THE Cambridge Connection - Episode 9

Call us today. 1-800-CAMBRIDGE Welcome back, everyone, to The Cambridge Connection. I’m filling in for Gordon this week, and I’m here with Tina Marie. And we’re actually going to jump right into the Real People, Real Problems segment, where every week I ask your questions on the air. This week is Ladies’ Week, and we’ve got Tina Marie, who’s been counseling consumers for over 20 years, to answer you.

Hey, Tina. Hi. org to ask us a little relationship advice. She says, I’ve been with my partner for six months now. We’re both in our late 20s and have been in serious relationships before.

They asked me to move in with them, and I’m excited about the idea. We get along really well, and I see this relationship lasting a long time. This might be an atypical question for you, but what do you recommend for sharing finances? Should we join bank accounts to make it easier to pay bills? We both make the same amount of money, more or less, and we’ve agreed to pay bills 50-50.

That’s a good question, Anna. It doesn’t hurt to reach out for advice there. You too could maybe consider creating a new joint account that you use only to pay bills. You could put half of what’s owed in there. They could put their half, and this way you can each keep track of the deposits and payments, and you still have autonomy of your own personal bank accounts.

What do you think, Tina Marie? Actually, I agree with that wholeheartedly. You really want to take into consideration fixed expenses as well as variable expenses. Non-fixed and variable expenses can certainly change from month to month, and then you have your periodic expenses that you obviously want to take into consideration. So my advice is do that.

Sit down, create a budget. There are a lot of couples out there that don’t do that prior to getting involved in such a relationship. Sure. And you’ve got to understand, I mean, if it’s a two-way street, everybody wants to participate. Everybody needs to put their own contributions in and the same amount.

Unfortunately, the second leading cause of divorce behind infidelity is financial reasons, and the divorce rate in 2020 is 40% to 50%. At least two studies show that this could lead to divorce. Data released by the financial firm TD Ameritrade found that 41% of divorced Gen Xers and 29% of boomers say that their relationship ended because of disagreements about money. That’s interesting. I wonder how many of those statistics are impacted by people that have been divorced multiple times.

I wouldn’t even, you know, you would think that people would learn, but a lot of people jump into relationships, and they just don’t communicate enough as far as what they’re going to expect from each other. Sure. And it sounds like Anna’s off to a really good start since her and her partner are already talking about money before they even move in with each other. Very important that they’re doing that. Yeah.

So it sounds like, Anna, it sounds like you’re on the right track. So I hope that helped. And again, don’t be afraid to reach out to us, even if it’s just for regular advice. Who knows? All right.

Women and financial literacy statistics

So you made some really good points, Tina Marie, and I love that you brought so much data to the table. org on women and financial literacy, you know, since it’s Ladies Week. I’d like to throw in some of these stats and facts at you to see what you’ve noticed and experienced in the trenches during your one-on-one counseling session. Just to remind our listeners, Tina Marie has been working with consumers for over 20 years. So she’s definitely got some good insight on women and financial literacy.

So, Tina Marie, I was looking at this article, and I’ve been doing this a long time, and I was really blown away by some of these statistics because it looks like women are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to personal finance. One of the examples they give is women make up the majority of caregivers, and they’re three times more likely than men to quit their jobs to care for a family member. So have you seen any evidence of this working through the pandemic? Absolutely. When kids can’t go to school because they’ve been exposed, it’s usually the mother that has to stay home and take care of that child.

There are a lot of single mothers out there as well that are working from home, and once something happens with a young child, they may have to take a break and take care of that child who can’t go to school. So they’re at a disadvantage because it’s their only income that’s paying the bills this month. Sure, and that’s if they’re getting child support payments on time, which this article also says that three out of four divorced mothers don’t receive full payment of child support. So money that they thought was in their budget just isn’t there anymore. Yeah, and one has to not depend on child support as income.

It’s something that, yes, it could be court ordered, and yes, it’s an obligation for the absent parent, but it doesn’t always mean that this person is going to receive that child support each month. If the absent parent or if the male loses his job, it could go months without a child support payment. So in that case, now the full-time parent is falling behind because they lost the child support income. So it’s really tough to just depend on child support as income. My recommendation is simply to try to make sure that you can do it on your own.

Child support and budgeting challenges

And when you do receive the child support, it might be a little added bonus. All right, Tina-Marie. So let’s talk about how that relates to your counseling experience. So when you’re creating a budget with someone that’s calling in to determine if they’re a good fit for any sort of a debt management plan, or if you can help them with their credit cards, how does child support factor into that process? As long as it’s a dependable source, I will factor it in.

But I come across a lot of women who do not receive the required amount each month, and therefore I won’t factor it in because I’d like them to be able to do this, pay their bills, without actually depending on the child support, especially if it’s not consistent. Sure. So what happens if they’re on the program, they had dependable child support, and now all of a sudden that spouse that was paying child support is no longer employed, and that was a big chunk of change for them? So what happens to the person on the program? Well, if they can’t make payments, they can’t make payments.

Bankruptcy is still an option. The bankruptcy laws were written with the knowledge that people do reach that point, that it’s impossible. So even being on the program, you’re making the effort. Again, you can’t control child support. So if it’s not there, you might want to look into bankruptcy, talk with an attorney, unless you have other family members that could step up and help out if it’s just a temporary situation.

Sure. So it says here also in the article that one out of every three women who own a home and have children even lose the house after a divorce. Do you see that often? Absolutely. Actually, I was just speaking with somebody the other day who was going through a divorce and has a 13-year-old daughter, and her ex-husband is actually forcing her and her daughter out.

They were displaced as of the 1st of November. That’s terrible. At that point, I had to tell her, let’s put the credit cards aside. Housing is more important. You have a child.

So we’re working with her there to develop the housing, and then once that’s done, I’ll talk with her, and we’ll get together and see what we can do about credit cards. But again, bankruptcy is still an option for her. Sure. So if someone’s in that situation where, like this woman, it’s a rough time, and you recommended she put the credit cards aside, what other bills or what other financial responsibilities would you recommend that she prioritizes in that tough situation? Obviously, housing is the most important, and transportation.

Prioritizing bills in emergencies

Credit cards, yes, people want to pay their bills, and it should be paid. However, your housing, your food on the table, the clothes on your back is obviously more important than your jewelry credit card or your store card. Unfortunately, some women even depend on credit cards as income when it gets to this point. Right, right, right. Would you recommend opening more lines of credit to kind of get her head above the water at this point?

How much credit card debt is too much credit card debt when you’re in this kind of emergency situation? I would never recommend anyone open up credit cards for living expenses, but sometimes you get to that point where it’s just a survival mode. Sure. And you got to do what you got to do to survive, especially as a single parent. That child of yours is solely relying on you.

Medical, obviously more important than a credit card. So we go through it and see what’s most important. And of course, it’s always the lifestyle of the individual as well that takes a factor into it. So we certainly look into it in depth to see where we should prioritize. You don’t need a credit card to the jewelry company or to the store cards.

I understand, you know, maybe a major credit card to fall back on for emergency purposes. Absolutely. That’s always recommended. Right. Because you never know what’s going to come up.

If you need transportation to get to your job and all of a sudden you pop a tire. Correct. And you need to get to that job to keep making money. Exactly. You don’t want to be in that situation.

So do you think people should be prepared with an open line of credit just in case? Absolutely. Because there are people out there that don’t have credit cards and that’s fair. I can understand being afraid of that stuff. But would you recommend always having one open?

Having something open, yes, for emergency purposes. Especially as a single parent. Especially as a single parent. Sure. On a personal note, I did it myself.

And if you can’t depend on the income for child support, you have to depend on yourself. You have to find a way to develop a budget, stick to it, and prepare yourself for unexpected car repairs, medical expenses. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it can happen. You can definitely be prepared. What if a mother is in a situation where an emergency expense comes up and she doesn’t have a credit card open?

What’s that timeline look like? Does she apply for a credit card then to try and take care of the expense as soon as possible? Does it go through? Does it get approved? Once again, it’s to prioritize what the expense is.

Credit monitoring tools and credit karma

Obviously, again, a car, you have to have a car to get to work. If your child needs medication, something like that is an emergency expense. You may not get approved right away. It might take a week or two before you even receive an approval letter or a denial letter. com, and that’s C-R-E-D-I-T-K-A-R-M-A dot com.

And it gives you a report card of your credit score. It’s kind of neat. So you’re able to see how your score is calculated, what you can do to improve it, and it’ll also give you preapproval odds. So I would certainly recommend in a situation like that, an emergency situation, that you utilize that website. Absolutely.

com, it’s going to be a soft pull on your credit score, which means it’s not going to impact it in any way. So there’s no worries there if you want to check it out every once in a while. You can go to it as often as you’d like to see your score. If you do apply, however, you’re actually applying for permissible purposes. So, yes, there might be a hard inquiry once you apply.

For a credit card. Right, but you can still go to that and see your preapproval odds. Okay, fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me, Tina Marie. This is Arianne, your host of The Cambridge Connection, right here on WHMP.

Sponsor message and program reminder

And we’ll be right back. Hey, Gordie. I guess we’re here to talk to our listeners about Cambridge Credit Counseling, the company in partnership with your new show, The Cambridge Connection. So what shall we tell them? Hold on, Arianne.

It’s Tina Marie. I think we should remind everyone that asking for financial wellness advice on student loans, buying a home, or even paying off credit card debt isn’t anything to be embarrassed about. It takes a lot of courage to ask for help. You got it, Tina Marie. And Cambridge Credit Counseling offers so much more than just helping to manage credit card debt.

That’s why Gordon is hosting the Cambridge Connection radio show every week. It’s all about empowering people to pick up the phone and ask for help. Hey, Arianne, is it my turn now? Oops, sorry, Gordie. We’re out of time, but if listeners need some financial wellness advice, there’s always time to call 1-800-CAMBRIDGE.

Women’s fund and economic security hub

That’s 1-800-CAMBRIDGE. Welcome home, this is Arianne, your fill-in hostess with the mostest of The Cambridge Connection. I’m very excited to have with us this week Donna Hegegat, the CEO of the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts, and I want to give a shout out to Tara Marshall, the manager of the customer care division at Cambridge Credit Counseling, who put us in touch with you. Donna, how you doing? I’m doing great and I’m excited to be here.

So glad to have you. 5 million dollars in grants to over 150 nonprofits. They are dedicated to developing leaders throughout their Leadership Institute for Political and Public Impact, abbreviated as LIPI, and they’ve impacted over 3 million women and their families through their partnerships and grants. So Donna, tell us a little bit about the Women’s Fund and what you do. Sure, I’d be happy to.

So the Women’s Fund has been working, as you said, for almost 25 years in the four westernmost counties, so Berkshires and all of Pioneer Valley, and what we’ve been doing is showing up and providing grants and at various times running programs like LIPI and we also run a Young Women’s Initiative. And really when you step back and look at all these things, it’s all about moving women and girls forward in the community and also finding out like what are the challenges and opportunities for women and girls in the community. So for instance, in 2019 we issued a research report on what is the status of women and girls in our communities. So these are the kinds of things we do. How did you get that research report started?

Yeah, great question. So we really said, you know what, if we’re like here holding ourselves out as sort of the subject matter experts around what’s going on in the community, it would be really great for us to actually have our finger on the pulse on what the data looks like. And so we took it upon ourselves to find the right research partners in the community because we don’t actually, we’re not researchers, we kind of know where we should stay in our lanes. Yeah. And so we partnered with a Public Health Institute of Western Massachusetts and they actually are also all female staff as well.

Oh, very cool. Yeah. Very cool. So let’s talk about your big project, the Greater Springfield Women’s Economic Security Hub. Tell me more about it.

Yeah. So again, this was a something that we were leading that we knew we couldn’t do alone and why we wanted to do it was that research report that I mentioned to you showed us that women, particularly in Hamden County and women of color in particular, were really not doing well on measures of economic security. Things like employment status, educational level, poverty rates, different things like that. And so we said we really want to do something and then of course along comes COVID and it makes matters exponentially worse for these exact same women, right? org and it’s under the Economic Security Hub area and really that framework shows you 12 different determinants all of which really interlock to create what I consider one woman’s economic engine and so you’re looking at that and you’re saying wow this is like yeah this is all the things that women you know have in their lives from housing to transportation to unpaid caregiving to having a supportive tribe of women or other people that are going to help you when things kind of go south if your car breaks down or your babysitter you know isn’t there and different things and it’s including things like identification so with undocumented women obviously identification is an issue but also something that we learned is identification for women coming out of incarceration.

When they leave prison they don’t just get handed their IDs back and they struggle to reestablish that and as you can imagine these days if you don’t have an ID you can’t get housing you can’t get all these other things a job and so forth and so thinking about all those things. Absolutely that’s fantastic so how would someone access this information you said they go to your website they check it out but how are they going to digest it what are they going to see and what can they learn from it? Yeah so right now you go to our website you’re going to see it you’re going to digest this framework and you’re going to look at it and say wow yeah those are all the things but are they all the things right and then you’ll read a little bit more about what we want to do with this project and they’ll be able to already access an asset map right so I mentioned that there’s 12 different determinants and so what we’ve done is mapped out for the Springfield area for instance housing I mentioned we have now listed all the organizations that are addressing housing needs in Springfield area so it’s a great asset and so we have that for all 12 determinants and really our next step is to interview 100 women who actually are experiencing that economic security because we in security I should say because we know that we’re kind of too far removed from the problem and we need to hear from women themselves directly are these 12 determinants that we say make up a woman’s economic engine are they like complete or are we missing something is there like a 13th element right and either way where are the trends in the greater Springfield area is it child care and housing for instance or is it really addiction recovery or mental health you know certainly all of our mental health has suffered from the pandemic and or is it domestic violence who knows right so that’s what we want to find out from these 100 women because we know that all these things intersect but where are the greatest trends of that intersection and also importantly where are the places that things are actually working pretty well for most women we want to learn that too so if someone was to ask you today what’s the one factor that has the greatest impact on women that you’ve seen what would your answer be I would say it’s too soon to tell yet that we want to look at this complexity and ask women themselves and value their time and their insights and provide resources to them and what they tell us we want to listen to directly if you’re just joining us I’m here with Donna Hagegat the CEO of the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts and we are talking about her big project the Greater Springfield Women’s Economic Security Hub all right so I’m here with Donna and also Tina Murray and so we’re gonna kind of connect this back to the conversation we were having earlier so Donna we were talking about the framework that’s available on the website and can you tell me a little bit about how Cambridge Credit Counseling is a part of that framework yes I’d be happy to so Cambridge Credit Counseling is one of the resources that’s listed on our asset map under a money and assets and they were actually a great partner at our first regional meeting and they talked about some of the issues that their clients are seeing fantastic and so we’ve got Tina Murray here as well and I want to tie this conversation back to where we were earlier when we were talking about Anna and her issues and of the trends you’ve been seeing so Tina Murray what can you what can you add to this conversation well it’s ironic that we are talking about this today you know there are a lot of women out there that don’t know where to go if they’re divorced recently their spouses may have been the breadwinner in the family or may have controlled all the finances now they’re gone and these women unfortunately are left in the dark so that’s where we come in and say hey this is what we’re going to do this is how we’re going to help you and it’s very rewarding to be able to do that do you often find Donna that a lot of women are struggling with finance in particular after a divorce or after one of those big events? Yeah, I think after any transition in life, we see that, not even probably just women, but in particular women because of the way we’ve all been socialized, that oftentimes it’s like the man’s job to take care of the bills and different things. Exactly.

And so when we think about these things, oftentimes we, as women, maybe take a back seat to some of that stuff and assume that somebody else is taking care of it, of course, then a divorce happens, or a death happens, or something like that. And then all of a sudden, she is in the driver’s seat and feels very vulnerable because she doesn’t know how to do it, and it’s urgent, and it’s so important for her economic security. I actually have another example of that with a consumer that I was recently speaking with who, unfortunately, had a flood in her basement. And her significant other passed away. So she was left dealing with this mess by herself and had no idea, didn’t even know who her homeowner’s insurance company was.

So it’s just so important for us to empower each other and help each other. So Donna, what’s one piece of advice you’d like to leave our listeners with? I would love to leave your listeners with the advice that whatever you’re struggling with, you’re not the only one who’s struggling with it. And this does have, whatever the issue is, it’s going to have repercussions across your life. And so the sooner that you address the issue, the better.

Thank you so much. And so how can people get in touch with you? And how can people view the framework? Want to tell us the website again, Donna? org.

And right on our main page, we have sliders. And there’s one that has information right about the economic security hub. And if you click on that, you can scroll down, and you’ll see the asset map for each of the 12 things, such as financial literacy and housing and so forth. Great. So if an organization wants to get in touch with you, they can find you where?

org is the best way to reach me. Great. Thank you so much for joining us today, Donna. It’s been a pleasure. I really appreciate the time.

Closing credits and next week preview

And I also want to give a shout out to Tara for making it happen. Thanks, Tara. Hi, this is Christopher Viale, president of Cambridge Credit Counseling. I want to give a special shout out to the Women’s Fund of Western Mass and their CEO, Donna Hagigat. For nearly 25 years, the Women’s Fund has been making grants to help women and girls achieve economic prosperity.

And at Cambridge Credit Counseling, we partner with Donna and her team to assist her clients with debt solutions. Learn more about the Women’s Fund of Western Mass at 413-529-0087. So a big thank you to Tina Marie, our resident rock star counselor, for helping me carry the show this week. She’ll be back next week, we promise, with her success moment. And another big thank you to Donna Hagigat, the CEO of the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts, for coming to chat with us about the Greater Springfield Women’s Economic Security Hub and the resources that they offer.

5 FM, and 1400 AM. com, on SoundCloud, or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. org. So be a part of the conversation. Have a great week, everyone.

Stay positive. Test negative. Hey, everyone. Gordon Oliver here, and I’m the host of the brand new Saturday morning show, The Cambridge Connection. Every Saturday at 930 AM, we’ll spend 28 minutes together that will change your relationship with money for the better.

I’ve been a financial counselor for 20 years, and I’m here to get you excited about being in financial control. Join me next Saturday, right here on The Cambridge Connection. It’s ladies week again. Join Arienne and Tina Marie, along with Margaret Tantillo, executive director of Dress for Success Western Mass, next Saturday, 930 AM, right here on WHMP.