ATU715 – Penny Forward with Chris Peterson AFC and Kane Brolin CFP, CHSNC

Hi, I’m Chris Peterson, AFC and Founder and CEO of Penny Forward.

Hi, this is Kane Brolin. I’m a Certified Financial Planner Professional. I’m a board member of Penny Forward, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs.

I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 715 of Assistive Technology Update, it is scheduled to be released on February 7th, 2025. On today’s show, we are super excited to welcome Chris Peterson and Kane Brolin from Penny Forward to the show. They’re going to tell us all about financial literacy and some amazing things available through Penny Forward to help individuals with vision loss in becoming financially independent. Don’t forget listeners, you can always reach out to us with suggestions, comments, questions, or anything you might have. You can shoot us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. We always love hearing from you.

A lot of us here at the INDATA Project, our clinical assistive technology program in the Atlas project just got back from ATIA and it was an amazing trip. I was lucky enough to get to present a couple of times, to meet just a lot of really great folks. I’m always amazed by all the knowledge, all the just ingenuity, all the incredible people that I get to meet at this conference. I must admit, it’s a bit exhausting afterwards just getting back and trying to process everything, but we’ll do all that we can to get some of our team here on the show in the coming weeks just to kind of share their thoughts, maybe some of the great stuff that they saw, some of the amazing sessions they were able to attend, and all the great things that they got to do down there in Orlando this last week. But now we’re all back, we’re all getting back in the swing and for right now, let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Listeners, today we are excited to be joined by the folks from Penny Forward to talk about the great resources that they offer to assist individuals with vision loss in becoming a financially independent. Kane, Chris, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, I am excited to get in and learn about this very kind of timely and important topic. But before we get into talking about Penny Forward, could you tell us a little bit about yourselves?

Sure. I’ll start and I’ll pass it over to you, Kane, in a sec here. I’m Chris Peterson, I’m an Accredited Financial Counselor and the Founder and CEO of Penny Forward. We’ll talk about what that means in a second, but first, a little bit about me.

I am totally blind and have been so since birth. I have worked as a software developer, a materials and resources coordinator for a nonprofit organization, and most recently, as an Accredited Financial Counselor and the CEO of Penny Forward. In my personal life, I have two wonderful children, ages 5 and 13, a retired guide dog, and I have a beautiful girlfriend who I’m very proud of, who is a very successful business owner in her own right. I train Brazilian Jujitsu, am a beat baseball player, I am also a blind bowler, and I play blind audio darts, and I’m a licensed amateur radio operator, among many, many other things. So, I have a wonderfully full life and am really proud of all the things I’ve accomplished. Kane?

I am Kane Brolin, and for about the past 25 years or so, I have worked as a financial planner or if you will, as a broker. So, my work day-to-day has a lot of variance in it, but I do sell and service investment products, including stocks, mutual funds, and annuities, and bonds, and various insurance and real estate related products. And I helped people to solve a lot of different goals that it takes money to solve. I really think of myself as more of a life planner than as someone that really works day to day with just money. It’s always about getting people to where they want to be in their goals.

I was originally trained as a broadcaster and a journalist. Like many people back in the ’80s, I wanted to get into radio full-time and I did work in that industry some, but then realized after a while that I loved broadcasting a lot more than it loved me. But fortunately, I was able to take a plan B and I got into a business school, I got a master in management from Northwestern University. I did some corporate work for the Dow Chemical Company. And got a little experience along with my wife as a small business owner, we had a small retail operation for about a year, and then I moved into the financial planning and securities business. And currently, I do that business under my own name, but the licenses that I hold and the securities that I sell are under the umbrella of is called the Commonwealth Financial Network, which is a nationwide network of advisors. It is a member of FINRA and SIPC, I can explain later on what that is if anyone really wants to know.

I am a husband, I am a father of four wonderful children. I live in the Greater South Bend, Indiana area, and I am also currently serving as the Treasurer of the Indiana Affiliate of the National Federation of the Blind. So, I have a busy life as well.

Wow. Well, thank you both for taking time out. I can definitely tell by your voices that you both had a little bit of experience in broadcasting and radio, so we always appreciate when that comes. But the real reason we have you on is to talk about Penny Forward. So I guess, let’s just start with kind of big picture. What is it?

It’s a nonprofit organization founded and led by blind people, who together thought that it was important for us to help each other learn to navigate the complicated landscape of personal finance. And we not only thought that it was important to help each other, but we thought it was important to help our community learn those skills as well. And so we offer self-paced online financial education courses that are screen reader friendly. We hold weekly Wednesday financial education workshops, and we also offer one-on-one financial counseling and benefits planning services to our community as well.

We’re really trying to help people to eliminate the fear, the confusion, the uncertainty and the doubt about their financial decisions, because we want everybody in the blind and low vision community to be able to live full, happy, healthy and secure, and resilient lives. And money is an underpinning of really, all of those things.

No, it definitely is. Well, we’re going to break down those just a little bit deeper. Chris, I guess let’s start by talking about the self-paced online courses. What kind of courses are available or what kinds of information can individuals learn from these?

So we’ve designed these courses to be something that you can sit down and take in about an hour each. The topics are so far, budgeting and banking basics, concerned about credit, digging out of debt, employment essentials, simplifying social security, and taking on taxes. And we are working on this year, thanks to a grant from the NASDAQ Foundation, an introduction to investing course, and that’s actually going to turn into a series of investing courses. And we’re continuing to add more as our time and our capacity allows. So, we hope to really cover at some point in our evolution, every topic that money touches in some way or another.

Nice, and that’s great information for folks and kind of like we were talking off air kind of beforehand, you don’t always know if you’re getting information that’s always in your best interest. But I love that this is information just to educate and to get folks those tools that they might need. You also offer the online workshops and you mentioned those. Tell us about those.

So, those were an inspiration that comes from a few different places in my past. One is, I mentioned that I trained Brazilian Jujitsu, and one of the things that I learned about training in the martial arts, and it’s true of a lot of things not just martial arts, is that you go to classes, those classes repeat the same things over and over and over again for a very specific reason. You can learn something once and you might intellectually understand how to put it into practice, but only through practice and practice and more practice do you actually get to be good at it. And that’s true with financial capability as well. You may know in your mind what the right financial decisions are for yourself, but you also think a lot, whether you want to or not, with your heart. And sometimes the right financial decision also may feel like a very scary financial decision. And in order to overcome that fear and to be able to make those right healthy decisions over and over again consistently, we believe that practice is the key.

And so, one of the reasons for holding these workshops is to allow people to talk through with us and with each other the kinds of decisions they might be called upon to make throughout their lives. To help them to come to the conclusions of what are the right decisions for them and to be confident about making those right decisions for them.

Another thing that it does is it builds community, and being around a community of people that think as you do, that have the same goals you do, or if they don’t have the same goals, they at least respect your goals, is really important. It can help you to stay motivated when things get tough. It can help you to be more confident in making decisions when maybe some people that say they have your best interests at heart, but maybe are themselves operating from a perspective of fear and uncertainty, are giving you advice that isn’t necessarily the best advice. You can’t go off of your mom or your dad saying, “Well, I heard that this is true.” It might in fact be true, but it also might be entirely false and they might be afraid of encouraging you to take risks, to take a leap of faith, to believe that you actually know what you’re doing and that you can go out there and live a healthy financial life. And also, a financial life that can help you to build wealth and the kind of security that having really healthy finances brings along with it.

Nice. I love that. I love that you brought up the building community, I was going to say that too. Just as people can learn from each other, not just be told by a financial professional, but also just learn from each other and each other’s experiences for things they may have experienced or may experience kind of coming up. So, that’s really awesome. And then Chris, you mentioned this also for folks who maybe need a little bit more, you offer one-to-one financial counseling. I guess, what kinds of assistance can this one-to-one counseling offer and what kind of information can be shared in those?

So, a counseling environment one-on-one is bound by a code of ethics. As an Accredited Financial Counselor, I’m bound by a code of ethics to keep things confidential, to be non-judgmental, to provide guidance and support, but not to tell somebody what to do or how to do it, and definitely not to do something for somebody when they can do it themselves. And I believe that Kane would say that being a Certified Financial Planner is bound by a similar, if not identical code of ethics in the same way.

So, the types of information that can be shared are pretty much the sky’s the limit, whatever you feel comfortable with. Sometimes my counseling sessions are almost like therapy sessions. Gosh, I’m feeling really afraid of these decisions that I have to make, or I’m feeling really overwhelmed by all of the things that I need to do financially. And sometimes they are a lot more intellectual. What do you think of the idea of me using my credit cards to pay all my bills? Is it okay if I do that and make sure that I pay the credit card off in full at the end of the month? Should I pay my mortgage off early? Should I consider this job offer that I just got?

I think being part of a community such as Penny Forward, another big advantage for that from my standpoint, is that it helps us to bust some myths. As a Certified Financial Planner, I talk to a lot of people privately too, and I’ve had the chance to speak with a few people one-to-one that found me through… Who are blind and have other disabilities, can actually have financial power and significant financial resources.

In the past few months, I’ve talked to two different blind individuals who had very successful careers and who today have over $2 million in the bank. And I think a lot of times we can operate under a dangerously false assumption. Even those of us that share that disability, that most blind people really don’t have much of anything. We live in penury and we have to depend on state or federal benefits just to live, and we’re probably not going to get a good job and we just have to take what the world hands us.

But being a part of the Penny Forward community, I’ve actually had people come to me with legit questions about investing, based on the premise that they have money to invest, that they have a home. There’s blind people out there with mortgages, there are blind people out there that play an active role in even physically fixing up their own home, that have all kinds of skills, and many of them have been monetized. And that does not mean that we as a community are out of the woods, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of people that need a great deal of help and guidance and confidence. But through being a part of the Penny Forward community, we know that success on a lot of levels is possible. And it’s possible because we can meet others who have been there, who are doing successful things, who have a great outcome, and who actually can live a healthy and prosperous retirement after having put the building blocks in place to save and invest for that for many years. And that’s just a great shot in the arm to have that basis for such confidence.

Oh, for sure. Just knowing that it’s been done, it can be done. At least I know in my work I encounter folks who seem to most of the time be told the opposite. So, I like that you can show or not just help folks along, but also just show that it’s possible, that folks have done it and it’s not the biggest thing in the world. And with a little bit of work, you can manage your finances and be able to do those things and all the other things you mentioned as well. So, that’s awesome, Kane.

In looking through here. I also found that you guys have a podcast as well. Is that correct?

We do have a podcast. We call it a show about blind people building bright futures, one penny at a time, because that’s really what it is. We are out there trying to highlight all of the blind people in the world that are finding success in every way imaginable. We’ve had guests on ranging from Bruce Horak, the first blind actor to play a role in a Star Trek series, to George Wartzel, who was famous for a while in 2018 in a Subaru commercial. And what you don’t know about him is that he is an incredibly skilled and accomplished woodworker who has been a many time business owner and is currently running a gallery in Greenville, Tennessee.

And we’ve talked to plumbers, we’ve talked to lawyers, we’ve talked to chiropractors, nutritionists, software developers developing games and other types of apps. We’ve talked to parents, single parents, married parents, people that are raising one child, and even people that have worked in the foster care system and have raised over 30 children. As well as people that all they want to do is live on a farmstead out in the country and raise goats. And the person that I’m thinking of that actually does this, makes a living boarding other people’s dogs and taking care of their dogs when they go on vacation.

So, we live all walks of life and some of us are totally blind, some of us have some vision, and it doesn’t matter, we find a way. And there’s a tremendous amount of dignity and capability that I’ve found in our community that I think is sadly going unrecognized. And what’s even sadder still is that it goes unrecognized even in our own community. Like Kane said earlier, and I do want to touch on this as many times as I have the opportunity to, many of us as blind people even sort of figure that we just need to accept what the world offers us and that we don’t deserve anymore. I reject that. We have merit, we have skill, we have talent, we have capability, and we are deserving of every opportunity that anyone else, whether able-bodied or disabled, has in this world. And I am challenging all of the blind and low vision people listening to this to take advantage of those opportunities when they come up.

I could not have said that better myself. Guys, we’ve got a little bit of time left, I guess, and I know it’s going to be hard to really whittle this down, but maybe what’s one quick piece of advice that you could give individuals with or without low vision, just about finances, about financial literacy, or maybe something important to keep front of mind as they think about these things?

Oh, that is such a tough one. One of the things that I advise people on all the time is to be confident. You may not always make the right decision. Sometimes we don’t know what right decision is going to be until we reach the future and we can’t predict the future without 100% certainty. So, sometimes we just need to make the best decision that we can with the information that we have, and make our best guess about how the future is going to turn out. And something that we may have been very afraid of may never come to pass, and something that we may never have been afraid of at all may actually come to pass.

And so there is a tremendous amount of balance in making good financial decisions. It’s important to take some risk. Without some risk, there isn’t any reward. Taking no risk, taking the safe path entails some risk all by itself, on missing out on opportunities that might come up. On the other hand, you can’t or don’t want to take on too much risk, and you don’t want to pretend like bad things never happen because they do, and you do want to protect yourself against those bad things. It’s a part of being resilient to that future that we can’t predict. So, I think that’s my advice. Kane, do you have anything to add?

Yeah, if possible, develop a cash reserve. I know that’s not easy for a lot of people to do, but if you have the means to do it, always be sure you have at least three to six months worth of your expenses paid. And then protect things that are important to you or protect against the loss of those things.

As a financial planner, I’ve had some happy stories, some triumphal stories to report, but I also have some heartbreaking ones. If you’ve ever talked to someone who lost a spouse and then realized after the fact that they or their spouse had left the life insurance on that person lapse, so they were counting on at least something to stem the tide and to give them something to live on while they recovered from the loss of a loved one that was very meaningful to them. That’s kind of a double whammy, and that’s very hard to recover from. It’s also hard to recover from the loss of something that may be stolen or lost or burned up that might’ve mattered a lot to you, but you just forgot to make sure that that was covered in a homeowner’s or a rental policy.

So, a lot of times, even though people ask me about money making opportunities and want me to give them a stock tip and all these other things that are more colorful that you might read about wanting to get rich, a big part of being prosperous is just not making decisions or failing to make a decision that the consequence of that is that you find yourself back in a position of poverty when you didn’t have to be. Or when you have to replace something that was very expensive at a full market value just because you didn’t protect it and make sure it was covered as an endorsement on your property insurance policy. These things are important, and they’ll become more important to us, especially in the blind, low vision community, as more of us may decide to make a decision like to buy a car, even though we may not drive it, but we might hire someone to drive it for us, but that still makes us a car owner.

And so we find that as we become more prosperous, we deal with some of the same things that people with eyesight have dealt with for years, such as being able to afford the cost of maintenance and the rising cost of fuel for that car, at least if it burns fossil fuels, hydrocarbons like gas or diesel. So, just a few things to keep in mind. It’s about taking risks. Chris is right, it’s also about making sure that you do a sweep every now and then in front of you to make sure that there’s no landmines that you might step on that are going to take you backward in your journey toward financial fitness.

Awesome, and if our listeners want to find out more about Penny Forward and all these great resources that you have, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Got three different ways. Our website, www.pennyforward.com. We can be reached by email, the address is pennyforward@pennyforward.com, or we can reach by phone. The phone number is 1-888-332-5558, and we have an answering service that is standing by 24/7. They can answer some basic questions and if they have things that they can’t answer directly, they will help you to arrange a callback from one of us so that you can get your questions answered.

Guys, we’ll put all that down in the show notes so folks can reach you in any way that they might see fit. But thank you so much for coming on today, for providing such a valuable, and I hate to say, kind of a missing service that’s out there. But really, being able to help folks who may be blind or have low vision with being able to just be financially, well, independent and all the great things that can come from that. So, thank you so much for your work, thank you for what you do, and thank you for coming on.

Thanks for having us.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation, or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com.

A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.