister or a politician. And I joke now that yes, I do both of those things. Because what I feel that I do is a sort of ministry, if you will, it's sort of a moral crusade and you know, advocating for policy and access and, and so forth are all part of that. But I knew myself and my parents and my grandparents actually encouraged that in me and recognized that in me that,'Oh, you know, you're going to do great things.' And I heard that so often as a child. And I know a lot of kids don't hear that, but I just followed my strengths and what felt right and what felt good to me. I didn't feel that I had to follow a career path that fit what someone else expected of me, other than they expected great things, you know, and it was open ended and whatever I chose. And you know, my brothers all do different things. One is a mechanic and one is a police officer and they all were catering to their strengths. And my parents look at us all as equally successful. Doesn't matter what our title is because we followed what we do well, and how we know ourselves.

Mary Bell Carlson: 15:08

Awesome. What a great example they were to you, but also what example you are to others of'you can do this and you can move forward and better your life.' That's awesome.

Billy Hensley: 15:16

Thank you. I hope so.

Mary Bell Carlson: 15:17

So under your leadership, NEFE has undergone a strategic shift away from some of the programs you provided. Tell us more about that evolution of the organization and where you see NEFE going in the next few years.

Billy Hensley: 15:30

I have not for one minute taken lightly the platform that NEFE has and the respect that the organization has and had for years before I ever showed up. So I've always wanted to be the best steward of that possible. And I knew that that became very real to me, a couple of months on the job when my phone rang, when I was, you know, the, the education director, and I looked down and the caller ID said the Sesame Workshop, which is the Sesame Street folks. And I thought,'Wow, Sesame Street just called me to ask for my advice.' That had nothing to do with Billy, that had a hundred percent to do with NEFE. And the reason is, is we've always tried to be what our community and what our field and what our discipline needed. And, you know, like all of us in the nonprofit space, we want to be what are our constituents and what our partners need. We struggle sometimes to let go of those things when it's time to do the next thing and we keep adding on. And so what we've tried to do is sort of, sunset aspects of our work that are well served now. You know, direct-to-consumer, free quality financial education, resources and materials were pretty rare 15-20 years ago. You know, a lot of it was commercialized. A lot of it was tied around personalities and folks who write books, which is great too, but there wasn't a sort of a wide net cast where things were very accessible. But now there is. So we feel that we were able to move on from the direct consumer websites and resources and tips and the financial information landscape, if you will. And what our field now truly needs is a better understanding of impact. And how do we quantify and qualify that, how do we advocate for access? You know, it's one thing to be able to print, uh, you know, financial literacy curriculum in books and resources and advocate for workshops and downloadable materials. But when you operate in a world where only 4% of students of color are required to take a personal finance class at a much lower rate than their wealthier white peers, that's an issue for me that it's not about creating touch points. It's about advocating that everyone should have the same at a very minimum, a quality financial education class as a teen, that colleges should be advocating and developing programming for financial wellness of their graduates that they're producing. You know, these, these citizens who are going to contribute to society beyond just having a major. It's not just about a trade or a skill or a job. It's about, you know, being well rounded individuals. The same in the workplace, you know, creating the level of access that, you know, whether you work for an organization that provides a retirement match or not, you should still have access to quality information and educational materials and programming so that you can make the best decisions that are tied to your values. So for us, it's about the next level, the next version of ourselves, it's about access and advocating for that from a point of view, that's about equity and quality.

Mary Bell Carlson: 18:59

Billy, you have used your platform to be a vocal advocate for issues of equity and inclusion. One of the things that we respect the most about you is your decisive leadership on issues of inequality and being part of the solution. Tell us more about your decision to provide funding for 100 people of color to earn the AFC®credential and your broader commitment to address systematic inequality and racism.

Billy Hensley: 19:23

You know, it goes back to what I was talking about,growing up in a small community in Eastern Kentucky, that, you know, that savior mentality, you know the folks from the big city would come in and help the poor folks. You know, I always felt that the greater value would be to give us the tools to help ourselves. And that's where the 100 AFC®credentials comes from. I mean, it's rooted in that sense of, you know, I make it sound like it was only my idea. It wasn't only mine, but that's the philosophy that drives me personally, is that if we can help communities of color build capacity internally so that they can serve their neighbors, that people don't have to leave their community to get financial counseling, financial coaching, financial education, that it's with the neighbors and the people they go to church with and the people they grew up with. And you build those relationships. You know, money management is a topic that is really tied to things like trust and understanding for me. It's about values and it's about principles. And when you are going to talk to someone who understands community and your background, and maybe your kids play ball together at school, or your kids were in ballet class together, you get a sense for that feeling of community. And it's a relational thing that you can build when it's the people in your community that, you know, and just fundamentally by the things that you can see with your eyes, because some, some components of diversity are visible. And when you sit in a room in a topic about money management, or if you're in a room of professionals, it is very easy to see that most of us in the room look Caucasian, look white. Most of us look male. And how is that representative of the communities in this country? I come from education, which is a lot more diverse. Our conferences were a lot more diverse, the practitioners, are more diverse at least about what I could see, and I want the room to be full of people who represent my community and my neighborhood and your neighborhood and the neighborhoods of everyone who listens to this podcast, because, you know, we want to be as effective as possible. And that's just an element for me that I want to create that level of fairness. And I'm sensitive to it because I didn't like the fact, I always appreciated the help and I appreciated the funding. And I appreciated the volunteers who would come in in the summer and, you know, help build porches for the elderly in my community. But what I would love to have seen is that same level of commitment to provide a funding mechanism or resources so that we could help our neighbors and the people we grew up with ourselves in the longterm. And, you know, it was also about access to resources and jobs and so forth. So I think if we can model what it looks like in a community, in terms of this topic, then it becomes something that we all want, we all see, it's approachable. If it's just the tiniest barrier we can remove for access. And that's a way that access is gained, then I'm all for it. And so, you know, fundamentally I just wanted to build more capacity and more representative experiences for every person in the community, well, I should say every person in the communities we're trying to serve.

Mary Bell Carlson: 23:21

I think that's so important here is that it's more peer-to-peer than it is from an outsider coming in and telling you what you should do, or how you should manage your money or something else that we, as a profession need to grow in this realm so that we can do more peer-to-peer based. And like you say, it's a community that we need to focus on, not just an outsider coming in to do good every once in a while, which is great, but really need to focus in on how do we grow that community and empower that community with the tools and the things they need to teach one another. Billy NEFE released a survey this spring that found that nine in 10 or 88% of Americans indicated that COVID-19 caused them financial stress. You will be presenting this research during the upcoming AFCPE®symposium in November, but can you give us a sense of what kind of information you will be sharing and how our profession can respond to this pandemic?

Billy Hensley: 24:18

Let me start by saying that, that number that you mentioned, the 88% is absolutely astounding. I mean, you don't see numbers that high in any survey. Especially now Americans rarely agree at that rate on anything. But the fact that it happens so quickly to so many people. And this survey was initially fielded in the early days of April, you know, the first week of April, 2020. And by the way, we're going to be doing a follow up survey asking many of the same questions and a few additional questions about coping and so forth that will be highlighted at the AFCPE®symposium. But the fact that that many Americans were touched so quickly, and for us in Colorado where NEFE is headquartered, that was three weeks in the lockdown phase or in this safer at home or the stay at home orders. And the thing that troubled me the most about that was number one, this 88% number, but the number of people who had to make a withdrawal from their retirement account and, you know, that was in the teens. And when you think about that many people and in some thought,'Oh, that's a low number.' And what I saw was that a month in, and people were already having to take money from their retirement accounts, showed how many millions of us are financially fragile. And that's not a financial literacy issue. That's not a financial counseling and coaching issue. It is a true reflection of how expensive life is. And 60% of Americans are going to see a crisis or see an unexpected expense in any given year. I mean, that's a survey NEFE has done, research we've done and we have very clear data on that. But in a normal year, without something like COVID happening, it's, you know, people are going to have unexpected expenses. So when you compound that with the fragility, having to go into retirement, you know, it's going to be something that we have to face and contend with for many, many years. And I think what our field can use is how have people coped? How can we recover? How can we begin to rebuild? A lot of us work in the space where like, educators, for example, like the community that we work with at NEFE, we can't help during the free fall, but where we can help and the value add is as we rebuild, as we start over, as we began to try to, you know, repopulate the emergency savings and get the money back into the 401k. Those are spaces that the educators and the counselors and so forth can really contribute and to build that plan toward recovery. It's just like when a storm blows through there's little, you can do in the midst of the storm, unless you're a person whose building, you know, putting up the sandbags and things like that. But it's the recovery, it's the, you know, the financial recovery after COVID, that's going to be the true value add that our community can bring.

Mary Bell Carlson: 27:30

So at the end of each interview, we like to get the guests two cents, or your biggest takeaways for our listeners. If you had just one piece of advice for financial professionals, what would that be?

Billy Hensley: 27:40

Financial education is positioned to play a pivotal role in the economic recovery of our country. But we must, we know, lead, we must work together, we must take action. You know, we're seeing so many quality organizations, practitioners, partners, educators, working together with families to provide assistance and access. And, you know, being able to do this as a community, work together as community is what we need right now. You know we shouldn't have these divergent goals in the sense of that,'Your idea is better than mine' or'Mine is better than yours.' That together, we're actually stronger in the aggregate and that financial education matters, but it alone cannot solve this problem. Just like financial counseling matters, but alone, it cannot solve the problem. But together, we have the context that we need to help build the financial wellbeing of all Americans.

Rebecca Wiggins: 28:40

I love that, Billy, thank you so much. Yeah. Thanks for being on today, this was a great conversation.

Mary Bell Carlson: 28:43

Rebecca. I have known Billy for several years. We've met up at many conferences and said hello in the hallways many times, but I've never known his story. And I really am grateful that he was willing to be so open with his history and his background and really how he became who he is now. And it really, for me, is inspiring that you can come from any background or walk of life and become a CEO of NEFE or do what your life's passion is. And he's really worked hard to get where he is. And I appreciate that he's also sensitive to the fact that he's had privileges. And even though he didn't grow up in a privileged home, but he's been taught those senses and values and standards. But he's also very careful to show that he's wanting to help others too. And that he's not just saying everyone can do it the same way I did it, but he's sensitive really to others' needs. And I think that's exactly what NEFE is, they are trying to build a community, and many communities, to be honest for others, to teach each other and to learn from, and to grow from and empower people at the end of the day. That's really what I think NEFE is all about. And it was great to hear Billy's story and how he's been empowered over the years and how he's trying to empower others now.

Rebecca Wiggins: 30:02

Yeah, he is such a tremendous leader. I really do consider him a friend and a mentor, and we've had so many great really rich discussions, especially over the last year or so about things that are going on in the country, about our field. And I always learn so much from him, but really respect the way that he has led NEFE into this new chapter. And, you know, there's a lot of- we're going to put in the show notes- a lot of his articles where he's been very vocal about these issues of equity and inclusion and the work we must do as a field to be more integrated across these disciplines and areas of expertise. And so I really encourage everyone first to check out all the links in the show notes. There's more information too about NEFE's, financial ecosystem, so you can get a little bit more information about kind of the vision and approach there. And then as we mentioned, NEFE is providing scholarship funding for professionals of color, but we also have other scholarships available for the AFC®. And those will be open until October 15. So please do check them out. We are, in addition to the individual AFC®scholarships, we are also opening up nonprofit capacity building scholarships for groups to actually submit for funding requests through AFCPE®'s Strategic Impact Fund. So there's a lot of really great opportunities to, as we talked about today, build capacity from within, make sure that we're professionalizing the field and giving access to people who need it and have been maybe historically left out or marginalized. So I'm really excited about all of those things. Please check out the show notes. We will have a link as well to the scholarship application in the show notes, but check your email. That should be in there as well. And we hope everyone enjoyed the discussion that we had today with Billy. I always learn so much from him.

Mary Bell Carlson: 31:56

And Rebecca I'm going to add to that as well that we'd like to hear more from Billy. And if you would like to hear more come to our virtual symposium this year, it's November 16-20. He is one of our keynote speakers. And as we mentioned in the podcast, he's going to be speaking on the financial impacts of COVID-19. So we hope you'll join us and go to the AFCPE®website today and register for the symposium.

Billy Hensley: 32:19

If you enjoyed the show today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. Real Money, Real Experts is available wherever you listen to your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Share it with a friend and leave us a rating and review. This helps others discover the podcast too. Thanks so much for listening.