Growing Pains

Yesterday the Dow closed at 7,100, and man, was I mad. I felt disappointed, angry, and resentful. Is it irrational to have these strong feelings about a non-human entity? You betcha. Is it a little crazy to feel like the market's "behavior" is out of line? Sure, but I would wager I'm not the only one who is re-evaluating her "relationship" with the market these days.

It feels terrible to lose money -- nothing odd about that -- but why was I taking it all so personally? The intensity of my feelings caught me off guard and I found myself pondering the relational nature of my experience. What role was I projecting onto the market, and what enactment was I engaging in? 

The closest parallel I could come up with was one of an adolescent going through the pains of maturation. I had come to expect the market to be a kind of benevolent parent. I followed the "rules" -- save your money, invest it, diversify your portfolio -- and then I expected the rest of it (the nurturing and growth of my money) to be "taken care of." 

Obviously the market is not a parent -- that's not the point I'm trying to make. And lots of people who were a lot more hands-on than me have lost even more money. 

But the growth pain that I'm going through is one of waking up and knowing that I have to be more responsible for myself. I have to do more homework. I have to make more informed decisions. I can't ever trust that my money is just going to be "taken care of."

I don't know what change this realization is going to make in my net worth. Maybe it won't change anything. But at least I will feel like more of a financial grown up living powerfully in the world, instead of a disappointed child. 

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Are You Worth It?

MP Dunleavey has a great article in the NY Times today (subs. req.) about why debt seems to “stick” to some people but not others. Debt may be the result of your negative cash flow, she posits, but it may also be tied to the “emotional underbelly” of your spending.

T. Harv Ecker says something similar in Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. He wrote (and you’ll have to forgive me for paraphrasing, I don’t have the book here in front of me) that most people do not have the internal capacity to create and retain great wealth.

For Dunleavey and for Ecker the solution to one’s financial woes lies not in a better spreadsheet but in cultivating a better mindset.

I’ve definitely seen this phenomenon in my work. People tend to have very strong beliefs about themselves and their place in a money world. The problem is that these beliefs are usually unarticulated and live unchallenged in the person’s unconscious.

Unchallenged beliefs create patterns of behavior that resist every effort to change. For example, if you have an unconscious belief that having money will expose you to envy and resentment, you will always release the money in your life rather than risk being a target of antipathy. You will probably spend a lot of money on others and generally treat money with great disrespect. Any accumulation of cash will create a huge amount of anxiety, and as your bank balance rises so will your fear that other people are judging you.

The “secret” here (it’s actually not so very secret, but it is hard work) is to do some digging into your own financial psyche. Millionaire Mind is a good book, but I feel that books that only focus on wealth building are rather narrow in scope. Financial wellness should be about a lot more than just a string of fat assets. Dunleavey’s book, Money Can Buy Happiness, is a good one, so is The Money Mirror by Annette Lieberman and Vicki Lindner. For those in search of a more interpersonal approach is to start a Money Awareness Club per the folks at the Women’s Institute for Financial Education. Whatever method you choose, bringing your unconscious beliefs about money into awareness can be the most valuable experience of your life.

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The Money Complex Just Got Less Complex

I haven’t written in awhile for a couple of reasons. Number one, work and my practice have been really busy (as you can imagine). Number two, our culture has been on a rollercoaster ride to match the dips and loops of the market. Each day seems to usher in a whole new socioeconomic “reality.” It astounds to me how quickly our society has pivoted to embrace values of frugality, simplicity, and human connection over consumer expression. As someone who works from a systems perspective, this is mind-bending stuff. It also feels slightly schizophrenic.

It puts me in mind of Arlene Modica Matthews’ book, Your Money, Your Self. In her book Ms. Matthews talks about the five-layer “Money Complex” which resides in each of us. Whenever we are poised to make a financial choice or action, our process gets filtered through each of these layers:

Layer 1: Intrapsychic Response – Feelings, reactions, the "little voice" of truth in your head.

Layer 2: Family Training Response –What you learned or saw in your family and how you interpreted that as right or wrong.

Layer 3: Social Training Response – What you believe is true about others, especially those you admire.

Layer 4: Technology Based Response – Is there a financial instrument (such as a credit card, HELOC, floating 0% balances) that will enable me to take – or avoid – this action?

Layer 5: Pack-think Response – The pressure you feel to do what everyone else is doing or not doing.

Certain layers are stronger or weaker than others depending on the individual and the situation.

In recent years financial stress has ticked quietly higher as our debt levels rose and certain middle-class givens started to stretch out of reach. The Intrapsychic Response Layer (“this feels terrible, something is wrong here”) was ignored while the Social Training Layer (“people like me have this, it's the normal thing”), Pack-think Layer (“I certainly don’t want to be the ONLY person who doesn’t have that”) and Technology Layer (“I can have it if I charge it and just pay the minimum”) ran the show.

This seismic cultural shift seems primarily driven by the about-face in financial technology – the loss of cheap, easy credit along with job insecurity and the end of perceived wealth from a stock boom and housing bubble. When the technology abruptly changed the culture did, too.

I didn’t have a name for it then, but I feel like the last two or three years of my practice might be summed up as Layer 4 Mania. People have been completely distracted by the myriad of financial instruments and scams. Our culture has mistaken the ability to buy something as the ability to afford something.

What we’re experiencing now is a hard, painful look in the mirror. The Intrapsychic Response Layer is screaming, and it’s finally being heard.

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Amanda in the WSJ: Keeping Spending in Check

Different life transitions bring with them different financial challenges. For young people just entering the workforce post-college, the challenges include establishing a professional identity, developing a budget that balances their new expenses with their new income, and managing all of the stresses that come with any period of transition or change.

One of the ways that people often blow off emotional steam is with spending. How do you know when the spending -- particularly deficit spending -- is worth it? Figuring that out can be confusing when the new laptop or suit is something you "need" for your new professional life.

In my financial counseling practice I have an easy rule of thumb for figuring out when people are spending based on mood versus based on necessity. Was the purchase made on the spur of the moment or was it planned for? If it was done on the fly, there's good chance that anxiety, unease, or insecurity was responsible for the impulse to buy. Rationalization after the fact won't make up for that.

Shelly Banjo writes the Starting Out column in the Wall Street Journal and asked me how young professionals can Keep Spending in Check.

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Amanda in the NY Times: A Conflict that Came in the Mail

Spouses are always doing little things "for each other's good." In the past I may have taken it upon myself to retire some of my husband's more-than-gently-worn socks (to all the TSA agents who were privy to the site of his big toe poking through in the security line: you're welcome).

MP Dunleavey writes in her Cost of Living column for the New York Times about another case of marital editing, this one having to do with catalogs that (did not quite) arrive in the mail.

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Reading, Writing, and Relevant Cost?

As a high school student, I never learned economics -- home, macro, or otherwise. Interestingly enough I went to a math and science-focused magnet school, so I was better prepared to handle infinitesimals than interest rates.

In fact, my personal finance education started right about the time I walked into mu college bookstore to buy my textbooks and was handed a Visa application. Fast forward a few years and I was the proud carrier of about 10 platinum cards and a whopping amount of gut-churning, insomnia-producing debt.

I learned most of my early economic lessons the hard way - by mistake.

Unfortunately it seems that my learning experience is the norm. In today's New York Times Freakonomics blog Stephen Dubner asks, “Are We a Nation of Financial Illiterates?” The sad answer is probably yes. And Stephen turns to Annamaria Lusardi, a professor of economics at Dartmouth, who has some answers that make sense.

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Your Creditor is Silently Judging You

You stay below your credit limit, pay your bills on time, and always pay more than the minimum balance due. Yet your creditor mysteriously raises your interest rate and cuts your credit line in half. What gives? Maybe it was because you swiped your card at the bar or at a massage parlor, and the lender's scoring model deemed your purchasing behavior a credit risk.

Lenders, insurers, other financial firms (and, increasingly employers, landlords, cell phone carriers, and the voting public) have always used credit scoring models to make decisions about people. While we have some very general information about the design of the most widely-used models, many lenders use proprietary formulas based on their own evaluative criteria. In the case of CompuCredit's Aspire Visa, these criteria allegedly included individual spending behavior.

The Federal Trade Commission recently filed suit against CompuCredit accusing them of "deceptive" marketing practices because they did not properly disclose to consumers that they monitored spending. The suit alleges that when the cards were used at places like tire and retreading shops, massage parlors, bars, billiard halls, and marriage counselors (really? marriage counselors?), CompuCredit cut their credit lines.

Now keep in mind, the legal issue here is not that a lender monitored purchasing behavior and used it to evaluate the terms of credit. The legal issue is that the lender did not properly communicate the policy to cardholders.

But the relevance to consumers is far broader, because this suit gives us a glimpse into the heretofore secret world of credit scoring. Consumer advocates have long suspected that purchasing behavior is included in scoring models but because the models were protected as intellectual property there was no way of knowing for certain. As Jennifer Silver-Greenberg writes in BusinessWeek:

With competition increasing, databases improving, and technology advancing, companies can include more factors than ever in their models.... The worry is that companies may tweak the credit scoring system in unfair or biased ways, weeding out or limiting borrowers based on race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Personally, and this is my opinion here, I would say of course creditors are monitoring purchasing behavior. If they can do it, they are doing it. It's simple human nature to want to know things about others, and creditors are not any purer than the rest of us. They have the additional incentive of being in business with their customers, so if the mechanism exists for them to gather the information then I think we can safely assume that they will do so.

The concern is not that financial institutions are gathering the information, the concern is in how they are evaluating it. "Scoring model" sounds analytical, but in reality all models that evaluate data are exactly as biased as the person or people developing them.

Models are, in effect, hypotheses. You come up with a hypothesis, you enter the data, and you discover if the data predicts the outcome that you are expecting. If it does then you consider the hypothesis valid. It's reliable if it gives the same valid outcome again and again.

The problem with the credit scoring model is that it's only being selectively tested and only by the same biased people who developed it. In the natural and social sciences we cannot say, "Hey, psychotherapy and antidepressants are more effective in treating depression than psychotherapy alone. Don't ask me how I know this, just buy my medicine." The scientific method dictates that we present all of it -- our hypothesis, subject selection, testing process, data gathering, analysis -- and encourage others to try exactly what we did and produce the same results.

People might not be so outraged about creditors analyzing purchasing behavior if we were allowed to shine the light of public scrutiny on their scoring model.

This particular instance with the Aspire Visa also just smacks of moralism. Why is using your credit card at a bar or marriage counselor so bad? What about people who use a credit card "convenience check" to pay their rent -- that seems more indicative of financial instability than a night out at the pub. We can't ask the lender these questions because their process is protected.

In our complex financial world, selectively directing the quality and availability of credit products has profound social consequences. We've already seen how institutions were able to perpetrate bias (consciously or unconsciously) in the subprime lending market. With credit so interwoven into the social fabric, do we have a right to public oversight of how lenders make their decisions?

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Seminar: Remain Calm, Create Wealth

If you are in the New York area and are looking for a hands-on, solution-focused personal finance seminar I would like to recommend the June 30th session of Remain Calm, Create Wealth. MP Dunleavey (personal finance journalist, MSN Money contributor, and New York Times Cost of Living columnist) and Galia Gichon (founder of Down to Earth Finance) will guide participants through setting up a quick financial plan, establishing a strategy to control spending, and setting investment goals. Register here!

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Is There a Doctor in the House?

In my financial counseling practice sometimes I have to deliver bad news. Whether it’s showing a client how his income doesn’t support his already modest lifestyle or helping a family understand the terms of their unmanageable debt, I am there when painful economic realities are revealed, often for the first time.

My role in these scenarios is not unlike a doctor sitting down with a patient to give him a poor test result. Given this parallel I watched with interest a lecture by Elly Hann D.O. on How Best to Deliver Bad News to Patients and Family. Dr. Hann, a hospice physician specializing in palliative care and pain management, emphasized the importance of communicating bad news clearly and compassionately so that the patient is able to begin organizing his thoughts around the diagnosis and treatment plan.

Without the doctor’s effective communication, patients remain stuck in a state of anxious confusion. These feelings compromise the patient’s ability to trust his doctor and follow through with necessary treatment.

While this all seems obvious in a medical model, it really made me think about our socio-financial model and how we meet consumers’ needs for assessment (diagnosis), communication, and support.

In the medical model the doctor is the expert, the one with the information. The doctor is required to be the patient’s advocate without any conflicting loyalty. Thus the patient can trust the doctor to decide and to act in his best interest.

In the financial world, one can retain similar unbiased expertise in the form of a fee-only financial planner or accounting professional. These services are excellent but can be prohibitively expensive for all but the most affluent. Some professionals offer pro bono or reduced-fee services through local non-profits or public agencies but these programs are spotty and not scalable to the population at large.

In the absence of expert guidance what has happened is that we’ve made “doctors” out of lenders. We assume that because lenders incur risk the market drives them to become experts on how to extend credit, at what competitive terms, and to whom.

This is not a patient- or consumer-based model. This would be like a person going into a hospital with pain in his shoulder and being told by the radiologist, “Hey, what you need is an x-ray,” and then the orthopedist countering with, “But if you sign up with me now I will give you an excellent deal on this cast!” How is the patient supposed to determine what to do with something as complicated as his health?

Our financial world has become similarly complex. Many consumers feel lost, anxiously confused about how to diagnose their own needs, identify the right course of action, and organize themselves around a plan.

Anxious confusion poisons the whole system. We can see the erosion of trust in the lending establishment. Whereas once consumers put too much faith in the promise of credit, now you see people suspicious of lenders’ motives to the point where they feel the system is out to get them.

I definitely see a need for a more widespread combination of consumer advocacy, information, and support. Right now all of those functions are operating somewhat disjointedly. For example, I can provide expert communication and support in my counseling practice, but I must partner with financial services professionals to get clients the information and analysis they need. The financial services industry has the information, but is mostly geared at helping already stable people protect their security and not at being a consumer sounding-board. Consumer advocates exist, but they often take an adversarial, system-focused position that is not necessarily based on the needs of the individual consumer.

I’m writing this post as a real thought-in-progress. Our socio-financial set-up seems inadequate but I don’t know what the right answer is. It’s hard to point to the state of the health care industry as any sort of positive example, but I think that the doctor metaphor is helpful in illustrating the vacuum that currently exists. This is not generally a comment-heavy blog, but if any readers have an opinion on this I would be glad to read it.

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My Future's So Bright, I Gotta Buy Shades

In The Secret Life of Money, Tad Crawford offers this revolutionary concept:

Keeping the symbolic value of money in mind....we can gain a new view of debt, seeing it not as merely an obligation to be paid but also as a statement about how our inner richness will be expressed in the future (italics added).

That is actually completely brilliant. Until I read that I had not heard the phenomenon articulated so clearly.

When it comes to understanding how money doesn't work in a person's life, debt is often where the narrative begins. Debt is the manifestation of some sort of imbalance, either internal or external (or sometimes both).

An external imbalance may be quite difficult but it's usually pretty straightforward. Perhaps a major life crisis affected a person's finances, or their resources are simply not adequate for their needs.

An internal imbalance, on the other hand, can be many things. It may be around self-concept, such as when you buy things to try to feel like a new person or to correct for some felt deficit. It may be around impulse, when the desire to buy something rises up and cannot be deferred. There are a million ways we might be slightly skewed in perception, judgment, mood, etc. and all of these can affect how we use money.

What I love about the Crawford quote is how artfully it captures a distortion of both self and time. It shows how debt is a way of not fully living life in the present, but rather projecting oneself forward into some fantasy future where money is more abundant (along with approval, achievement, and sex, most likely).

This more affluent future-self is perceived as the true manifestation, and the debt is simply the price we pay to express our confidence in that belief.

I see this again and again in my counseling practice. When people arrive at a point whereby they can no longer afford to sustain their debt, they experience an accompanying personal crisis. It is not that they are so attached to the things that they bought on credit. It is that their coveted future self -- who is much more real to them than the life they live in the day to day -- must be sacrificed to come to terms with the reality of their financial position.

The good news is that most people who get appropriate support through this crisis come out healthier on the other side. It's true one can amass huge amounts of debt but there is pretty much always a limit. Being forced to a financial reckoning brings many activities that are effective in re-aligning the temporal distortion and the imbalance in self-concept. Tracking spending, for example, reinforces connection to the present and helps a person to remain grounded in their life as they actually experience it.

Unless there is true mental illness, a derealized existence actually gets pretty uncomfortable after awhile. You only get one life. Spending all that "future richness" wastes so much more than just money.

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Explanatory Styles and Financial Baby Steps

This morning as my daughter was learning to pull herself up in her crib, I became aware of how I kept my hand on her back, supporting her. Without thinking about it I maintained a presence that was close enough to mitigate a swift fall that might injure, but not so close that she couldn't experiment on her own (and perhaps get a minor bonk or two to the head as she went along). It occurred to me that even this small activity of learning a new skill was a template for her in how she would see the world.

Our experiences shape our beliefs, and experiences are quite subjective things. My daughter's experience of her new activity might be "I am so strong!" or "The room looks different from here." Should she fall, her experience would indicate "Well, that was unpleasant but I sure liked standing while I was up -- maybe I'll try again." Or if the fall was enough to hurt or scare, she might believe that standing is a dangerous activity that should be avoided.

This is a small example (and one that probably only occurs to a caffeine-deprived therapist whose baby wakes up at a quarter to 6:00), but the idea behind it is well-established.

The beliefs that we use to give meaning to our experiences are generally organized into patterns, or Explanatory Styles. Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman is the clinician who is most often associated with the concept of Explanatory Styles through his work in the field of Positive Psychology.

Awhile back I developed a simple quiz to demonstrate how people bring their Explanatory Style into their experiences with money. The quiz asked respondents to identify the thought or belief that would occur in the following situations:

1) You overdraw your bank account and are charged a $39 fee.
Option A: "I never have enough money."
Option B: "This month I didn't account for some extra expenses that I had."

2) You find $20 in a jacket pocket.
Option A: "This is my lucky day!"
Option B: "I'm so lucky!"

3) Even though you've always paid your bill on time, your creditor mysteriously raises your APR.
Option A: "Maybe a temporary dip in my credit score caused this creditor to try to raise my rate."
Option B: "Creditors are unfeeling beasts."

4) Someone with your creditor's fraud department calls to alert you to suspicious activity on your account.
Option A: "Here is one instance when this creditor actually did something right."
Option B: "Creditors do their best to provide good customer service."

5) Your investment portfolio grew significantly in value over the last couple years.
Option A: "The market did well."
Option B: "I did a good job choosing investments."

6) When bringing some items to the register for purchase, the total price is higher than you'd anticipated.
Option A: "I must have miscalculated how much these things cost all together."
Option B: "Some of these items must have been mis-marked."

The six items are organized into three sets of one positive scenario and one negative scenario. The positive/negative dyads correspond to the three dimensions of interpretation that constitute one's Explanatory Style.

The first two scenarios have to do with the value of Permanence, or how we perceive time. When something bad happens, do we think that such a result is to be expected always? What about when something good happens? Is that a result of something that is permanent (such as a character trait) or is it something that just happened randomly?

The second set of scenarios relate to the value of Pervasiveness, whether something is seen as specific or something that is true across all situations. A jump in APR could thus be experienced as a particular event relating to the one account or it can take on the specter of everything that is terrible about the credit industry. A helpful customer service agent could be seen as either an anomaly or as an accurate representative of overall good business.

The final two scenarios demonstrate the value of Personalization, whether we see the event as due to our own actions or whether it occurred because of outside forces. Personalization is the most important dimension when it comes to determining how we feel about our ability to change. A person who sees negative events as universal and always true might still find the will to alter his behavior, but only if he believes that doing so might make a difference. If he believes that he himself is the source of his misfortune then what motivation is there to change?

I posed these six scenarios to a group taking the Seven Weeks to Financial Sanity teleconference organized by Galia Gichon and M.P. Dunleavey. What we discovered was that even people who were familiar with Explanatory Styles and Learned Optimism were surprised how often they identified with the pessimistic/negative statement when it came to money. It seems that we can view the world as generally good and believe in our own positive self-agency, and money can still be an area of our lives where we struggle with destructive frames.

Why is this true? Well, perhaps we grew up in a home where money was treated as a great evil or a cause of conflict. Perhaps the consequences we experienced around our earliest financial decisions were too punitive or hard to bear. Perhaps issues of money separated us from others and caused us to feel isolated.

Perhaps we did not have that supportive parental hand guiding us, preventing the worst spills but still allowing for experimentation and learning. Not to blame parents here -- it's much more straightforward to help a child learn to walk than to navigate the complexities of financial self-care.

Whatever the particular cause (or more likely accumulation and reinforcement of causes), it behooves us to think about how we view ourselves as agents in a money world. The benefit of being an adult is that you can bring events from the past forward into consciousness and apply adult maturity and cognition to understanding them. This new understanding can, with applied practice, become a new cognitive frame that supports healthy financial self-care.

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ING Direct "Funny Money?!" Event on May 21st, 2008

I'm going to be participating in an event on May 21st in conjunction with ING Direct NY Cafe. The event is geared toward engaging artists and performers to think about the ways they use money to take care of themselves. Below is the press release. If you are interested in the event and are in the New York area I encourage you to RSVP to cafenyterm1@ingdirect.com and stop by. All attendees are eligible to sign up for a savings account that starts with a $25 balance, and there are raffles for other financial prizes.

For Immediate Release
Contact: Katie Northlich, ING DIRECT NY Café, knorthlich@ingdirect.com, 302-255- 3394; Diana Santana, ING DIRECT NY Café, dsantana@ingdirect.com, 302-255-3407.

New York, NY (5/01/2008)–ING DIRECT NY Café, The Actors Fund, and comedians Rick Younger, Keith Alberstadt, and Mike Siscoe team up to present FUNNY MONEY?!, a night of entertaining and informative dialogue on financial challenges artists and performers face in New York City. On Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 6:30PM at the ING DIRECT NY Café (45 E. 49 Street, between Park and Madison Avenues), these hilarious comedians lighten up the crowd for the financial solutions provided by Amanda Clayman of The Actors Fund and the savings solutions of ING DIRECT. Entry is free. Food, beverage, and door prizes are provided. Please RSVP to cafenyterm1@ingdirect.com by May 19, 2008.

Rick Younger has made audiences around the nation roll in laughter. From television to the Broadway stage, Rick’s performances have shined on BET's Comic View, It's Showtime at the Apollo, NBC's Last Comic Standing, NBC’s The Today Show, the Broadway musical RENT and popular national commercials for Verizon, Staples, and McDonald’s. His current status as star of The Rick Younger Show, featuring Dean Edwards (SNL) and Todd Lynn (My Wife and Kids), allows Rick to give the audience what they need most – the joy of laughter and the comedic energy of Rick Younger.

Keith Alberstadt has entertained audiences nationwide with his easy-going sense of humor and approachable personality. Appearing on the nationally syndicated Bob and Tom Show, The John Boy and Billy Show (radio), and the Boston Comedy and Film Festival, Keith delivers consistently entertaining performances. He has traveled the globe entertaining U.S. troops in Kuwait, Iraq, and beyond, and has been featured on Country Music Television's "Funniest Video Countdown" and "Greatest Redneck Moments." Keith is a contributing writer for National Lampoon's syndicated "Sports Minute" and for The Complete Sheet, a nationally broadcasted radio show.

Mike Siscoe’s quick-witted, high energy shows keep audiences laughing for hours. Voted funniest comic in San Diego by The Reader (1999), Mike began his stand-up career in 1997 at the world-famous Comedy Store in La Jolla, CA and was soon opening for Tommy Davidson, Jeff Altman, Mitch Hedberg, Margaret Cho and Richard Jeni. Now based in NYC, Mike performs at marquee clubs including Gotham, The Laugh Factory, The Improv, Dangerfield’s, and The Laugh Lounge. He has also been featured in national television commercials.

ING DIRECT, fsb is best known as the revolutionary on-line savings bank whose mission is to “Lead Americans back to Savings.” Operating in the US for 8 years, ING DIRECT has stayed ahead of competitors by providing exceptional customer service, high yielding savings products with no minimum requirements and no monthly fees, and through its innovative Cafés, the face-to-face interaction with the internet bank. ING DIRECT NY Café is the only one of its kind in the NY region and is a focal point for customer interaction and outreach.

The Actors Fund is a nationwide human services organization that helps professionals in performing arts and entertainment by providing programs and services such as supportive and affordable housing, emergency financial assistance, employment and training services, and skilled nursing and assisted living care for those in need, crisis, or transition.

Amanda Clayman, a pioneer in the field of Financial Wellness, counsels individuals and couples on the topic and has developed a number of workshops that support the unique financial challenges facing entertainment industry and performing arts professionals.

Media: For information, press inquires, or interviews, please contact Katie Northlich, ING DIRECT, knorthlich@ingdirect.com, 302-255- 3394, or Diana Santana, dsantana@ingdirect.com, 302-255-3407. For more information on the comedians or institutions, please visit http://www.rickyounger.net/; http://www.keithcomedy.com/; http://www.mikesiscoe.com/; http://www.ingdirect.com/; or http://www.actorsfund.com/.

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