Attending conferences is one of the best ways that I get to learn new ideas and research, as well as getting to network/brainstorm with other professionals. This year at the Association for Financial Counseling and Planning Education’s annual symposium the constant theme from the conference we heard was hope and empathy. Here are a few takeaways from this year’s AFCPE conference:
More Research is being done with couples and money
From a study done on the spender-saver perception scale, led by Dr. John Grable and Dr. Michelle Krueger, they found that respondents who viewed their spouse primarily as a saver reported lower levels of financial satisfaction. Another study done by my friend, Dr. Emily Koochel, focused on validating the financial transparency scale. This scale can be used to help practitioners determine the amount of open and honest disclosures about one’s finances, as well as determining if there may be secret spending in a married relationship. While these two examples are just the tip of the iceberg about couples and money, we recently hosted a pocast discussing the less discussed side of financial equity and abuse in our most recent podcast – Financial Equity in Relationships.
Winning Awards
Both I and Camaya Wallace-Bechard won AFCPE Symposium Awards. Camaya won the Outstanding Symposium Poster award for her poster “Using Needs Assessments to Support Financial Literacy Programs in Non-Profit Agencies”, while I won the Outstanding Practitioners’ Forum award for “Fred Rogers and Financial Counseling: What do they have in common?” Getting to represent and win awards with University of Illinois Extension at AFCPE is such an honor and really validates the work we are doing in Illinois.
For a recap of all three parts.