Date: 07/08/16 Event: Empowering Consumers with Disabilities to Save Their Futures

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**********DISCLAIMER********** >> We're going to start in about two minutes, so make sure you're sufficiently

caffeinated and we're really looking forward to the presentations. Thank you.>> Okay. Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to empowering people with

disabilities to build a better financial future. My name is Thomas and I am the deputy director here at the institute on disability at the Ed Roberts campus. And thank you all for being here today. So we at the World Institute on disability, one of the things that sets us apart, we are an organization built for people with disabilities. Half are staff are folks with disabilities, half our board of directors, and our mission is to eliminate barriers and have full social employment and full healthcare and security for people with disabilities. So we are really excited that you are all in the room today to talk about economic empowerment, the Achieving a Better Life Experience Act, and financial future. Looking at registration ahead of time, I really am privileged to be in the room with so many policy advocates, community members, parents, federal and state partners. We are really excited that you're all joining us today. I particularly want to recognize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and particularly Dale Hogelman, who has been a staunch supporter of diversity and inclusion, particularly with folks with disabilities at the bureau. This event, Dale, couldn't happen without your support. So thank you very much.

[Applause]>> So at the World Institute on disabilities, for about 20 years we've had a

program called access to assets. We look at the income and asset inequality in the disability community verse [Inaudible] and we've learned a lot to set a landscape picture. We know that people with disabilities are more than twice as likely live in poverty than their nondisabled peers. We know from a savings perspective, the general population has about 72% of the population has savings accounts. Only 46 people of people with disabilities have a savings account. If we look at the under banks number, 21% of the population is under banks. In the disability community it's 28%. When we look at completely unbanked, that's 7% in the general population and 18% in the disability community. And if you break it down by ethnicity, it's even worse in the

disability community. When we looked at using alternative financial services, so check cashers, payday lenders, we know that 45% of the general population have used these non-traditional financial products, but almost 63% of people with disabilities have. So it paints not a great picture for financial empowerment in the disability community, and there are lots of reasons for this. Last year we got together with the American Foundation for the Blind, the Hearing Loss Association of America, The National Council on Independent Living, and we did a national survey and we went to look at what sort of barriers are out there for these three groups with regard to financial services. So we found that the blind and visually impaired communities had issues around the internet access, mobile access, and as somebody who just refinanced their home, I have to say I am so shocked when there are visual things on a bank's website and you call up and say, what about this? Well, can somebody else help you? When we talked with folks from the hearing loss community, we found that nearly 20% of people have regular and consistent issues with customer service. I mean, let's face it.

It's hard to hear through bulletproof glass or read lips. If you have a significant hearing loss, telephone customer service is going to be difficult. But when we surveyed people, they said, you know, 62% of our Sawyer way respondents said if we could just text with your banks, even behind the firewall on their website, that would be really helpful, but my bank doesn't offer that. We found that 74% of the people said a loop system in the bank, a telecoil that amplified the sound of the tell tore loop enable hearing aids would make a huge difference and we found that 30% of people with hearing loss or that were deaf said, you know, I can't always get a sign language interpreter or each video relay services to do my banking. When we talked with people with physical disabilities, we found that 76% of folks had access issues. We found that 32% of respondents had trouble getting to or using the accessible window. Sometimes it was used for storage. Sometimes there was non-movable chairs in the way. And sometimes the teller just didn't want to move to that window. We found that about 20% of respondents said that, you know, there was either no or not enough disabled parking at their bank. But 55% of respondents said, you know, I can't use the ATMs at my bank. Maybe I can't get my wheelchair under the lip of it. Maybe I don't have the strengths or dexterity to insert my card or take out my cash. 55% said I'm not able to use the ATMs. And then 46% of survey participants said that their bank or financial institution didn't have an electric door opener. So 25 years of the Americans with Disabilities Act, roughly 50% of people with physical disabilities still can't get through the front door of their financial institution. So we know we have a lot of work to do around access. But you know, the other big issue is what we're here to talk about largely today, the issue of benefits and asset limits. So as many of you know, for folks with disabilities who are on benefits in the United States, either supplemental social security income or Medicaid, here in California we call it Medi-Health since we are the center of the universe --

[Laughter]There's a $2,000 asset limit. That means the second you have more than $2,000

in benefits, your benefits can be stopped. Your income at that difficulty can be talk ago way. Your access to medical care can be taken away. Your access to in-home support

services, personal attendants will be taken away, all for trying to save and improve your financial lot in life. You know, it's a powerful disincentive that has held people with disabilities back from saving for a generation. And you know, it reminds me when we were talking about today's panel, I moved here about 30 years ago this month actually. And you know, I went through one winter in California and then I decided, I am never going back to Chicago again.

[Laughter]And you know, I totally bought into the whole American dream. You know what

I wanted to do? I wanted to own a home, because I knew for me, owning a home would be the first step to a better financial future. Except I was on benefits. I was on SSI and I had the $2,000 asset limit. And oddly enough, SSI allows you to own a home, but how do you save for a down payment if you have a $2,000 asset limit? You're not allowed to. Being an enterprising individual, I discovered safety deposit boxes and I spent the next three years every single time I got paid putting cash into that safety deposit box. And about three years later, the most terrifying night of my life, I was walking through downtown Berkley at night with several thousand dollars in my pocket on the way to the bank to provide my down payment. They looked at me a bit askance. But it was back in the eighties. Eventually they took the money and everything worked out, but you know what? People with disabilities shouldn't have to break the rules to make their financial lives better.

[Applause]And guess what? We don't have to anymore.[Applause] so about a month ago, the Achieving a Better Life Experience

accounts or ABLE accounts were opened. Lots of other people will talk about these, but let me say, for folks with disabilities, you can save up to $100,000 and still receive SSI, up to $300,000 and still receive Medicaid. And you know, the great thing about these accounts is you get to decide. The count is in your name. You get to decide what you're going to do with the money. Maybe you want to build a career and an employment future. Maybe you want to save money and invest it and become wealthy that way. Maybe you want to buy a home, go college, travel. Maybe you want to put money aside for your children or your grandchildren. You get to do it. You get to decide what your American dream is and what independence looks like for you. So it's time to get busy. There is an amazing opportunity here with ABLE right now, but let me assure you, there is still lots to do. There's a lot of work to be done around education and outreach, letting not only community members in California know about ABLE, but to know what's going on nationally. There are still some excellent opportunities for advocacy. ABLE accounts are, by no means, perfect, but they're still an opportunity from a policy perspective to improve upon them and make them bigger and better and accessible to more people. And there's lots of things to be done around implementation. So again, this room is filled with the need to be here today. Policy-makers, funders, individuals with disabilities, federal and state workers, accountants of people with disabilities. Together, if we come together, we can begin to change the economic and financial outcomes for people with disabilities. I want to take this opportunity to bring Olivia to the microphone. Olivia Calderon is somebody that I've known from the advocate

community for several years, but I've only recently had the opportunity to work with her. And I have to say, Olivia is a force of nature. I've never put together an event with somebody with such passion for the community or passion for financial empowerment, so without further ado, I'd like to hand the mic over to Olivia and look forward to the next couple hours with you guys.

[Applause]>> Olivia Calderon: Thank you, Tom, for that kind introduction. It is such a

pleasure for me to be here with you in Berkley at the Ed Roberts campus. I just want to extend appreciation at the World Institute on disability for inciting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to cohost today's convening to explore new ways to help consumers with disabilities and their families save for their future. And I also just want to extend my sincere appreciation for all of our presenters. They traveled from Ohio and Nebraska, from DC and across the country to be here with us, to share their experiences, to share their innovative programs and their vision. Also, I would like to, again, take a moment to acknowledge and to thank the head of the FPD's consumer engagement division, Gail Hillebrand, who changed her schedule to join us. She leads a division with six offices, including the Office of Financial Empowerment, Office of Service Member Affairs, office six students, Office of Older Americans, Consumer Engagement and Financial Education. Her participation here with us today is a clear reflection of CFPB's commitment to support and partner with the disability community. My objective in the next few minutes is just to make sure we're all on the same page as we launch into today's program. So maybe two things. To provide back down to CFPB's mission and approach that we take to engaging with consumers, and also talk about some of the tools and programs we offer you and the people you serve. And then I'm going to describe why we're excited about ABLE has an essential tool to provide financial capability and inclusion for people with disabilities. Overall the goals are, you know, look at the agenda enough your packet. It's twofold. We want to learn and hear from leaders that have launched these able account programs. We want to learn about the features and mechanics of these accounts, but we also want to learn directly from you, the disability community, about your financial experience, your feedback, your ideas. As the community proudly says, nothing about us without us. And we at the CFPB take this to heart and that's why we're here. Before we talked about the commission of the CFPB, we're going to talk about account features. We do not endorse legislation or a product. So what is the mission of the CFPB? The mission of the CFPB is to make markets for consumer financial products and services work for consumers by making rules more effective and by consistently enforcing those rules and by empowering consumers to take control of their financial lives. In the Office of financial empowerment, we're focused on empowering low income and economically vulnerable consumers. You may wonder, how is it that we reach the millions of consumers of our task? I will share three examples. One of the key ways we serve consumers is to take complaints about things like mortgages, student loans, credit cards, debt collection. Through this process, some consumers get a refund. Some consumers get an explanation of what happened in their account. Consumers can file a complaint directly to the CFPB online at www.consumerfinance.gov/complaint over the phone.

And we've provided this service in over 180 languages. Second, we provide sort answers to common questions with financial products and choices to ask CFPB. Ask CFPB is a searchable online resource and there's a thousand questions and answers about financial issues and troubles ranging from information for parents who want to learn how to talk to their kids about money to specific questions about things like ordering a credit report. Understanding a credit score. Avoiding overdraft fees and checking accounts and even how to respond to that collector when they call. Third, major life decisions such as going to college, paying back student loans, borrowing money to buy a home, planning for retirement. There you also find our series for financial caregivers called managing someone else's money. We can find all of these resources on our website at consumer resources.gov. We also collaborate with national, state, and local intermediaries. We work closely with social service providers, financial educators, and community based organizations to reach people where they are and get them the information. For example, we developed your money, your goals and toolkits to help front line the staff of the people we serve to develop skills and financial activities such as building emergency savings, building a credit history, understand and go managing debt, and through your money, your goals, we've trained thousands of case managers and Social Services, legal aid, volunteers to help the people they serve identify and possibly overcome financial challenges and reach their personal financial goals. But we understand that information alone doesn't fully empower people to become financially secure. Part of financial empowerment is ensuring people have access to the financial products and services be that are tailored to meet their needs. And that's expected by the [Inaudible] at the campus, buzz people with disabilities, like all consumers, deserve to be treated fairly and have access to tools and information they need to be able to enhance their financial well-being. You know, one of the most common misperceptions about low income people is that they don't want to save, and that's wrong. Just like everyone else, if given the proper tools and I know centers, even the most economically vulnerable can and do save. The reality is that too many low income people with disabilities or without disabilities are facing structural barriers that stifle their ability to save. This is why we see great potential in the ABLE accounts and great potential in partnering with organizations like the World Institute on Disability and other organizations with disability communities to raise opportunities about these exciting opportunities. We knee many of you today are on the cutting edge of designing and implementing scalable policies and programs available for families to save, and we hope that without today's discussion, without ABLE account innovations, this will inspire greater programs and greater savings and the programs you serve. You have an opportunity to network with one another throughout the forum and hear each other's questions and answers. You'll quickly realize how diverse this audience is. This was designed intentionally for policy-makers, practitioners, for funders and for consumers with disabilities to break out of silos and collaborate. So before I introduce a guest speaker and we transition to the next panel, I want to take a moment to thank Ed Roberts campus. I just can't think of a more beautiful and inspiring place to have today's conversation universally designed. The whole host of services in the disability community, it's really here for the entire community to be able to take advantage of.

The Ed Roberts campus is a concrete example of what's possible when we work together. And I'm reminded of an African proverb that my Mexican grandmother shared with me years ago. If you want to go fast, go alone. Approximate if you want to go far, go together.

[Applause]Closing, I just want to thank all of the leaders in the disability movement, past

and present, who have worked doggedly to ensure quality of opportunity, independent living, full participation, and economic self-sufficiency for all people. Your tireless efforts made ABLE a reality, and it's because of you that we're here today. And because of you that Ed Roberts' words are as true today as the day he spoke them in 1977. The future for millions of people with disabilities will find a New World. ABLE is part of the New World and their collaboration and partnership, we can extend opportunities for people with disabilities and without to be able to say dream big and achieve financial independence. So with that, we have much to discuss and learn, and I look forward to it very, very much. And I thank you. And now -- no applause. It's my pleasure -- hold it for someone special -- to introduce to you a public servant whose servant leadership and courage and sheer tenacity has inspired local, state, and national leaders to see what's possible when you create real opportunities for all families to save and achieve upward mobility. With that, please join me in giving a warm, warm welcome to the treasurer of the city and County of San Francisco, José Cisneros.

[Applause]>> Jose Cisneros: Good Morning, everyone. It's great to join Tom and Olivia

today to welcome to you this awesome day of discussion. I just want for take a couple of minutes and share with you some of the things we've been doing in San Francisco. We are the treasurer's office, which means we have the responsibility of taking care of the city's money, but we wanted to take some of that knowledge we had about managing money and share it with people that really needed help on keeping their money safe. So for more than ten years, we've been launching program after program in the area of financial empowerment to hopefully help people be more successful. We launched [Inaudible] San Francisco, which contacted over 50,000 folks in San Francisco to a safe bank account and let them steer themselves away from predatory check cashers or, worse, payday lender. We're now doing financial coaching, connecting low income folks in your city with individual Coaches to help them be more successful in how they manage their money. And I'm very excited about our kindergarten to college program, which would be ready five years from now. This program automatically opens up a college savings account for every child that enters the San Francisco public schools in kindergarten. Completely automatic. No paperwork.

[Applause] >> No permission. Every child gets an account. Every child gets a $50 deposit in

their account, and they get match money to inspire them to save. And I'm here to report that of the 23,000 accounts we've opened, the families that have started to save have saved over one and a half million dollars of their own family money for their kids' college education. I think this is the first time we've seen low income families save for this extent for college. We're excited to work with many of our partner cities, which are

now rolling out similar programs so we can help everybody be successful. I'm excited about the work we can do on the local level here in our cities and counties, but we can only do this because of the strong support and partnership we get from our state government partners and our federal partners. We have some great representatives in the state of California, state government. They really do good things. We use them all the time in San Francisco and in the bay area. Their program, makes a world of difference for us. Of course, launching ABLE accounts in California is going to allow us at the street level to help people be more and more successful with their funds. And I can't say enough about the great leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It's an honor to have them here today. Gail, Olivia, and all the folks over there help us day after day to be more effective, help us tackle the big issues and help us solve problems on a national scale that we're discovering full and I see unfold here at the local level. It's a great partnership. I'm excited that you're all here to be part of this today. Welcome, and have a great day, everyone.

[Applause] If we can have the first panel of folks come up here? Congratulations. >> David Sieminski: So my name is David Sieminski. I work in the Office of

Financial Empowerment, along with Olivia and Gail at the CFPB. And I have the pleasure of introducing the first panel. I want to drill down on the work we've been doing around saving and how that associates itself with financial well-being. First of all, I want to thank you all, as Olivia has, for being here today. We're so thrilled to have such a diverse crowd in the room. We have the right people and we're going to hear from a lot of people during the course of the day and I think it's really exciting. A little bit about financial well and can how that associates itself with saving and some of the topics we're talking about today. So we know in general that when people have the opportunity to save and when they're able to accumulate funds, it's extremely important and highly associated with their own financial well-being. As their director, Richard Cordray has said, saving now can help keep consumers out of trouble and help them achieve long-term financial stability and their personal financial goals. The bureau has been engaged in multi-year research project to determine how consumers define their own financial well-being. What we learned from hundreds of interviews with consumers is that they design financial well-being as having four key elements. First, having control over their day-to-day and month to month finances. That's something we all want to do. Having the capacity to absorb financial shock, because we know life happens. Knowing that they are on track to meet their financial goals and having the financial freedom to make the choices to allow them to enjoy life. We've also learned that four types of behaviors support financial well-being: Effective routine money management, financial research and knowledge seeking, financial planning and goal setting, and following through on financial decisions. In other words, are we to suggest that people have higher levels of financial well-being when they're able to ask, plan, and act? To date, the CFPB has focused some of its efforts to educate consumers about the value of saving based on unique opportunities or specific goals. For example, we provide opportunities for people to save at tax time, because that's the one time at the year they may get the largest payment they receive and they may get to make a

financial decision about the possibility of saving. We've also, as Olivia said, helped people save for specific goals like retirement. Thousand leverage the savings they have, plus the other benefits that they may receive in order to have a secure retirement. And we expand our efforts to encourage saving. We want to make sure that consumers have the knowledge and capability to set and meet their key financial goals and that the policies, the programs, be and the products are aligned to can you port consume in other words achieving those goals, and certainly one of those policies is one that we're going to be talking a lot about today.

Broadly, we want consumers to have sufficient financial liquidity so that they have the financial resources to withstand financial shocks. We want to help them save for the future so that they can develop and execute plans to meet their own personal financial goals and we also want to make sure that consumers understand how to maintain that liquidity, engage in goal based savings, and that they know the tradeoffs between things like saving and paying down debt based on quality, unbiased research, and guidance. One of our new areas of work, and Olivia alluded to it, is starting to look at the opportunities for people to save to college. Again, José also mentioned this as well. Kindergarten to school one of the premier programs in the country. We want to support that work and we want to lift up best practices in that space, because we know that when Children and Families start saving for college early in life, the children are more likely to go to college and they're more likely to graduate. So we plan on engaging innovate in other words that space in the coming years. We recognize that many people with disability find they're excluded from financial services all together. As Tom has said, some of the detrimental effects that can have. So we're very focused on increasing the ability of speech with disabilities, and especially low income and low wealth consumers, to access and use savings products, such as the ABLE account in a productive way. As a result, there's a couple of key questions we will be looking at as ABLE accounts become more available. Will people who open ABLE accounts be able to save? And will they be able to save regularly? Many people with disabilities living on fixed incomes may not be able to save much or save regularly, so it's important that ABLE products that come to market have little or no limit on deposits and people with limited resources can access the funds easily when they need them. Another key question we'll be watching is are ABLE account products accessible and usable by the lowest income and most vulnerable users. Product design are key elements may influence this question. And we look forward to learning how providers are engaged in these activities and to working with them to make sure these accounts are accessible populations that may benefit from this new savings product. So we're excited about the creativity and willingness demonstrated by the States and institutions here today, and we'll hear from them soon. We greatly appreciate their willingness to share their product designs and their marketing and outreach strategies to reach populations of people with disabilities who are most in need of this it important savings tool. So now let me introduce to you our expert panel. Sarah Weir, Juliana Crist, and Deborah Goodkin. Bios in your market, so I'll briefly introduce them. Sara was appointed to the National Down Syndrome Society in December 2014 after previously serving as the Vice President of advocacy and affiliate relations for NDSS since 2012. She's responsible for

overseeing the mission and administration of the organization which is the largest nonprofit in the United States advocating for people with Down Syndrome and their families. Sara will start out first and describe ABLE, provide the history including status of treasury rules and ongoing federal legislative efforts to strengthen able. Juliana Crist will go next. She's the Director of STABLE accounts, Ohio. Ohio's ABLE program. She began her career has an attorney in private practice and transitioned to government practice before joining the Ohio treasurer's office, she clerked at the Ohio Supreme Court and she has a nephew with autism and is thrilled to be working on a program that is empowering people with disabilities. She has been working on building and launching STABLE accounts since 2015. Juliana will discuss the pieces and mechanics of Ohio's ABLE program. And last, but certainly not list, Deborah Goodkin has over 19 years' experience in mutual fund and college savings industry. She is presently the program manager for the very successful 529 college savings plan on back of Nebraska State Treasurer. She's proven her ability to manage a team to continuously make sure the plans meet the needs and expectations of college savers. Deborah brings that experience, zeal, commitment, and focus to the ABLE savings plan in Nebraska's ABLE program. Now I'll turn it over to Sara.

>> Sara Weir: Good Morning, everyone. It is such an honor to be here. I really want to thank the World Institute on Disability and of course the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for putting on today's event and bringing you all here to learn more about the ABLE program. I guess my job is to tell you A little bit about the history of how the ABLE program and the more current program that we have in existence today came to be. It wasn't an easy task to get ABLE across the finish line, let me tell you. We were working on legislation for almost a decade. I'll tell you a little bit about the history. Fortunately, through my role I started off as a consultant and then I joined the staff of the organization and when I came onboard in 2012, my boss at the time and our board of directors said we were going to make this little tiny ABLE thing a priority for our organization, and we were going to get it done and we weren't going to do it alone. There's a lot of people that help get this legislation across the finish line. Many of you in this room. Anybody who sent an e-mail, picked up a phone, even mentioned it in the course of the discussion helped make this legislation a reality. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about how the idea came to be. Everything we heard from the World Institute on Disability this morning is so true. From day one, especially from the community's perspective, we put people with disabilities in the same category as before. And it's unacceptable. It's 2016 and we simply couple Medicaid and social security services in a way that looks at how long an individual is to be financially empowered and allow them to save their own money for the future. And that was really the whole goal of the ABLE program. So about nine and a half, almost ten years ago, one incredibly hot summer DC day -- it's very hot in DC. I wish I could stay in California for a lot longer. We had five amazing parents. Their names were Rick Christina, [Inaudible] and Steve. These names might sound a little bit familiar. The legislation, the law that ultimately passed in December of 2014 that President Obama signed into law was named in his honor. And I'll talk about that in a little bit. These five parents were sitting around. They all had children at the time. Many of them are adults now, with Down Syndrome. And they

were talking about inequities that exist in the system. How is it that I am penalized for putting assets into the name of my individual, my son or daughter with Down Syndrome, but they really need some of that extra financial security a little bit more than my other children who have access to 401(k)s, that are going to get benefits from their employer, that are going to go to college. And all of these things. And one of the parents at the time, Rick actually said, come up with some legislation. Let's create a law. And Jen at the time, Jen lives in Florida, and yesterday she and her son were part of the launch of the Florida program and Jen spoke. Jen goes, you know, my neighbor, he's a Congressman. I think in Florida we used to work together. Let me ask him and see what he thinks about this idea. So she caught John Arieli as he was mowing the lawn next door. This is really how things happen in Washington. She went across the fence and John was mowing the lawn. She said, John, I've got to talk to you about something. Me and four other parents had this board meeting the other night and we were talking. We can't save more than $2,000 for our children with Down Syndrome. He said, what the heck are you talking about? How is that even legal? How is that even possible? Again, to everyone in the room, we live and breathe this every single day, so we know the barriers that are up against people with disabilities on a daily basis, but to the general public, to Congress, and to congressional staff, I can tell you from the countless meetings that I've done on this legislation that they don't know, because they don't experience it every day. And John, you know, shut down the mower and said, let me talk to my boss about this. It sounds like a great idea. It sounds like something he could get behind. So at the time [Inaudible] who ultimately game the lead Republican on this legislation. Unfortunately, Conner Crenshaw was relatively new in the United States Congress. He was not on any of the key committees of jurisdiction, which is also a barrier to getting anything done in Washington. So that would have been 2006, 2005/2006. And we really had to build a coalition and we had to bring the right stakeholders in the room to talk about how this legislation would ultimately look like. When we first introduced the bill, it actually had a different name. It wasn't called the ABLE Act. It was called a really bad name. The Financial Savings Account for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities or FSAIID. And it was bad. And we had this bill out there for two Congresses and I think we had this bill out there and I think we had 25 cosponsors on this legislation for about four years. In about 2012, I joined NDSS on staff and we said we would make it a priority. We would put our resources into dealing with legislation across the finish line. We really teamed up with our colleagues from Autism Speaks. I can't talk highly enough about what a valuable partner Autism Speaks was to NDSS and getting their legislation done. I did countless meetings with Autism Speaks. Some of my NDSS colleagues, we would finish each other's sentences or tell our personal advocacy stories. They would look at me and say, can I tell Angie's story how she has five jobs and only gets paid for one of them? Sure, Stuart. Go ahead. Tell Angie's story. But about that four-year Mark, we actually have two pending pieces of legislation out there. So they create financial savings tools for people with disabilities. We have one introduced by senator Dodd in the Senate. So we actually have to marry the two, and there were some differences. Some wanted tax credit. Some wanted tax deductions. Some wanted the cap at 500,000. So we had to come up with some

compromises, and at that point in time we had a committee staff, we can blame it on her. We can blame it on Tiffany. She'll take the blame. I know she will. Came up with this brilliant idea. If we're going to invent a tax code, let's put it under a program that already exists, that's working for families and allowing families to save for the future, and that's the traditional 529 college and savings program that Juliana and Deborah both manage for the States of Nebraska and Ohio. And it was a really good idea, because the appetites do pass for forms in the U.S. Congress, and at the time, we had a House Ways and Means Committee chairman who didn't want to do tax reform and he didn't want to address single tax issues or single tax bills. So we put ABLE under the 529 program and it meant that that creates a new section in that account and we changed the name of the bill at the time. So that's when the bill became the Achieving a Better Life Experience Act, which really sums up what we were trying to do when we came up with this concept eight years ago. The whole goal is to allow people to save their own money, but remain under necessary benefits. So we'll talk more specifically about the legislation and the nuances in the current able structure and some of the things we're working on to make this happen, but this is an idea that came around a kitchen table from five parents and talking about inequities that exist in the system, and it's just, for me, a personal honor to be in this room today and to talk to you about the story and to see Deborah and Juliana and two other states that have actually launched programs. And we have individuals with disabilities actually opening up ABLE accounts to have it become full circle is nothing short of amazing. So in 2012, we really ramped up. We said we're going to get this bill across the finish line, and it took two more Congresses. So at that point we really tried to engage our grassroots. Any advocate that we could get to listen to us and understand why this legislation was important, we talked to cultivate relationships to members of Congress, how to be effective advocates, why it was important to come to Washington and talk about ABLE. Why it was important to meet with your member of Congress back at home when they were at recess. And our advocates really, and especially our self-advocates, our individuals with Down syndrome, they totally got the picture and they totally understood why this was important. So when we actually passed ABLE in December of 2014, we had 85% of the entire United States Congress cosponsor this bill, a tax bill. 381 out of 435 members of Congress signed on to a bill who said this is the right thing to do in the House of Representatives and 78 out of 100 U.S. Senators joined the house and cosponsored that bill. I can tell you, I've been in Washington for a long time and that has never happened, and it has never happened on a disability bill to have so many bipartisan members of Congress come together. So we took this one idea, which is one member of Congress from Florida, and we cultivated really an amazing array of champions across the United States Senate and across the United States house to make this happen. One quick story, and I know I need to wrap up, I was just getting my annual checkup, as we all should when you go to the doctor. And I was sitting in the waiting room and I'll never forget the call I received from Senator Casey's office from my good friend who was working there at the time on this legislation. I said, I hope you're sitting down. I said, what's going on? [Inaudible] are going to cosponsor ABLE on the same day. I mean, it's the power of the grassroots that really, really helped make that happen. That really hasn't

happened since September 11th. Many of you have probably heard Sara Weir. She's an individual with down win drop. Her change.org petition had 300,000 signatures, and those are 300,000 signatures for people outside of our community, people that thought this was a good idea writing her members of Congress and this incident had to get done. So that was very instrumental in making this happen. When we ultimately found a pay for to get this across the finish line, the ultimate cost of the bill when it was introduced was $10 billion over two years. $10 billion over ten years. Chairman of the house ways and means community said we could only tap it if we got it down to 2 million, so we had to make some of those concession. Some of those concessions weren't the most ideal, and that was trimming back the age to age 26. And we'll talk a little bit about the improvements that we're working on to increase the age of eligibility for ABLE accounts. The other was putting an annual cap on contributions. So the annual cap for ABLE accounts is $14,000. The other was you could only have one ABLE account. But for us, having one account where you could actually save your own money was a total concession we were willing to make. So that happiness is scored down to get us to $2 million, and they ultimately passed the legislation. House Republican rules require us to have pay for. So we had to come up with some other set of funding within the federal government to make ABLE a reality and we actually, and I think everybody in this room will be highly entertained by one of the pay for ABLE was we actually eliminated medical devices for Medicare recipients of the mail genre to pay for the ABLE program. Congress was already paying for these devices and we eliminated it and it allowed us to have ABLE accounts, which was nothing short of amazing to find this pay for. No member of Congress wants to cut their pet project. So we passed ABLE December of 2014 as a standalone bill, and it was an incredible moment to be in the house gallery to get across the finish line on its own merits as a standalone piece of legislation. It ultimately passed in the tax passage. It was a key piece of legislation Congress worked on every single year. We rolled ABLE into that and that's when it ultimately passed. So since December 2014, really January of 2014 when the legislative session started, we have passed 27 state ABLE laws. That also never happens. I really can't say enough about Nebraska, Ohio, and then the other two states I have launched, Tennessee and now Florida as of yesterday. I mean, they have moved full speed ahead and I'm so excited for you to hear about their particular program. ABLE, you've heard a little bit about the actual registration, but it creates a new section in 529, because you understand why you need it. You can save beyond the $2,000. You can have up to $100,000 in the ABLE account before your social security benefits are suspended. You do not go off of social security. The cap on ABLE accounts is subject to the state you open up the account in, and that varies. I think Pennsylvania may be the highest, about $480,000 can be in an ABLE account, which is amazing. $14,000 is the annual contribution tied to the gift tax that you can put into an ABLE account. We anticipate about 54 million people will be eligible for their ABLE program. One thing I wanted to mention, because this is what we're focused on kind of going forward. We've formed what we're calling the ABLE alliances for financial empowerment. We're working with the disability opportunity fund, Autism Speaks, SISMA, FSI, and we're bringing in a couple new partners and we're focused on the ABLE improvement package. So there's

the series of three goals that are out there right now. One is called the ABLE to work act. We want to expand the assets that you can put into an ABLE account. We know that $14,000 is not enough. So we're ABLE to work and allow the beneficiary of the ABLE program, the individual with the disabilities, to actually put their paycheck into an ABLE account up to the poverty line. So that's $11,700 on an annual basis. There's a lot of momentum for this legislation. There's a lot of cosponsors, because they understand the need for it. That's the ABLE to work. The second piece of legislation is increasing the age to 46 for eligibility. And we can get you this information after today's presentation. It's all there in the DSS website. So increasing age is really important. And the third piece of legislation is the rollover provision. So what happens, if you get a diagnosis of a disability later in life, if you already have a traditional 529 account, we want to make sure that the account can be rolled over. This legislation, we almost passed it in December of last year when we eliminated state residency requirements. If we do have [Inaudible] especially given the dynamics of this election, a lot of it depends, unfortunately, on what we can get done with ABLE this year. We have a really good chance at the rollover provision, which we're very excited about. A couple things we're working on with the ABLE Alliance. And actually, I'm very happy to report, I got the report on the plane coming here yesterday, we've actually secured $8 million in the house financial services legislative vehicle to provide financial assistance and technical assistance for training and outreach to those communities to develop financial institutions, the CDFI, to expand investment benefits and to educate families of individuals with disabilities on financial literacy. So $6 million goes toward that. And the other $2 million is for capacity building to the CDFI to expand those investment benefits for individuals with disabilities. This is really about consumer education and allowing people to understand what it means to actually save money. You know, if you think about it, this is the first time the disability community is interacting with financial institutions, 529 administrators and state treasurers. There's a lot of education and a lot of market that go needs to go into these programs. One of the things we'll also be working on in the next Congress, there's a Medicaid call back in the legislation. It was something that we really never wand in the first place, but some of the disability people were adamant they wouldn't support the legislation unless it was included. And they're using some elimination to eliminate the Medicaid claw back. It's a burden on the states to figure out how to account for that money, so we're very excited about that opportunity. Looking at other opportunities to put more assets into ABLE accounts, employer matches. If the employer offers a match to the traditional 529 program, they should have that opportunity to make that match to an ABLE program. So we are looking to our state partners to come up with other opportunities to put more assets into ABLE accounts. And then the big Kahuna, because we really address the asset portion, we took from $2,000 to $100,000, and that's huge. It's definitely not enough. So we need to address the income limitations. We'll have to do that outside of the scope of ABLE, but that's not enough through 2016. Fortunately, Ryan has this whole poverty objective that he's laid out and it's been in front of him. His Chief of Staff actually has a son with Down Syndrome and is a former member of our board of directors. We're getting in front of him and we're talking about disability, a stake holder

in this conversation. And they're not going to allow individuals with disabilities to earn more money, what's the point? So we need to increase those income limitations or do away with them, but allow folks to have the necessary benefits with Medicaid and social security. So that conversation is taking place right now on Capitol Hill and has to happen and we're going to really need your help. Again, to pass the next ABLE program. I've talked long enough. Thank you again, and I will be here all day and happy to answer any questions.

[Applause] >> Juliana Crist: Hi, everyone. My name is Juliana Crist. I am the director of the

ABLE program, called STABLE accounts. STABLE just stands for State Treasury ABLE, in case you were wondering. Our program is run through the Ohio treasurer's office. That's why we call it that. I'm going to take you guys through my presentation, and I'm going to do two main parts. First I'm going to take you guys through some of the specifics in terms of what our accounts look like, the functionality, and then I'm going to talk about some of the challenges that we face. And this is a brand new law, a brand new program. There was no model that it we could look at. There was no example out there that we could even look to and try to get ideas from. So what it took for us to really get going. And then I'm going to end with some of what we've seen so far. Right? When our program is up and running, and I tell you what our account holders looks like and what the saviors are so far. So jumping in. Ohio -- well, let me step back. I would be remiss if I didn't mention you guys enough. Ohio is home of the recently crowned world champion [Inaudible]

[Laughter]I have never, ever gotten to brag on Cleveland. The one opportunity I have, I

can't lose it.That's our claim to fame or second claim to fame that I would put on the same

level is that we have the great fortune of being the first state in the country to lunch an ABLE program.

[Applause]And it has been a ride. We're working on it. We passed our state legislation in

June of last year, so we've been really working on this for a year. June 1st, we announced our launch. We are a nationwide program. So what that means is that even though Ohio is administering STABLE accounts, anybody across the country can open one. So right now, we do have 33 states and the Virgin Islands represented. So we have accounts far and wide. Interestingly, California is actually our second biggest population.

[Applause]Right now we're seeing about half in state folks. So half Ohioans and half out of

state. Californians represent about 9% of our account holders actually. I owe a lot of that to many people in the room here, a lot of advocates. Steve Dale who is here, who has been a crate attorney advocate for Californians. I get calls, like, every other day from organizations in your state, more than any other state, asking me for pamphlets, educational opportunities, that kind of thing. So you guys are doing a great job of getting the word out and we appreciate that. What do stable accounts looks like and

how can you get one? Our process is online. Question to have a paper application for those who need it, but the system is all housed online. So you don't go to a bank to open a STABLE account. And these aren't banking account, either. It is not like a checking account or savings account. Think of it more like an investment account. So a 401(k) maybe. Or if you've ever opened up a 529 college savings account for your grandchild or child, it's very similar to that. The online enrollment is through our website, so if you want some more information or you want to check out the program, it's STABLEaccount.com. We also have a really good eligibility quiz on there. If you're wondering if you or your loved one or an advocate call, you can click on that and a quick series of yes or no questions and at the end they'll tell you whether they're eligible to open an account. The process is paperless, so although you do have to have some kind of determination that you have a disability, maybe you receive SSI or SSDI or I just have a diagnosis from a doctor, you have to tell us that, but we don't ask you for anything. We don't send you to the doctor to be evaluated. We don't ask you to mail in your diagnosis or medical form. It was designed to be something that you could go on our website and finish in ten minutes and you have your account and you could start saving. So that's how it's designed. And from there, the functionality is also designed to be electronic, for the most part. So you can get money into the account just by doing an electronic transfer from a bank account. You can also mail in a check if you want, but if you have a checking or savings account, you can just put in your account in writing numbers and send us the money that way. And withdrawals work similarly. So if you want to take out your money, first of all, there's no penalty for how often you take it out. No fees for taking it out. It's your money. You can do anything you want to. You can transfer your money electronically from your STABLE account into your existing accounted when you're ready to spend it. We also have a debit card that we've attached to at count that you can use to spend your money really on the go, and I'll get to that in a little bit. The other electronic part we have is basically a gifting platform. So if you're familiar with social media-type platforms, like Go Fund Me, things like that, you can go into your account. You can put in e-mail addresses for your friends, family, and the system will generate a message to them. You get it right. Hi, Uncle. It's my birthday or I'm graduating. Don't you really love me? Here is a link. Right? And so the system will send out the e-mail to your friends and family and they can put that link and make a gift directly to your account. As many of you know, that's Mott something a lot of people could do before. If their child had a birthday, they would have to say, don't give my child money, because I don't want it to affect their benefits. This way you can totally bypass that. The money goes straight into the accounted. You don't have to give them account numbers or go anywhere special. You can contribute your gifting platform that way. I mentioned earlier that these are investment accounts. What that means is when you go to put your money in, we give you a menu of five different investment portfolios that you can choose from. It's very simple. They just range from very aggressive, so a little more risky to very conservative, not as risky. There's four of those options. Those invest in mutual funds administered by Vanguard. It's a familiar household name. Many of you know it. We also have an FDIC insured option, a type of institutional savings account. So you cannot lose your principle on that one. Tradeoff has lower returns, but

that, right now, is far and away our most popular option. So 40% of our assets are in that FDIC insured options. Is there a question?

>> Yeah. [Inaudible]>> Juliana Crist: Yes. So the option, is that for high eye or has that changed?

Great question. It's by state. We vetted those. We talked to people. Those are ours just for the STABLE program, but I know Deborah will talk about it, but they'll change state to state.

>> Are there federal guidelines [Inaudible]>> Juliana Crist: So the question, are there federal guidelines demanding what

those ought to be? No. There could be a lot of flavors determining what these look like. Some might have a little more variety or maybe more sophisticated options. Some might even have a checking account. Deborah will talk about hers. But yeah, that's what we've chose phone now. So that's just specific to Ohio.

>> Do we need to choose one or can you have one of the Vanguard accounts and the FDIA?

>> Juliana Crist: You can choose as many as you want.>> Okay. Good.>> Juliana Crist: Most people go one way or the other. Right? They either go to

growth portfolio, the riskiest, or the FDIC option. And some just put 20% in every option. Another economy

>> Yeah. Is there an option to get more information about the different investment options on your website?

>> Juliana Crist: Yes. We do have an investment page. It goes through what the options look like. You can actually link to the web pages for the underlying Vanguard funds. We also have a great customer service center and they can talk you through if you have questions. I realize this is different than a bank account and it's harder to understand if you're not familiar with it.

>> And maybe we should hold some questions to the end? One more question?>> Juliana Crist: Yeah, that's fine.>> Hold on, Scott. I'm coming.>> So as a California resident, why wouldn't I choose Ohio if it's available now

and California is essentially not quite yet? Is there any disadvantage? It doesn't seem like there really is. Is there a difference between state to state? Again, it seems odd that someone wouldn't just go to California or go to Ohio or Tennessee or Florida or Nebraska.

>> Juliana Crist: You should. Please do. Come to us. We'd love to have you. We have a lot of Californians, like I said. Our advice to people is if you would like a STABLE account, don't wait for your state. We know already that a number of states aren't ever, at least right now they've said we're not going to do this. Right? There's other national plans. There's not maybe the political will. They maybe don't have an appropriation to do it. These are hard. These are expensive to set up on the stateside. So don't wait. Right? Because if you wait, even until next year, if you lose the ability to put aside $14,000 that you get every year and what you can do, if you want to wait for your state, you can open a STABLE account right now, put aside your money, and then

roll over to your state once your state gets up and running.>> There you go.>> Juliana Crist: So you're not going to be locked in, in other words, if you open

somewhere else right now. You can always switch over more of your money to another state later on. Great question. Okay. You can keep going here. Move to the next slide. So I want to touch on learning the big things that we've added on to our product. Like I said before, we have a debit card associated with this. So it's called a STABLE card. This is a MasterCard, so it's a loadable prepaid card. It doesn't work exactly like a checking card that you might have right now. What you do is if you want to take the money out of your account, you go into your online log in, ask for a withdrawal, say you want to take out $100, and then you can actually move that $100 onto the card. So that way if you go out to the pharmacy or the doctor or Target, buy whatever you're going to buy and you swipe your card, you only have $100 on that. The reason with we did it that way, you're building, a lot of interaction with different parents’ groups and disabilities organizations, and what they said to us is I don't want to be putting $10,000 into my account or my child's account. I want them to have financial independence, but I don't necessarily want to give them a card where they can spend $10,000. Right? Or be taken advantage of. Right? So we designed it this way so if there's a parent or guardian assigned to an account, they can limit access to funds. Now, if that's not a concern for you, no big deal. You can put up to $15,000. You can put all your money on the card if you want, but we at least wanted to give people that option, because we know the folks be that set up these accounts are going to fall into two buckets. We're going to have spenders and we're going to have savers. We wanted people to have easy access to their money, especially because these aren't exactly like 529 college accounts where you have 18 years to plan and you pretty much know what you're going to need the money. These accounts can be used on a daily, monthly basis. You're not always going to be able to predict you have to go to the doctor tomorrow. You have easy access to your funds. That's why we design this it. It's free to get. As long as you're not going to the register and using your card like you're running a pin transaction, then it's totally for you. There are no additional fees for the card. Just sign for your purchases when you use it and it's completely free. No additional cost. The other great thing that comes with the card is we know that this community, especially people that receive SSI or Medicaid, are often audited. Right? At Ohio, like our counties will audit folks that are receiving benefits, sometimes on a monthly basis. So they need to be able to keep good records. So what the system does is every time you swipe your STABLE card, it has a record of your transaction that you can print off if you're ever audited. You can actually categorize every single expense in terms of whether or not it was going toward a qualified sense or not, disability related or not, and you can write your own specific notes on the line saying, hey, CVS line. I bought a prescription. Or doctor line. I we wanted to a checkup related to my disability. So if you do need to prove what you were doing with your money, go on their online, print it off, and hand it over to them. It's designed to be really easy to use to keep records, good records for people. Go to the next slide. Yes?

>> Is your money earning money while it's on the card?

>> Juliana Crist: Not while it's in the card. While it's in the account, it would be earning money. The card doesn't have any kind of interest on it, but the balance is still FDIC insured. I'm going to switch gears a little bit and talk about how we got here. This was a challenging product to build, so don't be too hard on your state if they're not up and running. I know firsthand experience it's expensive and it's difficult. Just the resources alone are very hard. I work full time on the STABLE program. Next week we're going to hire another full time person to work with me. Throughout the office we have about 14 or 15 people working on the program, the equivalent of roughly seven to eight full time employees just doing STABLE work. That doesn't even through our outside vendors. Right? So we have a program manager, a whole team of people that help us administer the account. We have seven or eight people full time in a customer service call center just to answer the phones and the e-mails. We have three law firms. We have a number of consultants. So again, this is like a tremendous amount of resources that went into this, but we're proud of how quickly we were able to do that, considering all the back end work that goes into it. And I should also mention Ohio, our legislature gave us a $4 million appropriation to build this program. So a lot of states have no money, $0, so if you come from a state that doesn't have an appropriation, be gentle. It could be very hard for them to get a program up and running without any money to do so. There's great reference that comes out of and FDIC telling us that individuals with disabilities are often unbanked or under banked, and one of the biggest reasons is because there's trust barriers between the community and government organizations. So I have the pleasure of being both a government organization and a banking organization, so we have a hurdle to get over. When I'm talking to people in the community about these accounts and they don't have a bank accounted or they're distrustful of the government in some way, we really have to bridge that relationship gap and that just takes face-to-face meetings. That takes boots on the ground. A lot of times we'll even offer like a webinar to someone to educate them about STABLE accounts and they'll tell me, I need you to sit here and it talk to my parents face to face. And I'm happy to do that, but it is a challenge, because that means people have to go out in the community, and it just takes more time. So I think we're going to see a slow ramp up, a slow adoption of these programs and these accounts, but it's worth it. Right? Eventually we're going to hit that tipping point where it becomes a household name and people can go to their advisors or, you know, anybody to help them, their attorneys, and well just do it themselves, get on the website, do it yourself in ten minutes. We're not there yet, but that is what we're building towards. We also see a lot of people nervous in the community about these accounts. It's different. People are used to being told, you can't save more than $2,000 or you'll lose your healthcare or your benefits. All of a sudden, here I come saying, no more. Right? Go ahead. Put your money away. And some of them look at me like, where did you come from? Does the federal government know you're doing this? That kind of thing.

[Laughter]So I have to educate them. And especially the Medicaid pay back that Sara

mentioned. That scares people, and rightfully so. So we're working on educating people like that. We're working on our state in Ohio to see what we can do to maybe

get rid of it, because again, people don't want to think that if their loved ones pass away, all the money goes to Medicare. That's not how it works. I don't ever turn your account over to Medicaid, but it is a reality that medicate can come in and ask for their money back. I'm going to speed up a little bit here. Obviously, understanding investments is difficult for people. It stops people in the enrollment process. We have education to it do there. And just boots on the ground. Right? Trying to get awareness out takes a lot of legwork, so we're working through that right now. You can go to the next slide. I know the CFPB works on consumer fraud issues, so I won't go through all of these. You probably are familiar with them just from working in the disability community. But with these accounts, obviously we want to be very sensitive to fraud issues and ways that people could be taken advantage of. So we're notating these as I hear back from the community, guardianship issues. Maybe divorced parents, one in California and one in Ohio. They both opened accounts and all of a sudden -- we're not there to do that, by the way. Mom and dad don't talk. Did somebody just mess up their child's benefits? There's a lot of things we need to be cognizant of and figure out. You can go to the next slide and I'll jump ahead. This is just what I wanted to close on. So just some of the behaviors that we've seen. What our account users looked like right now. Our average account holder is a young adult with a permanent developmental disability. About 75% of account holders receive some form of disability benefits and half of our account holders have a parent administering the account for them. About a third are actually self-administered, so there's no kind of guardian or anybody helping them, but half of them do have a parent or guardian or somebody else helping them with the account. [Inaudible] they want to know they're not going to lose their money. On the second FDIC insured investment option, we've seen such an interest in that. And then, again, across the country, about 34 states represented. So what this tells me is that we're doing a good job of reaching some populations that help us target who can really use these accounts. It also tells me that we're not reaching different disability groups, physical disability or people with mental health substance abuse and addiction issues. We need to do a better job of reaching out to those communities as well. So this is interesting data. We have a ways to go. I'm really glad that we're here and we're at least up and running and open to the question. So that's it.

[Applause] >> David Sieminski: We'll have ten minutes at the end. Don't worry. Go ahead.>> Can you or maybe the next speaker can talk about it? I'd be curious about the

age limit and what happens when someone becomes too old to be a part of the program. I'd like to hear a little bit about that.

>> Juliana Crist: Sure. So there's no age limit on actually opening an account. Anybody at any age can open at count. It has to do with onset of disability. So your disability has to have occurred before you turn age 26. I know maybe you wouldn't qualify for that, but that's kind of what Sara talked about. That was a concession they had to make on a federal level to get the law passed, but there is a bill right now in Congress asking people to bump that age limit up.

>> David Sieminski: I see two questions. Ma'am, you, and then we'll go to the next speaker and then we'll come back and have questions afterwards as well. Go

ahead.>> My question is related to the [Inaudible] it will be fine. As a parent, the

14,000 that I can put into the account, is that pretax money? and then you said there's qualified expenses. So when I'm paying my taxes at the end of the year, how do I figure that out? If someone else is going to talk about that, fine. If not, if you could talk a little bit about that?

>> Deborah Goodkin: For the most part, yes. At least on the federal side, it's post tax. So there's no federal tax deduction. I don't know what California's law is. Duds somebody be now if there's a state tax deduction? There is not? Okay. So at least in California there's no state tax deduction. In Ohio we do. We have a contributor state tax deduction for contributions into STABLE accounts, but that's going to vary state to state and there's nothing on a federal level, but your earnings are tax-free.

>> David Sieminski: One more question.>> [Off Mic] >> David Sieminski: So we are working on an appropriation [Inaudible] soon be

named the executive director. One of the things to do is get some sort of a tax advantage for California.

[Applause]>> And only one more question and then we'll go on so we can stay on time.>> Thank you. In your slide, you said that more than -- about 70% of people are

receiving benefits. So I thought you had to be receiving benefits to qualify for a type of account like this. Otherwise, there would be no asset limit issue. So how can you have an asset limit issue if you're not receiving benefits and then be able to qualify for the program?

>> Juliana Crist: You're correct. You do not have to be receiving benefits. If you are receiving benefits, the asset limit is a good part of what this account does for you. But even if you don't receive benefits, you can still use that and get tax advantages. A lot of what we see, the earnings on your account are tax-free. You know, they had [Inaudible] they know someday they're going to pass away. At that point, their child will go on benefits. So they want to make sure that they had saved up for when their child goes through that transition and it won't affect them.

>> Why wouldn't they use a traditional savings vehicle, though?>> When we came up with the definition to qualify for an ABLE account ten years

ago, we use the definition of disability as related to social security. As Juliana said, you don't have to be on benefits to open up an ABLE program. It's how you qualify actually to open an ABLE account were that's a very broad misconception in the disability community, but I'm sure you'd -- again, you don't have to be on benefits like social security and Medicaid, but you can still open up an ABLE account. The second option for eligibility for meeting the definition of social security is a doctor certification and treasury has actually validated our recommendation and our guidance, so a doctor could say that a disability occurs before age 26. MS is a great example. It's a genetic condition. You were likely born with it. You could demonstrate that you had the onset of MS before age 26 and still qualify for an ABLE account.

>> I want to ease the thought there won't be time for questions. There

absolutely will be time for questions and answers. As the logistics person, I'm trying to keep us on schedule. Thank you so much.

>> David Sieminski: So just a heads up that we're going to run a little over, because we want to make sure that Deborah has a full time to get her presentation. We'll get as many questions in after that as we can. So Deborah?

[Applause]>> Deborah Goodkin: Hi, everyone. Another answer to your question is that you

get tax-free, your earnings are tax-free. So that's another good reason.>> It's a sheltered account?>> Deborah Goodkin: Yes, but we can't say that if the IRS is here.[Laughter]I think the most important thing that I learned when I developed in Nebraska an

ABLE than called NABLE savings plan is it's not about me. It's about you. If it wasn't for you and the people from the Down Syndrome society, from Autism Speaks, there really wouldn't be this plan. I'm just a tool to deliver a plan for you. And we learned that and we designed this plan with the community. I'm a bank, First National Bank of Omaha. We have footprints in five or six states. But we do not presume that we knew what you wanted. And we worked with folks on the top there -- I have another slide that didn't make it in. With hundreds of families in the state of Nebraska to design a plan that will help you achieve your hopes and dreams. I do want to say I want to try to go through this very quickly. We cannot have an appropriation. I'm a bank. The state didn't really have an appropriation. So when we went to the owners of my bank and we said, you know, we ever this thing going on. It's called the Achieving a Better Life Experience Act and we're thinking on bidding on it. Let me tell you a little bit about it. The owner said to me, how much do you think it's going to cost? Do you think you're going to make a profit on it? First, it will cost about a million, million five. Right, Joanna? Takes a lot of money. And other people will probably three in another million and I don't think you're going break even for five or six or ten years. And the family who owns the bank, it's a private bank, said they're a member of my community just like everybody else, so do it. And we're losing a lot of money and it really doesn't matter. We invited 500 people to our launch event last Thursday. Juliana launched June 1st and we launched June 30th.

[Applause] Just a couple of days. We invited 500 people who had a member of the family

who was disabled and everything was free. Omaha, of course, you have Cleveland. You have your athletes. We have none of that, but what we do have is one of the top zoos in the world, and they enjoyed a day, free everything, lunch, everything. It's heartwarming, it's changed my life, I must say. Working with people just like you has changed my life the life of the bank, the owners of the bank, and the life of our community. So I want to thank you for the opportunity to have this plan from the bottom of my heart. I'm going to go through this pretty quickly, and I'm not used to talking in a microphone. Can you hear me? Look a little backwards? So that slide should go to the next slide that. Slide is all about how we work with the community, because it's really about you, not about me. Next slide. Go back one. I'm sorry. When I talked to you about this guy, this is Jake Garringer. Sara, smile. She knows the

Garringers very well. She testified before Congress on behalf of I guess the National Down Syndrome Society. His mother works in the community in Omaha, one of the largest organizations that serve the disability community called Olivet. Jake, when I met him more than a year ago, this took seven months to launch. We asked Jake what he wanted to save for, and he said I want to save for a service dog, because his service dog had recently passed away. So we said, great, Jake. We'll make sure you have a service dog H we launched, he was the first account owner and he stood up and now we said, what do you want to save for, Jake? Well, I have my service dog, so now I want a house with a backyard so my service dog can run around. And what does that seen in what that really means is a year ago or before, that he didn't have that kind of hope and dream. All he wanted was a service dog. A year later, after participating with ABLE, a year later he said I'm going to save so much that I'm going to have a house with a yard. And that's what this means to your community. Let's go to the next slide. Another one of your favorites. Yeah. Let's go to the next slide. How do we open up account? Well, Juliana and I cannot work on this together. We cannot co-conspire. But we basically have the same plan, I must say. It's kind of interesting, don't you think? I think it's because we work with people in the disability community and they have the same ideas. So we open up an account online. Everything is online. What we did learn if there's a conserve tore or guardian to manage the finances of a young adult or an adult, they need a paper application, because they need it approved, their conservatorship. It's a way to prevent fraud. As you know, we want to protect individuals with disabilities against fraud, so we do require a paper application to have the papers sent to us. You can have a minor, a parent or guardian of a minor account. One of the things we decided to do was to have how to videos. So a section of our website, which is NABLEsavings.com, and there are materials on the back, is a resource center, and one of the items in there are how to videos and the digital library. And the how to video that's up there right now, and we'll have more in the coming months, is how to open up an account online. So you can look at it. You can figure it out. You can stop it. You can start it. You can do it when you're opening up an account. And it's a really great how to video. We also have tips and a lot of other things to help open up an account, like Ohio, ten minutes or less. Next one. This is our home page. Jacobs again. Right? One of the things that I've learned of almost 20 years in the college savings business, and by the way, I was responsible many years ago for the California 529 plan the. The first time it was TIAA-CREF before it became Fidelity and then it became TIAA-CREF again. I feel like I'm coming home. TIAA-CREF. So we learned about education, trying to have people understand what it means and how to save and how important saving is, and I personally don't care if I get $50 into this account or a thousand or $14,000 into the account, because what we've learned from the college savings business is that once you start, then newer a mindset that you can save and that mindset is extraordinarily important. So when people say to me, I'm worried about social security benefits going away when I do this, and they said you have $50, because we have a 50-dollar minimum, or $25 if you do it automatically and they said, yeah, I could come up with $50. Well, first put $50 in and let's see what happens the next time you speak to your disability advocate. Because I know that we have done outreach to over 750

organizations, advocates, and providers of services in the State of Nebraska and they all know that it is a cool thing to do here, those issues, but we are not -- if someone could believe me, are you going to believe me if I tell you your social security benefits are not going to be impacted? Probably not. Are you going to believe the treasurer's office? Probably not. Are you going to believe the person who you work with all the time on disability services? Yes. And so our belief is that you need to train the trainer. You need to train those people. You need to get them to believe in you and then we work through you to the people who need the services. So we have a lot of education. Let's go to the next one. This is our role online. It's very easy. The steps are across the top. Along the left are tips. If we do something wrong, something pops up, it's very clean and understandable English, I must say. Next? We have five investment options and let me go through them. You're doing great. Moderate, conservative. Not too different from what Juliana had. They're all in Vanguard funds. The only difference is we had professional investment manager, a world leader in this develop the underlying fund that would meet those risk options, those growth options. Excuse me. Next slide. Who can see the mistake on this slide?

>> Missing a D.>> Deborah Goodkin: Thank you. I missed a D. I'm a little embarrassed. We

have the bank savings option from First National Bank of Omaha. We are offering a 1% APY in this product, which is pretty cool. That's a lot of interest. And for a three to five-year horizon, we're seeing people who want to keep it in there a lot longer. The difference, I think, between our plans is we have a checking account. We heard mostly from Down Syndrome and Autism Speaks who had young adults that they wanted to be able to move money in from their personal bank account into their child's or young adult's account, maybe $100 a month or $200 a month. Some of it would go into the five investment options. Some of it would go into the checking accounts, and that at any time we can write a check and they can use their ATM card, an ATM machine to pay for services. The important thing about it is the money still sets there. It's not withdrawn from the plan, from the account. And what's so nice about that is how we're going to start the idea of budgeting for young adults, budget and go managing your finances. There's a lot of limits so that you prevent fraud. There is overcharge, you know, overcharge limits. We understand all of those concerns and it's been incorporated into the checking accounted, but that's not launching until early fall. Probably September. Next one? Contribute any way you want. Payroll deductions. You can contribute be from a bank account. Anyone can contribute. In the State of Nebraska, anyone who contributes can deduct up to $10,000 from their state income tax. Anyone who contributes to this account. Obviously it's a $14,000 limit. That is huge. College saving plan, by the wake it's only the account owner's contributions. The state recognizes the need for this and the importance of this to bring people out of poverty. Anyone who contributes gets up to a $10,000 tax deduction. Obviously, you don't get 10,000. You get that. Next one. Withdraw any way you want. You can set up a systematic withdraw. You want to pay rent. You know your rent is $200 a month. Wouldn't that be nice? You can set it up. The withdrawal automatically goes to pay. Money can go right into your bank account. We can send a dock a third-party. You can

write a check, debit card, et cetera. Questions will be important. Next one. Everything is online. Everything, everything is online. We have a great call center. Our call center is endless and the number of people, we've trained about ten people in the call center and we have backup of probably another 30 or 40. They know all about ABLE. We've gotten a lot ever calls. It's been great. We're very proud of our call center. We outsource it, because we do not believe that we were experts in call centers, so we outsource it and they're an unbelievable call center. They do our college savings as well. Secure access. You can see anything in line. You can contribute online withdraw online, et cetera. Customer care center, 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., voice response system and TRS as well. Next one. Facebook? Anyone want to look it up on Facebook? Enable savings? It's really cool. I look at it every day, a couple times a day. Even though my staff is doing it, I really like it. Financial literacy. We are a firm, humongous believer in financial literacy. So there is a link that talks about how to start thinking about becoming NABLEed. How to start budgeting. How to start thinking about who can help you send money into your account. We do have a gifting option as well. And how do you make a plan to save? How do you start saving? We're having a very huge budget and go financial element. This is just the beginning. We're a firm believer in it. Normally as part of our business or 529 business and our banking business. Next. NABLE you is an interesting part of our website. They are topics that are written by experts to integrate a certain topic in with NABLE, such as inheritance and settlements, special needs trust. If you're a financial adviser, how you can use it. If anyone wants to give us an idea about either being a blogger, if you want to be a blogger for us, let me know. If you want to write one of these, let me know. The more, the merrier. Next? One more? Anyone else have a short list? Joanna Swanson in the back? We go out and sponsor sports leagues. We are a sponsor, a national sponsor of the ARC. This is a short list of our national organizations. We cannot, obviously, do it without you. This is a very successful college savings process. We understand the voice of the customer, cop us feedback and improvement. I'm going to stop there.

[Applause]>> You want to isn't that right>> Is your program available for residents of any state? The Ohio one?>> Sara Weir: Yes, nationwide. >> Juliana Crist: Yes.>> is it similar to the Ohio one where you move money into the checking account

away from the earning?>> You can put money into a bank savings program, have bank savings account

sit there and earn 1% and you can systematically move some of it monthly into your checking account. You set it up way in advance. You can November out of there. That's an option.

>> In regards to the 10,000 on tax deduction, that's a state tax deduction?>> Yes.>> So as a California residence, I won't benefit from that. However, and maybe

the gentleman in the back can answer this. California works on having tax breaks for us. Will the tax breaks count for my account in a different state and will it only account for

yours as you're doing it or how does it work?>> There are some states in the college savings business, for example, that are

called tax parity, in if their resident contributes to any college savings plan, they can get a tax benefit. I don't know what the California plan is.

>> All the panel feel free to answer any of these questions.>> This is actually both for Ohio and Nebraska. You both talk about the fact that

your process is online. Please guarantee to me that you've actually tested that for accesses ability. Especially Deborah talked about a video. Does the process talk about how to go through the process with screen reader? How to possibly do it with dragon? Online scares me. It's my profession. I have to be a skeptic at best, and the second be question that you can answer very briefly, we both talk about it's FDIC insured savings account, but are the mutual funds also insured?

>> Deborah Goodkin: Let me just talk a little bit about online accessibility. Our website went up on June 30th, and it has gone through many, many readers. We had to change color on one of them at the last minute, on one of our check colors. It definitely is accessible. The how to enroll should be. Let me do this. Is this what the answer is? I don't have the answer offhand, but I will find out about dragon. If you give me your name, I will get back to you.

>> Do you have a response to that as well?>> Juliana Crist: We tested with readers and had a third-party company do it and

do a whole 508 and accessibility determination to make sure we weren't missing anything. So we did go through that.

>> Deborah Goodkin: We hired outside as well.>> There's a lot of questions. Sorry, you have to wait a minute.>> So I have a question about the cost of administering these accounts going

forward. I know we have a state here and a private bank. Like how is the cost of the situation done? [Inaudible] and mutual funds or is it like a standalone fee for the account themselves? How is that going to work?

>> Is that going to eat into the beneficiaries’ money is what I'm asking.>> Deborah Goodkin: No. All the fees online have an annual account fee of $45

and then there's an underlying fee. It's hard to design what the total activation fee is for people who are not familiar with investing, but while I will see is if you purchase something that's a price to purchase, and this is the same on all investment accounts, there's a price to purchase and that price already has the fees incorporated into it. So it determines how many shares you ever and then when you sell, you know, you earn or you don't earn, whatever happens at the end. There's another price. So all along you're not charged anything else, other than the $45.

>> [Inaudible]>> There are no purchase and redemption fees. It's incorporated into the price.

Right? I think that's the same thing.>> Ours is the same way. So just a monthly maintenance fee and asset based

fee.>> What is your monthly fee?>> The fee depends whether or not you're an Ohio resident or an out of state

resident. For Ohioans, it's $2.50. For out of state residents it's $5. And the asset based fees range from.19% to.6%. The way that works, in case you're not familiar, let's say your investment option is earning five%. Then your account gets credited with five% minus.19% or 4.81%. It doesn't actually come out of your balance. It just basically affects that part, your return.

>> Is or and is there an asset fee as well?>> Deborah Goodkin: It's the same thing. Mine is quarterly. 11 and a quarter.

Or 50 basis points to 56 basis points and the checking account there's no fee.>> But without the fee, the Vanguard [Inaudible]>>>> Deborah Goodkin: That's incorporated in the pricing.>> [Inaudible]>> Deborah Goodkin: Nope. There's no hidden fees. There's no other kinds of

fees. It's all that's really all it is. It's a monthly or quarterly account fee, and then there's an activate fee and nothing else.

>> [Inaudible] mandated by the state legislature? >> We have an agreement with the State of Nebraska. I cannot say what it is.

We will not go higher than what we have right now.>> We're similar. The goal is as we grow assets, we use those to move -- there is

a benefit of being in the state so I can't make profit. If we make money, it means we move down the road.

>> HUD is another agency that is interested in our assets and in our income, and I haven't heard or read anything about any regulations or procedures that HUD has implemented to people who live in public housing or Section eight housing so that their rent will not be affected adversely or just how it's to be handled?

>> Yes. HUD hasn't put out, unless I misunderstand, they haven't put out any specific regulation yet. We already stocked about SSI and Medicaid, the two big ones that people normally have, but the law actually protects any federal means tested program. So what's in your accounted cannot be considered by any needs based program on the federal level, and at least in Ohio for our state legislation, Ohio either.

>> If there's no regulation or procedures there, then it's the assets, will welcome on the assets be imputed and that's what we do. Whether you have it, how does that work?

>> So we've actually done two it things. There's been a couple states, Virginia being one of them that has actually gone a step further and actually protected those states, means tested programs from cable and current eligibility. So those state based programs or any benefits they're receiving from the state of Virginia cannot be counted toward ABLE account were that's under the law by governor McCall a few weeks ago. We totally understand what you're saying. We actually, last fall, had six congressional champions send a letter to treasury. For instance, here's an example. You buy a wheelchair out of your ABLE account. Does that wheelchair now become an asset and does that it asset count toward your able account? And treasury agrees, and also they agree with the congressional intent of the legislation. So any other sets that are purchased within an able accounted, you can't be double counted. That goes for

housing. That goes for wheelchairs. That goes for you buy a van, an accessible van that you may need that's also disability qualified expense. You can't do double charge for that. And we validated that with the single intent and treasury has agreed with us as well.

>> 90% of ABLE is absolutely in the right direction. I wish one of you could recap or amplify about the Medicaid lead so everyone here today has a clear understanding of what that really means.

>> Sure. Absolutely. Let me take that a little bit. Medicaid, here is how it works. If your loved one has an ABLE accounted and they pass away, Medicaid can make a claim against the account for the amount of money, not for the whole thing necessarily, but they can make a claim against the account for the amount of money that Medicaid pays for that person from the date the person opened the account. It's not even a lifetime pay back. It's just from the date the ABLE account owns. Medicaid can say, if you opened the account last year, you paid $10,000 in medical bills last year. I now ask for that $10,000 back. But the individual, their family, their estate can still use the account for several things before Medicaid even gets to take a bite of the apple. You can pay for funeral and burial expenses. You can pay for any outstanding medical or other bills that you have first. You can also deduct, and I don't know if California has a Medicaid buy in program. If you paid premiums as part of that program, you can deduct the amount of premiums you paid as well. So after all that happens, then you can also roll over the account to a sibling that has a disability. Also, if you know that your loved one has a terminal illness, so their passing might be preventable, which is not always the case, obviously, you can also just dump the money without a tax penalty on it. But that's a decision you have to make, what's better or worse for you.

>> Thank you.>> Deborah Goodkin: I just want to mention that the law suggests that states

can change the Medicaid claw back. I know in the State of Nebraska we're going to try to do that. Hopefully California can do that as well. I know Sara mentioned before to me she's working at a federal. State by state can decide they're going to take the Medicaid claw back for the able accounted. So might be something you might want to look at.

>> Pennsylvania is still kind of in limbo. Pennsylvania eliminated their Medicaid claw back in their state statue, so I'm going to get a little bit more of an explanation on how that's going to happen with treasury. My organization and a couple of organizations are actually going to be meeting with U.S. Treasury department in the next couple weeks to see if this is going to be a viable option. Congress is also paying attention to this. They want to know how it's actually going to be implemented. The challenge is because they eliminated the state residency required, we're kind of sneaky. For better or for worse. We inserted some legislative language that eliminated the ability for an individual to only open up an ABLE account in the state I live in. So for everybody in California, you would have had to wait for the California program to be up and running. We actually eliminated that, because this is about people with disabilities to have access to ABLE accounts, no matter which state you lived in. There's some states like Wyoming and I'm blank okay it. A couple others. Wisconsin actually reversed

their ABLE accounted. They're never going to have the money, the resources, the capacity to do what Ohio and Nebraska have obviously done a fabulous job of doing in such a short time. And so for people with disabilities, be we want everyone to have access to ABLE accounts no matter what state you live in. So these are legislative fixes we're slowly working on. We're still figuring out when the Medicaid claw back perspective. So say you live in California, but you open up an account in Ohio, which now, I think, half of your people have. You know, who is going to claw back that money? If you're getting benefits in California, how are you going to communicate with Ohio? And I know treasury is not very happy with us on this particular legislative change, but it's in the best interest of people with disabilities and we'll work it out. We always do.

>> So when we're on SSI, we're not allowed to be using your money for food, clothing. We're not allowed to accept money for food, clothing, or shelter. How does that it affects the ABLE account? Are you able to use the ABLE account for those kind of things?

>> Yes, you are.>> So on the legislation, there's incentive disability qualified expenses that are

enumerated in the federal scratch. It has to be related to the disability, but they specifically mention transportation, post-secondary education. I know from our Down Syndrome perspective, we have 250 post-secondary programs in the U.S. that serve individuals with developmental disabilities. This program costs just as much as the campus we're sitting on, if not more. So families can now level the playing field and afford to send their children that will welcome adults to these programs. Treasury has actually put guidance out validating that any expense that's related to disability qualifies. That includes smartphone, iPads, any assistive technology. You heard Jake's story about a service dog, a House transportation to get to and from work. It's very broad and we're very happy with how they validated our request in that area.

>> That doesn't really cover food and clothing then.>> It can.>> It can?>> The best thing is to talk to someone in SSI, but if you go on IFL website, you

have to go to the federal law. Both of our websites have a list of what is the qualified disability expense.

>> [Inaudible]>> I know. I know.>> And another question with the age thing. So if you qualify for being on

benefits at a certain age, but you actually could possibly prove on the doctors’ line that you were disabled before that age, can you do both? Can you give them a doctor's letter for the 26 age then and that you know also that you're on SSDI and SSI capacity?

>> It is not necessarily that you qualified for the benefits, because if you're ten years old, you're probably not going to qualify for benefits like you would when you're an adult. So what it really is, at the onset of the disability occurring before you're 26.

>> Years later, you're looking at the same doctors. Any doctors letter can qualify you?

>> The doctor knows what the rules are. There are certain disabilities laws they need to check in order to make that.

>> We need to take questions and then take a break for five minutes. These experts are staying until 1:30. There will be more opportunity for questions and answers with everybody, but we have a whole other panel that would like to talk. So one question of two.

>> So my question is different states open up ABLE accounts or NABLE accounts. How are we supposed to know which one is the best? I guess I have a secondary on that, which is for example, I like Ohio's program. I heard about it. I'm interested in the fact that Nebraska has a checking account. As a person who is also on benefits, I'm nervous that I'm going tonight to go educating the Social Security Administration on this new program. With all due respect, social security doesn't seem to be able to know their own programs they have to administer so many. So I'm trying to think of ways that I could best protect myself and my benefits, even though I might wind up educating different agencies regarding this program.

>> So the Social Security Administration covered rules that the local social security offices need to abide by in implementing ABLE. And it was sent everywhere. And I hear you that it's hard to believe that they are a local social security office and they're going to listen to you. I get it. I can't feel it, but I understand what you must be going through. They do know, they do know and they do know from the Social Security Administration and when we went throughout Nebraska, before we came, they all knew exactly what they said, so how you would know, the national disability institute has a resource center that lifts specific features about each itch live programs, and I just choose what works for you. As you know, our programs aren't that dissimilar. It's just something, it's going to be something that works for you. If a checking account works for you come to ours. If it's the idea you like a debit card, you go to Ohio. There will be some that are not like hours and there will be some that are like hours. You need to figure that out, I'm sorry to say.

>> At NESS, we're going to put out a side by side of all programs gone launched. We're not going to endorse one section over another. It's not a one size fits all program. You need to figure out what's best for you. Maybe what's best for your disability. And going to that organization that represents you, they should be doing the same thing. We're doing that for the Down Syndrome community and the broader intersectional disability community. Those organizations that represent specific disabilities should be doing that and putting that information out there for their constituents.

>> David Sieminski: Last question.>> This is the last question.>> Okay. So I have a special needs trust and my mom is the trustee and through

Wells Margo we can put the money in any mutual fund and it's grown nicely. What I'm wondering, I know you have these Vanguard mutual funds as options. But I just want to confirm, are we not able to put it into any mutual fund we want? Do we have to stick with these Vanguard ones? And then another question is do you recommend that I switch from the special needs trust to putting the money in an ABLE account and what would you suggest I tell, like, my mom in order to persuade her to go with it?

>> That's a great question. I get the special use question everywhere we go. I can't give I financial advice. Generally, we tell people these are complementary products. Not competing products. They do different things. One of the things you can do with an ABLE account, you can pay rent out it have this which you can't do with a special needs trust. The flip side, ABLE accounts have a contribution limit of $14,000. If you have $20,000 and you're going to need something to put it, you could put it above and beyond ABLE accounts, because you have excess funds. A lot of people put them in tandem. If you had a trust and somebody set that up for you, you want to talk to them about what's best for you. Mostly, you say they're complimentary. Second question about mutual fund, you can only pick what's offered in the plan. You couldn't just say, go buy Tesla stock or whatever. Right? California there. You should only put in what's offered.

>> Okay. Let's take a few minutes to break and go to the bathroom while we switch out our panel and we'll begin in five minutes.

[Break.] >> Okay. Folks. We're going to start back up in about a minute. People want to

grab a chair? We're going to start momentarily. If everyone would take your seats, please.

>> Okay, everybody. Just a couple of housekeeping pieces. When we were talking about this panel, what we're talking about today, somebody was like, but what if there aren't any questions? That's not going to be a problem. You know what we have this afternoon or now is when we were talking about this, we recognize and had we talked about it a little bit in the first half is that, you know, everyone is going to use ABLE accounts for different reasons and at different times in their life. So what we wanted to do this afternoon is really put together a panel that reflected that, because you know, the way I might want to use an ABLE account might be the way Kenneth wants to use it or Lori or Scott. So we wanted to get a couple different people involved. So let me, again, this is in the handouts that everybody got, but let me start with who we're going to be hearing from today. Alex Ghenis works for the World Institute on Disability. He's a policy specialist in our office. He was one of the voices behind equity, asset building, and financial planning book for people with disabilities. He's been very involved in ABLE legislation and getting the word out about ABLE and it's great to have Tim today. We also have Christina Mills from the California Foundation for Independent Living. She is their deputy director and oversees disabled and proud. Christina is a mom and her husband serves on my board, and Wes, Tina, Alex and I are going to talk about sort of what disabled looks like for us. And then we're going to have Steve Dale from The Dale Law Firm. You know, when I first started doing disability work about a decade ago, I met Steve. And somebody said Steve is special needs trust from the community's perspective. I've gotten to be involved in some of the trainings that Steve has done from my perspective and he's the finalist special needs trust attorney in the country. He spends a lot of time traveling through the country and I can't imagine doing this, working full time with lawyers. So we have a little bit better idea of what they're doing around special needs trust and working with the disability community. So Alex, Christine, and I are going to talk a little bit and then turn it over to Steve who has some

fantastic planning options between ABLE and special needs trust. A bunch of questions that came up just before break are set up perfectly for Steve. And then I promise you, none of us are going home until we've answered every single question from the people in the room. It is so important to get the community's perspective and when we were talking with CFPB about this event they wanted to know how people were going to use it, concerns, opportunities. So Alex, let's start with you. As working person, how does ABLE work for you? How do you plan to use it?

>> Alex Ghenis: Before I start, I want to say Tom has a JD, so we all work full time with a lawyer. I want to give a little bit of a profile with myself and my relationship to benefits and finances. I have a spinal cord injury and due to things that happened after my spinal cords injury, I have a special needs trust right now and my brother is the trustee for that special needs trust. And I have a suite of personal attendants that help me in and out of bed and through in home supportive services, which is tied to Medi-Cal, tens of thousands of dollars of staff pay for those personal attendants. And for me, I don't receive SSI. I don't necessarily use a lot of the healthcare related to Medicaid, but that is criteria but that is my baby in terms of maintaining medical needs and Medi-Cal eligibility. So for me I'm constantly watching assets and for working people with disabilities, and actually, a lot of people with disabilities don't realize that, when we're talking about a $2,000 asset limit, it's actually a $2,000 liquid asset limit, which means that you can have $2,000 floating around, plus the amount of your paycheck. And here we have that I have, you know, several thousand dollars’ worth of an asset limit. I'm renting an apartment and I'm subleasing it out to a live-in attendant/roommate, and I am the one who has to pay the full rent check and then get paid as a sublease from my personal attendant and I have to pay more for an apartment that is accessible with an elevator and roll in shower and wide enough doors and all this that I'm basically running right up against my asset limit to be able to pay rent and what I've had to do recently is balance credit card payments and my rent and my paycheck and I actually pay rent in cashier's checks and paying that 25-dollar fee in order to make sure that I don't go over the asset limit. On the flip side if I have a definite, you know, and I do some freelance writing on the side and some months are plus. Some months are kind of where they're at, that I many ask to go into a special needs trust, balance these things, and then pay a rent check out of the special needs trust, and instead of paying that myself, go and ask my brother, tap him on the shoulder and say, hey, can you go send this over and then balance things again to be out another several bucks. I think when we were hearing from some of the prior speakers and actually through the advocacy and through the development of the Achieving a Better Life Experience Act, a lot of it came from parents in the DD community. And a perspective of worrying about a child or the DD communities maintaining eligibility as assigned by Medicaid, and I think there are a lot of people in my position working with disabilities that are able to balance, you know, people with disabilities that are receiving tens of thousands of dollars in personal attendant care trying to balance their finances, and that is a huge work disincentive. And it's a huge work disincentive that can keep people from getting into the work portion and actually working to the point that they don't necessarily need to receive that or we might be able, to you know, have their own insurance through

their workforce and save Medicaid money, but still have to maintain that personal attendant care. And not everybody has the luxury of having either special needs trust or somebody who's worked in financing benefits for a while and knows thousand balance credit card debt and cashier's checks or the rest of it like myself. So I'm going to be using it in those respects to basically ship some of those finances away into my own control to be able to have a bit more of a buffer and to not be worrying that at the end of the month, looking and saying, I got this cashier's check before the last day of the month when my paycheck comes in and holy crap, I just realized that I'm one day away from this and the 30th is actually on a weekend, so I need to get it all done by Friday. It's incredible stress at the end of the month. So that's what I'm going to be doing is just to lower my stress level and be able to have more of a buffer, more of a control over my own finances, and also, not be in credit card debt and risking I was going to say insurance payments. Interest payments. Thank you. Risking interest payments and all of those other financial pitfalls. So that's what I'm going to be using it for. I'm really looking forward to having this opportunity now and provide this go kind of treatment to have that financial situation.

>> Thomas Foley: Great. Thanks, Alex. Christina, you're a mom. I know we've talked about the ABLE Act and you talked about it from a parents’ perspective. Can you talk about what ABLE looks like for and you your family?

>> Christina Mills: Absolutely. And thank you, Tom, for asking me to be part of the panel. Alex, I just reminded me how much anxiety being on benefits was and I don't envy for you what you have to juggle in an ongoing basis. Just to kind of set the stage, like Alex did, I grew up on SSI and my mother was a single mother who was also obtaining welfare at the time. And I was on SSI until I was I think 22 or 23. I'd been working full time and went through the transition of going from benefits to off of benefits through some programs like the social security, the Medi-Cal program, 1619B that allowed knee keep my Medi-Cal in place. Fortunately, my employer did provide insurance. So I sent, and still, more than half of my life, I can say that, on public benefits. I had to think for a moment. And you know, I'm a planner. I'm the first in my family to graduate from high school and I'm the first in my family to go on to college. So I like to plan. And I became an older parent, became a parent in my mid to late thirties. My husband is also a person with a disability. And we knew that we wanted to be parents, and the likelihood of us having a child with a disability, because we both had genetic disabilities, was going to be very high. And so when we became parents, we did have kids with disabilities. Our son and our daughter both have osteogenesis imperfecta, the same disability that I have, which means we break bones more easily than a person who doesn't. And on top of that it, our first born also has intellectual developmental disabilities. With that, she has a variety of other things going on, including epilepsy, cortical visual impairment, and is nonverbal. When we planned parents, and Eli and I, my husband, we're always thinking about the future, I started thinking about what was college going to look like for Olivia when she was of age to go to college? So I started investigating and really learning about what universities of excellence are, and somebody on the previous pan hell alluded to the intellectual disability college funds that exist around the country. And I have to share this real

quickly. I started thinking about those college option and his what might be the best for Olivia. I called North Carolina. I called Chapel Hill, because I really liked what they said online. I introduced myself and I said, yeah, I have a child that I'm really interested in enrolling in your program possibly. We come out a couple times a year to visit our family. Can we do a tour maybe? Check it out? She said, oh, my God. I'd love to have you guys out. We just so happened to find ourselves both mixed up in leadership forums, both in North Carolina and California, so we had something in common and she said, about what's the next time you're coming to North Carolina? And I said, in November. This is last year and she said, do you think you could take some time out during that trip to come on campus and do a tour and meet us? And I said, absolutely. And then she said, I forgot to ask you, how old is your daughter? And I said, oh, she just started preschool.

[Laughter]So that gives you an idea of how much my husband and I like to plan. And we

can't plan for everything. We certainly didn't plan like most parents to have children with multiple disabilities, although we knew some disabilities definitely had them. Needless to say we haven't gone on that tour yet. The program may substantially change in the next few years. You never know. But we had been thinking about and we had made ourselves the new ears resolution to open up a special needs trust for Olivia this year, because her needs are always going to probably be more substantial than our son's needs. She has multiple therapies that she does weekly, occupational therapies, physical therapy, speech therapy, vision mobility training. The gamut. And we also have alternative therapies as well that aren't covered by any of our health insurance. So our daughter is also on the Medicaid institutionally deeming waiver. And some of you are nodding your head, because you're familiar with it. My husband and I are middle-class. We work in nonprofit. We don't have a lot of money. Just because we're working doesn't mean we're living paycheck to paycheck, especially with people like disabilities. It still feels very much like we're on benefits now and it's a good thing, because people on disabilities with benefits, I have to say, I give it up to us, because we are really good at juggling and managing and organizing and budgeting, because we're used to living off of very little. We know what it's like. So it's not that big of a stretch for our family to make ends meet because we have children with a disability. But my husband and I said at the beginning of this year that our goal was to open up a special needs trust for Olivia, and then we started looking into what that really meant and we realized opening up an account for her meant we had to pay money to pay an attorney to start it and we don't have $2,500 or $3,500 laying around to start that up. I feel like we had children at the right time and waiting to be older parents was okay, because our daughter was born in 2012 and our son was born in 2014. So came right in time for these ABLE Act accounts. And while we plan on opening up an account for each of our children this year, we've kind of been waiting, and I was shaving with some of my friends in the audience that I want to open it now, but at the same time, I was kind of waiting to see what California would offer, but now after today's presentation, I'm feeling even more solid about opening up an account, regardless if it's in California or not, although I do stim have some questions. Some of the things that we expect to have that account

cover, not just our children's educational expenses that may not be covered by loans or grants, but both of them regardless of [Inaudible] and both of them regardless of whether they need modified vehicle. And modified vehicles are very expensive. So whether my son used to use a fully modified vehicle or drive with hand controllers or pedal extenders like mom and dad, they cost money. The durable medical equipment that is not covered by traditional healthcare companies or by Medi-Cal, with osteogenesis imperfecta, we have a chance of losing hearing as we get older. Good hearing aids aren't covered and they aren't covered more than one time, depending on what type of insurance you have. So being able to use that funding to purchase hearing aids that we know both of our kids will likely need, because mom needed them and dad is also hard of hearing. Home modifications. I wish I would have had this account open for myself so that the home modifications I just did on our own home, because that was not very cheap and we know that job coaching services that aren't covered by maybe the regional center or the hours that Olivia will be allocated through in home support services or respite won't be enough, so we'll have other services like Alex explains. Medication. Olivia takes a lot of medications on a daily basis. We write off, on average, over the last four years between 25,000 and $40,000 in out of rocket healthcare expenses just for Olivia. So this account will be extremely beneficial for us. Not to mention we've thought about now, and especially after hearing the earlier presentation, what retirement accounts might look like for my husband and I. You know, although he and I were born with our disabilities just like everybody else, aging is a process and you never know what's going to happen. And maybe having an ABLE account for ourselves is something we should also consider, because you never know what kind of benefits we may need in the future as well. So I'm really excited to be a parent at this point and to be able to enroll in these accounts and I've got some questions certainly and I posed them to some of the folks that we had a call with earlier this week, but I really think that this is a game change for people with disabilities, and I just truly wish that a parent that I'm around most of the time through my son and daughter, they're mostly disabled parents, and when I tell them, you can open an ABLE account for no money. I just have to have money in the account. It's very minimal. It's not like a special needs trust. People don't believe me. And I think that's going to be one of the hardest things for people to understand, so I really encourage parents to come online to the websites that they've been talking about so far. And last, but not least, I really agree with the participant who shared that, you know, she wants to do it, but she has some concerns about the Social Security Administration and what they're really going to know about the program. And I can say I truly understand, because when I went to social security and was going through that transition from benefits to no benefits, I was the person based on educating them about the 1619BMediCal program. Unfortunately, the [Inaudible] disabled program wasn't available at that time. Like Tom had mentioned, I run the youth organization program and every single time it never fails. They go to the social security office and the social security office has never heard that have program. I do think we need to do some education around that, and I would be remiss working for a disability rights organization if I did not add that since our California ABLE committee is coming together, wouldn't it be nice to see Somebody from the Social Security

Administration a part of that committee so that we can actually have some communication across the table on the topic? Thank you.

[Applause]>> David Sieminski: Christina touched on a great topic that I just sort of wanted

to highlight. She mentioned retirement, and I know earlier we were talking about, again, that had disability onset before age 26 is qualified for an ABLE account. So I love the fact that you're thinking about college. You plan. I think that's why we get along. But you know, my youngest daughter has one more year of college left and now I, myself, I'm looking at that retirement thing and you know, the next question for the panel is what parts of ABLE or the accounts that you heard about today, you know, resonate most with you or are you most interested in? And when I was thinking about it, you know, it's probably most important to max out a 401(k) or IRA or something like that with a tax advantage, but ABLE provides for folks with disabilities an additional retirement savings tool. The tax advantage savings that ABLE provides can be a powerful benefit to retirement planning for folks with disabilities. We know that qualified expenses from an ABLE program include housing, medical care, and you know, from our retirement standpoint, we know that 50, 70% of spending in retirement is around housing and medical care. So I think ABLE provides a fantastic option of people looking for additional retirement savings. In addition to that, and this is me has an individual, not as a representative, but I'm really excited that both the programs we heard about today use Vanguard. For those of who you don't know, Vanguard is a nonprofit money management mutual fund company. They have been known for their mutual funds. I think both of the programs we heard from today really provide nice investment options at really low rates. But Christina, let me go back to you. From an ABLE perspective, what parts of ABLE or something you heard today resonates in your situation?

>> Christina: As a working parent full time who has no time at all, the fact that I can start that account up within ten minutes or less is super appealing. Because it's online, I can do it any time of day. That's wonderful. That means after the kids go to bed and I barely have enough time before I go to sleep myself, I can enroll. And that's huge.

>> Some of the things that resonate -- >> David Sieminski: Alex, tell us about what resonates with you?>> Alex Ghenis: I want to take a plan back here as we're talking about

retirement. I think that emergency expense buffer is something that we don't talk about with this. That for people with disabilities, you know, I tell this store a lot. If anybody wants to join me on the 20th at the Berkley disability commission, there is a housing issue. There is no requirement that there be good accessibility in any unit in new construction. An attendant or bathroom remodel or ground level door opener to a building. And if you can't find accessible housing and you need bathroom remodel. Or you need an accessible van or any of these things, these are large expenses that might come out of nowhere. And actually, Paul knows this. I work on climate change and I think that having issues coming through that that we don't know when we're going to have more emergency expenses is really important to me as well. So that's really

valuable and important, I think, for me is having these emergency expenses, being able to have that large amount of money. And actually, the flexibility of the disability-related spellings, a lot of people don't know that, be and I think we need to do more education about the disability-related expenses, because somebody was asking about [Inaudible] closing, and that can be a disability-related expense for independence. And that's a thing where there's a huge flexibility of expenses that can be covered, and that's huge lay feeling me.

>> David Sieminski: Great. Alex, let's stick with you since you have the mic. Are there any questions or concerns or something you'd like to see from a policy perspective, implementation perspective, advocacy perspective going forward around ABLE?

>> Alex Ghenis: Yes. Sara was talking earlier about developing a centralized resource for the DD community. Kind we have a side by side comparison with the different ABLE account options around the country. And I think kind of from a policy perspective, having a beneficially sanctioned centralized resource that the burden shouldn't be on each of the disability communities and some people have cross-cutting disabilities or don't identify or aren't connected to a single kind of disability community advocacy group that might be available. I think that from the policy perspective, the development of one sort of resource along those lines could be really valuable. Another thing that I have questions about, and I'm interesting in seeing how it goes, is the ease of access of starting up an account in ten minutes versus these are still kind of complex financial instruments. And there's the mix between accessibility information, especially as we are reaching out to a community that is incredibly wary of saving any money because of history and don't believe that these accounts are even here in the first place. And if you throw too much fine print at people off the bat, then that's difficult for them to digest. They still need to know about that as we're welcoming them into using these financial instruments for their own independence. So that's something I'm interested in seeing how it develops, how we can create a balance between a centralized resource and also accessibility and educating the community.

>> David Sieminski: Great. Thanks. Christina, from an advocacy perspective, is there a big question about ABLE?

>> Christina Mills: Yes. So aside from making the Social Security Administration a part of the Achieving a Better Life Experience Act committee in states, especially in California, I'd also like to see that the benefits planning positions and the folks -- I won't even say what college. The folks that are providing benefits planning training to benefits planners, I would like to see them incorporate different investment opportunities with people with disabilities into the training so that it's not just focused on programs with disabilities.

>> David Sieminski: I want to thank Sara and DSS for the work they're doing on burning the able legislation up to age 46, because Olivia heard it mentioned earlier. Nothing about us without us. And we're behind. I think we've got a bunch of folks that can help with this message as well. Okay.

>> Alex Ghenis: Tom was something nothing about us without us. I'm also of the opinion that nearly everything exists on a spectrum and that a hard cutoff at 26 is

something, disability exists on its spectrum. If somebody has to slow up that disability, at what point do you begin to identify or medically be determined to have a disability versus non is something that kind of piques my interest, and I'm not sure how we move forward with that.

>> David Sieminski: Great. Thanks, Alex. I'm going to turn the mic over to Steve right now. We started chatting by e-mail last night, and I think Steve has some planning opportunities that will really address a bunch of the questions that came up toward the end of the last station. So Steve?

>> Steve Dale: Okay. Thanks. I'm going to do this as fast as I can. Just A little bit before we get started, a little bit about my background, I was actually a psychiatric nurse before I became an attorney. I came from three generations of psychiatric nurses. Actually, when I worked at Napa State Hospital, I witnessed some abuse. Can you imagine that here? And I became a discipline rights lawyer and actually worked with [Inaudible] which is housed here. And this is actually where I met Ed Roberts. And I want to just take a minute, because this is going to have a lot to do with the last thing I'm going to talk B a moment about Edward Roberts in collaboration with the legal community. DREDTH helped pass access laws. The ADA were based on us here. And he knew, as well as the other people that passed the access laws, that having a law by itself is going to get incredibly [Inaudible] unless there's enforcement. So DREDA and WIN reached out to the legal community to help enforce this. And the consult has been that there's still a lot of accessibility that still needs to happen, but without the attorneys, without that collaboration with the attorneys, we would only have a fraction of the places that are accessible as they are now. Counting on the Attorney General to protect us I think is a huge mistake. And another thing, and I think this is becoming kind of a bizarre thing. I started off as a Civil Rights attorney. Now I'm a tax attorney who does special needs work. I do a lot of work with attorneys, tax attorneys who have very complex situations. I hear exactly the same thing from everyone. Taxes are a walk in the park compared to benefits. I've got a master's in tax. I'm an adjunct professor at a number of law schools here. This stuff confuses the hell out of me here. It's just -- and if we had time, I would love to go through the history of how we do the there. But President Kennedy promised 60 years ago to shut down institutions and move people into the community. The product didn't include let's put them on welfare programs. And the real answer is we should keep that promise and to hell with the welfare. We've seen billions of dollars in California by shutting down institutions that took care of my family here, and we shouldn't have to have folks with disabilities have their basic needs promised by welfare programs, and that's a common theme. Let me talk about a couple of things. I want to talk a little bit about attorney collaboration here. We were talking about what excites me about the able act. It's another tool. And with that, one of the things that NABLE act does, one of the stupidest thing on SSI, which you have special needs trust, if somebody helps you with food and shelter, your benefits will be reduced by $260.43. I get this from dollars all the time helping their disabled loved ones. Shouldn't I get a tax break? I didn't make up these rules. I can explain to you what they are. They're completely stupid here. What is the biggest issue they deal with? Food and shelter issues. Now, I'm a member of the Special Needs Alliance. Mary Alberta and

I talk a lot with Eric Brown and Ed Skidmore who write the rules. There actually are real people who write the rules for social security. And we made the argument that the assets in an ABLE account actually go on to the disabled individual. They're really paying for their own food and shelter and there shouldn't be a reduction in benefits. Lo and behold, not only did he agree with us. He made an announcement that Juliana was talking about, a big benefits conference coming up, and I finally wrote it down. Here's the thing that happens, and I'm going to give you an example here. Let's say Belinda, who has been disenabled from birth, as $889 of SSI, the current raised in California. For those of you in Nebraska and Ohio, we have a supplement. Trying to live on $889.48 I'm sure for you is a walk in the bark, but for my guys it's a little bit different here. A major expenditure is housing and utility payments. She'd like to move to a nicer apartment, but it's going to cost a thousand dollars a month. Difficult on $880. So she's going need some assistance. [Inaudible] it would be counted and would reduce her benefits completely. If they were to pay it more directly, whether from a special needs trust or out of their own pocket, they would take a $164.33 reduction. Instead, they put a thousand dollars a month into the ABLE account and the ABLE account, in turn, pays for the food and shelter. There's no reduction. You see a benefit there? From the gentleman that has a special needs trust, it is in estate planning or third-party trust, what you could actually do is take money from the trust, put it in the ABLE account. Turnaround and have the ABLE account pay for the housing without a reduction. That works out to about $3,000 a year. I know for the folksy served, this is a ton of money. I own a boat. I could blow through that in a weekend. Brian, you know what I'm talking about here. But that is just a tremendous tool. By the way, a lot of that came from collaboration of attorneys who do this work and are what I call the stakeholder attorneys. I want to mention one other thing before I get to the thing I really want to talk about, the Medicaid lead and it would be fantastic here to have lead go away. One thing that has driven me crazy, and if anybody wants to test this, Google ten things you should know about the Achieving a Better Life Experience Act, and I'll tell what you didn't make the list. And you'll see this on a number of websites. Okay? There is a link. Okay? And so here's what I wanted to mention. One unique feature about the ABLE Act there's a Lean on the death of the beneficiary. The in fact that there's a Lean doesn't lessen the usage of this. Like everything else, did I mention the benefits are complex here? You know, the important thing we need to do as policy make minors and advocates is make sure we're giving adequate information on all aspects of any tool we use. It doesn't matter what it is. So what it says is that in the event a qualified beneficiary dies with assets in the trust, the assets in the ABLE account are first distributed to any accounts providing sis fans designated beneficiaries after the creation of the ABLE account. Now, what are, and for those of us that are policy-makers, what are medical payments? And what's happened with Medi-Cal is they've taken it is position, and I'm happy to take the brief for whoever wants this, because we fought this and got killed with our law firm here and we will probably appeal, is what they're saying is any payment from Medi-Cal including transportation services, programs paid by Medi-Cal, prevocational services, Medicare Part B payments. Basically, every dollar under the state plan under current law, they are saying, those are medical payments.

So once again, it doesn't lessen the value of this. I just have to understand how it works. And I've been doing the series of videos on different aspects. One is on dealing with the Medicaid leave. And there are ways you can do this. I'm kind of an engineer when it comes to putting plans together, so I'm always kind of looking at whatever tool I can use here. Be it a special needs trust, be it a 529 plan, be it an ABLE account, whatever, how can I put that together and get the best results for folks? One last thing real quick, and this is what I really want to get to, which is this. Here's what really excites me about the ABLE account, and here is our opportunity not only in California, but across the nation. The ABLE account is a new tool with many uses. There's going to be a need for a lot of education on this. The special needs trust is going to remain a tool, but now we have another tool that sometimes will replace it. Sometimes we'll work with it. Age the lot of my clients are going to have most of this. Organizations like the arc in California, NOMI, NDSS, NDSC, whatever acronym you want to use to really start collaborating here together, and you work together to educate our communities. The other part of that is, for instance, in California here, in order to fully enact this, you would not be able to use an ABLE Act in California for a person who lacks capacity here with a personal injury settlement. So we would need to change probate code 3611. You would not be able to use an ABLE account for a conserve tea with money in a conservatorship. We need to change probate code 25A. You would not be able to use it for child support in California. We need to change the family code. The thing about this is, and I hope the result we get out of this is that we have the special needs community that is in this sphere here. And the disability community in another sphere. What if we put it together for accessibility? Because I'm kind of getting cut for time, that's as far as I can go.

[Applause] >> Steve Dale: There was a cost about special needs truck. That lady back there,

Mary Imel, is the Director of Golden State Trust. There are other options. So the thing about it is the key is having different options, and there are many, many options. We have a new option, a new tool, and what we need to do is educate ourselves. Now I really will stop.

>> As Tom mentioned, we're going to it try to get everybody's questions. Bear with me as we go around the room.

>> So Stephen, you mentioned, and I just want to understand if I heard this right, did you say you can't use an ABLE account if your child is conserved? You've got a child with disabilities.

>> Thomas Foley: If you have a conservatorship -->> There is no language that would allow the transfer of money into an ABLE

account. Let's look at this type of situation. I think there's going to be a lot of situations where having an ABLE account is going to have a lot of advantages here, but in order to enact that, [Inaudible] loss of different states. Or laws are pretty anal. If it doesn't say you can do it, you can't do it. So it would be a very simple thing to fix. Somebody just had to look at it. So for instance, I have a group of attorneys who are ready to tap into this here and I think if we all work together, we could go through what these do. I'm sure the ARK of California, which I'm onboard. ARC, would be more than happy to work

with that. Every day I find new uses for this thing. Juliana has been wonderful. In fact, we've been trading e-mails back and forth on this pretty complicate situation for a mere $14,000. But it's a lot of money to that person, and we were able to tap into some really smart attorneys, much smarter than me, and we came up with a solution. And by the way, we went all the way up to Ken Brown and we got his blessing. Ken Brown is the God at social security. So don't piss off John Brown.

>> This is Brian McDonald. I just have a comment more than a question. With the incredible powerhouse, cross-section of people here from across the country, in one of our setup speeches, the dynamic statement was made are you, the consumer, the person with the disability, are you able to ask, plan, and act? ABLE is a game changer to drive self-advocacy and self-information and self-empowerment towards benefit systems that have largely oppressed our population for as long as I've been in this business? Now we're adding treasury to it is MAIS of Medicaid rules and SSI rules. Good luck with that. The self-advocacy piece of being able to bring this new set of tools, the most common thing in my experience in this field is people do not know what they do not know. And what I heard most about today was this ripple of this can't be true. And social security won't believe it. So the self-advocacy piece that is going to have to put this in play times millions of people is probably the most important thing we need to work on. TV101 is in eight states. We put plain language information into the hands of the consumer.

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