THE Cambridge Connection - Episode 19

Thank you. Don’t feel a day over 30. You know, this show is about empowering people and providing wisdom. And as we get to those numbers, again, been there, done that, we’re wiser, aren’t we, Tina Marie? Is that what the word is?

Okay. I’ll accept that, Gordon. I will definitely accept that. Thank you very much. How are your holidays?

I’m terrific. And speaking of wisdom, so let me give you an update on where I’m at. Sure. So on our intention show, I had mentioned that I had done a fast that was a simulated fast for the first week. Okay.

And I’m in the middle of a liver cleanse. How’s it going? Everything is going great. Yeah. Feeling good?

Yeah. So it’s basically cutting out dairy, bread, the heavy meats. You can do chicken and fish the first week, no meat at all the second week, and no beans, just mostly vegetables. And then the third week is about the same. That’s good for you.

Yeah. So I set it up for the first week. I felt great. Now I feel great as well. And everything’s going well.

I’m on track. Good. The dry January is a success. Yes. Well, you’re always up for a challenge, and so am I.

I actually participate in dry January, obviously after I celebrated my 50th birthday. You know, I feel like the millions of cells in my body are thanking me. Right. All right. So coming up, we have the program manager of the Office of Economic Empowerment from the state of Massachusetts.

Upcoming guest and sponsor message

And we’re going to talk about some programs that we have to help people that could use information with whatever financial situation that they have, which is in line with what you do as a counselor. That’s what we’re here for. And credit counseling. So we’re looking forward to having Shaitia Spruill, and this is Gordon Alva with The Cambridge Connection. We’ll be right back.

Hi, I’m Christopher Viale, president of Cambridge Credit Counseling. As 2022 begins, the Cambridge Connection is ready to continue to tackle the financial issues and challenges that matter most to you and your family. This month, they’re going to feature critical conversations around student loans, paying off holiday spending, budgeting for the new year, and other financial wellness tips to help you meet any financial challenge. And as always, they’ll include experts in those fields and a few real life scenarios and success stories to show you how following reasonable steps can help you regain control of your family’s finances and get you back on track toward your goals. 5 FM, or 1400 AM.

Or find all The Cambridge Connection episodes anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. And in the meantime, if you’d like to speak to one of the counselors at Cambridge Credit Counseling, there’s no obligation to call. 1-800-CAMBRIDGE. Welcome back, everyone. This is Gordon Alva with The Cambridge Connection here, gladly and thankfully with my co-pilot who I’ve been missing terribly.

Listener question on managing debt

So we’re here with the real people, real problems, Tina. And what do you got for us today? Okay, right now I’d like to talk about Alexis from North Carolina. She writes in, and this is exactly what she says. I am 28 years old and in debt up to my eyeballs.

I was never really taught how to manage finances growing up. Sure, I was given an allowance and learned to save for the newest fashion trends, sneakers, shoes. However, I never actually knew what a bill was. I heard my parents talking about them from time to time, but in all reality, didn’t realize some date I would actually have to pay one myself. I have about $7,000 in credit cards and I’m still living with my parents, but obviously would like to move out on my own and start my own life.

Help, I just don’t know where to begin. This hits home. It sure does. Well, for Alexis, I don’t know if you remember the cartoon on Saturday morning, I’m just a bill on Capitol Hill. Oh, yeah.

It’s not that bill and nobody knows what those bills are either. The word bill, I guess, is just something that people don’t really know very well and rightfully so. Let’s break this down a little bit for the youth, people that are coming out of high school. Ironically, she’s 28. Right.

Fast forward. It starts at that time, right though? You’ve done credit for life with junior achievement. You’ve seen kids coming around trying to learn. Coming out of high school, you don’t have any idea and a lot of kids are thrusted into college.

Then you have regular life where all of a sudden you get offers to be able to buy things that you don’t necessarily have money for. So that’s where it starts. Right. Yeah. , that they’re moving back in with their family to be able to try to pay some living expenses and help the family out, but also pay down debt to try to be able to get out into the real world and survive.

That’s very common. My 28-year-old daughter just moved back with me last year, so this is why I say it really hits home. I thought I did okay teaching her a little bit about bills and payments and so forth, but apparently there’s room for improvement. Alexis, are you on a budget? Do you know what money is coming in and do you know what money is going out?

And if you know that, there are a couple of things in this situation that are important. Number one, if you’re going to pay that $7,000 in debt down, you have to calculate how many months you want to do that and then figure out how much money it’s going to take you to pay it off in the timeframe that you’re looking for, whether that be three years, four years, five years. And there’s a lot of debt calculators online that consumers can resort to to help them initiate something like that as well. Yeah, and secondarily that we talk about all the time that many people don’t do, and I would say more than most, not just many. The recommendation when you’re first starting out is 10% of your gross should be going into savings never to be touched, right?

So if you make $1,000 a week, 100 of that should be going into savings. So if you cannot do that, is it 5%, is it 3%? Something to start savings so that you can build up a fund for rainy days, things that come along, tires for your car. All kinds of things that will come up when you’re paying regular expenses. So the advice here is put a budget in place, calculate what you want to do as far as paying off the credit card debt that you have, and start developing savings.

And then when you move out again, don’t stop saving. That savings has to be continued and even accelerated or increased, if possible, because savings is what helps people not feel like they’re living paycheck to paycheck. They have something to fall back on. So when you do move back home, it’s about having a strategy. I would say budgeting, get the credit card debt paid down by accelerating payments, and then developing savings.

So what you’re saying is pretty much make savings actually a habit. Has to be. Has to be like it’s a bill. Fabulous. Absolutely.

Oh, I said that nasty word again. Bill. Pretend your savings is a bill, that you’re paying creditor yourself, right? You’re the creditor, right? Great way to look at it.

Introducing the economic empowerment guest

Absolutely. Yeah. All right, everyone. Here we are again with The Cambridge Connection. This is Gordon Oliver, your host.

I’m your co-pilot, Tina Marie. And we have our special guest, Shytia Spruill, from the Office of Economic Empowerment. Shytia, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for having me. Hi, Shytia. Nice to have you. Yeah, we’re truly glad to have you, and I’m so glad that you’re going to get into the great work that you do. But before we get started, can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are right now?

Sure. I’m a program manager. I’ve been with the Office of Economic Empowerment for going on just about five years. I was originally born and raised in Springfield, so shout out to Springfield. But I came to the office originally as an organizer, field organizer, for a pilot program we had called SOARMA, where I was organizing the Springfield and Pittsfield communities around college savings and getting access to 529 accounts in those specific cities.

And through that work and a lot of my volunteer work, I learned that, you know, economic empowerment is a conversation, I think, for everybody. Though it’s a hard conversation, I think it’s beneficial for everybody. And I started to really understand that there are some gaps in access, and I made it my sole purpose and mission within the office to make sure that we’re spreading awareness of not only all of the opportunities and learning that we have available from OEE, which is what we lovingly call Office of Economic Empowerment, but even, you know, locally, statewide, and just being a resource to share that type of information. So I’m really excited to be talking about, you know, the work that we do on the Cambridge Connection show. So thank you for the invitation.

Oh, great. Oh, yeah. Well, glad to have you. That’s awesome. As far as the Office of Economic Empowerment, can you give us a little bit of a summary of what the office does?

Sure. So we are an office that’s comfortably nestled under the Office of the State Treasurer and Receiver General. Our major task is supporting, advocating, and facilitating policies that empower all Massachusetts residents, and that’s through financial education, that’s through events, that’s through some of our pillar programs that we’ll probably talk a little bit more about just in a few minutes, but primarily we serve women, families, high school students, veterans, and seniors. Those are our core groups, and we focus on closing the race and gender wage gap, racial inequity, increasing access to financial education, and improving college affordability as well as investing in STEM careers and education. So those are the things that our office really focuses on, but like I said, we try to center ourselves as a place where folks can come for more information, and we like to direct people back to those local organizations and spaces where they can get things in their own neighborhood.

All right. If you’re just joining us, this is Gordon Oliver with The Cambridge Connection. I’m here with Tina Marie and our special guest, Shytia Spruill from the Office of Economic Empowerment. So Shytia, can you break down each program that you have for us? Sure.

Overview of savings and education programs

We have quite a bit going on, especially now in this virtual time that we’re in, but the first that I’ll talk about, which is really statewide, it’s our flagship, it’s our baby, it’s called the Baby Step Savings Plan, and that is truly the first statewide Massachusetts seeded college savings account program where we provide every Massachusetts baby born or adopted on or after January 1st, 2020, with $50 seed funding into a U Fund 529 college investing plan, and that’s to really jumpstart the child’s saving towards post-secondary education. We love these accounts because they are flexible and it’s not only just the traditional four-year university that you’re saving towards, but it could also be vocational training, it could be supplies for going to school, and it could even be transferred between family members. So we did a pilot, I mentioned before, I came on board with the Sora Mae pilot where we were doing similar with the 529 accounts, just a different age group, and we found that families were actually starting these types of accounts already and they were starting them at birth. We went ahead and redesigned our whole program around that, we partnered with the Department of Public Health and MEPHA, which is the Massachusetts Education Finance Authority, to put these programs together and get our question on the birth certificate form, so when families, you know, they give birth, before they leave they have to fill out this form, we’re on page two, and we just ask, you know, do you want more information about this? Families can check the box yes or no, but we really encourage them to check the box yes and leave their email information and we get that from DPH and follow up with the families, walk through the process on how to open these accounts.

Believe it or not, it’s been really successful, even through the pandemic and the challenges we’ve seen in the last almost two years. gov slash baby steps, so if folks have questions or more information, you can find everything you need there. Now, everybody and anybody that gives birth or adopts a baby after January of 2020 is eligible for this? Anybody can check that box? Yes.

Nice. Yes. So with the adoptions, the way we’re able to do that, and that’s even, you know, older children, with the adoptions, you get a new birth certificate, so that’s how we’re able to make that happen. It is a little bit of a different process, but those families are definitely eligible. Most families actually have a year from the date of adoption or birth to open these accounts, so sometimes parents, I’m sure, that are listening understand that birth is kind of a crazy time.

So, you know, we follow up with families three, six, eight, ten months down the road and say, hey, you know, you’re still eligible for this program, and we’re here to help you if you want to open it. By helping a family get started in an investment like that, there’s so many families that just put it off. It’s amazing how this would catapult a family to start recognizing by having an account that they need to invest in that as part of the future. Yes. Yes.

And we want to also wrap those kind of financial education pieces around this program. A family that signs up will also get access to the information that we have at OEE and meet us as emails, so there’s really just, it’s really just a touch point to then kind of put them in our pipeline of financial education and empower them. That’s fantastic. What’s the next program? The next program is our Money Talk Tuesday platform.

It is a webinar series we kick-started back in March of 2020 as the world shut down. We ramped up our financial education online programs, and the very first session was actually going over the stimulus package with a couple of financial... And they walk through, you know, what does this mean for families, what does this mean for individuals, what are some things that you need to know as we move through this really financial crisis, and be better prepared to make those financial decisions down the road. So we actually just hosted a session earlier this month on the changes with the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, and that was a huge success, because a lot of people have these questions, and it’s not always clear if there’s places and spaces that you can go to get these questions answered. So we bring on experts who do know those answers.

That’s been a big topic on our show, by the way, a huge topic on our show. I bet. I bet. Yeah. Yeah.

Definitely, there’s a thirst for it. So the Money Talks Tuesday program, we host them usually on Tuesdays at noon, though it’s sometimes a tough time, we do record them. They all end up on our YouTube channel. We have various topics from, like I said, the student loan piece, to avoiding foreclosure, to how joining a union can, in fact, help your financial understanding and decision making. We had partnered with MassHealth to walk through their health connector, and as the enrollment was open, just tons of different topics with those experts from those agencies and organizations that are focusing on this.

And we also highlight them in their offices in the different cities across the state. So we try to diversify geographically, but also the topics that we’re covering. And we also take suggestions. So at registration, folks that register for these programs can suggest like, hey, I’m looking for more information on this, and we try our best to incorporate that into future planning. And it’s usually updated weekly.

So when we do have these sessions, they go up immediately onto our YouTube channel, and they stay there for folks to access whenever they have the time. There’s so many people that don’t even know that these types of programs exist, which is why we’re grateful to have you to bring light to it. And are there any other programs that you’d like to discuss? Yeah. org.

That’s a digital platform that provides access to different bite-sized pieces, I’ll call it, tools, articles, there’s videos, there’s links to organizations that are doing great work, but it’s specific to Massachusetts residents, and there is an option to do specific playlists. So if you have goals that you’re looking, so say you want to buy a house, you can create your own financial education playlist where you can click through predetermined curriculum, and it really has your own taste. It’s accessible anywhere, but it’s focused on Massachusetts residents. And one more time, could you give us that website? org.

Details on upcoming seminars

All right, so we’ve unpacked a lot here, but let’s talk about your new webinar series that’s getting launched. Yes, yes. So it’s been a long time coming, but we are finally getting ready to launch our Worth and Wealth Seminars. m. org website, and this will be a program that will have three cohorts, so if you can’t catch the first cohort, second cohort kicks off in March.

The major topics that we’re looking to cover, financial foundation is what I’m calling it. You’ll be going through a money map coaching curriculum with our Oriana Falkowski, who is moderating those sessions, kind of talking about the psychology around your money-making decisions and then setting some goals. And then we’ll move right on into, well, there’s two options for the third session where you can either learn with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, learn your rights around employment, and the other option is we’re partnering with the Financial Planning Association of New England to offer Investing 101. So if folks want to learn about investing, if they’ve never heard, like never started that conversation, this is a good place to start. And then finally, all of our sessions will offer salary negotiation in partnership with AAUW.

We always try to promote salary negotiation. We’ve been partnered with AAUW for several years now, and we have been incorporating them into this program because we know that women and people of color have seen major challenges in the pay equity space, and we’re trying to close those gaps by educating people, making sure they know their worth, and they’re researching before they go into their salary negotiation conversations or promotion conversations, so really excited about those. And like I said, this first cohort starts January 26th, runs through February 23rd, and registration is rolling. I will also mention that we’re also doing financial checkups as a part of the program, so anybody who registers is eligible to sign up for financial checkups if they’ve been wanting to think about going back to school and continuing their education. You can check in with a financial coach who can give you some tips on how to start putting yourself in the right path to achieving that goal financially, and it’s free.

It’s free, and anyone who is in the state of Massachusetts is eligible to sign up. So it isn’t just women only, or is it? It’s targeting women. We designed it specifically for women, but of course, anybody who’s interested can always join any one of our programs that come from the office, so definitely anyone who’s interested, I’d say check it out. So Shaitia, you had mentioned the AAUW.

Can you just explain for our listeners what the AAUW is? Of course. So the AAUW is the American Association of University Women. Their main kind of issue is focusing on pay equity, gender equity, and advancing women in leadership. They have several...

It’s a national organization, and we have a chapter in Massachusetts that we work really closely with, and really, our introduction to them was through the salary negotiation piece, where they have really particular curriculum that teaches women how to properly prepare for those salary negotiation conversations. It’s another one of those types of topics that’s super interesting, and a lot of people are asking those questions, especially now, you know, in this time where it’s been dubbed the she-session, and so many women have left the workforce and are trying to reenter the workforce. It’s definitely something that we wanted to make sure we offered to our participants as another kind of tool to put in their financial toolbox. So much great information, and we’re going to take a little quick break here. Are you able to come back with us to share one of the stories that you have about someone that you’ve helped?

Success story from program participant

Yes. Yes, of course. Terrific. All right. This is Gordon Oliver with The Cambridge Connection.

We’ll be right back. The Office of Economic Empowerment is a department of the Massachusetts State Treasury tasked with helping people save for their children’s future, providing free financial education, and closing the gender and race wage gap. ly slash Office of Economic Empowerment. org. All right.

Welcome back, everyone. This is Gordon Oliver with The Cambridge Connection, here with my co-pilot, Tina Marie, and also here with Shaitia Spruill, who is the program manager for the Office of Economic Empowerment. Shaitia, for people that are listening to the show, I know you had some information you wanted to share about someone that you’ve helped. So can you please tell us a little bit about the situation that came to you, and then how you were able to help? I talked a little bit about our Worth and Wealth seminars, and that is really a culmination and kind of growth of our Women’s Economic Empowerment series.

We’ve always done this series in some way, shape, or form. We used to do them in person. All of these sessions have been coupled with, like, financial education opportunities, but also salary negotiation. And it’s in those sessions that we’ve always come across women who are blown away by some of the information that they’re learning, and they don’t even realize that they have some legal backing and protection. Because we had in Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Equal Pay Law was signed in 2016 and then enacted in 2018, and a lot of folks are still catching up to that.

So, to hear some of these women come to us and say, I didn’t even know that this law changed. I didn’t know that I could talk about my salary with my colleagues and not get reprimanded or get in trouble for it. And so, we had a woman come to us and just say, thank you for sharing this information and educating her. And she was so inspired, I guess, by the conversation and learning session that she was like, how can I become involved? And at the time we were training salary facilitators, she wanted to become a facilitator, and she became a facilitator, which then kind of inspired her to take on more leadership opportunities and roles.

And fast forward to this year, when we were designing the Worth and Wealth Seminars, we got an email from somebody who was interested in kind of helping us design or helping us in any way she could. And she told us that story again, like, I was part of the We Series back in 2017, and I was so inspired that I then took on the journey of becoming an entrepreneur and starting my own kind of financial coaching business. So, it was where it started with us, she continued kind of digging and digging and doing her own learning and research, and she became an entrepreneur. And now she’s started this great women-owned financial coaching business. So, that was really awesome to hear, because it’s not, we see the work, we see the data, and we’re doing this stuff every day, but to hear one of those types of stories where it’s like, you guys inspired us, and don’t stop the work, just keep doing it, because there’s a lot of people paying attention and benefiting from this work.

Is that a case where the student became the teacher? Yes, exactly. Very good, nice. All right, so we’re running out of time, and obviously we would love to have you back on this show to talk more about this great work and this great information that you’re providing. But before we let you go, can you please share for our listeners all the websites that you have shared throughout the program, just to sum it up, so that people know how to contact you or to get enrolled in some of these great programs?

Contact information and show closing

gov and you put in the search bar, Office of Economic Empowerment, that’s one way to find really all of our programs. gov slash baby steps, and it’s spelled just like it sounds. The Money Talk Tuesday program, I would direct you to the YouTube channel. So the YouTube channel is the Office of Economic Empowerment, MA, and if you search it that way, we pop up. We’re usually the first one.

It’s a green and white logo. org is its own link. Again, it’s spelled just how it sounds. And then finally, the Wealth and Wealth Seminars has its own website, and that’s also where you can find more information about registration. The folks listening are interested in partnering.

We’re still looking for partners. org. Well, we cannot thank you enough for sharing this amazing information, and we thank you and your team and everyone over there at the Office of Economic Empowerment for all the great work you do to try to help people. So thank you so much for all you do, and again, we’d love to have you back on the show. Will you join us again?

Yes, yes, of course. Thank you. All right, Chaitiya. Thank you so much. Have a great day.

Thank you, Chaitiya. Well, that wraps up another show. 28 Turbo Minutes of financial information offering empowerment to you, our listeners. We got some great experts on the horizon, and I’d like to give a huge thank you to Leah and Lisa, our producers, that have done nothing but help this show to be successful. m.

com and look under podcasts to find the show. Once again, we want you to be part of the conversation. org or feel free to call 1-800-CAMBRIDGE.