Ilyce Glink, Author at Best Money Moves

Employee Benefits 2020: Why Employees Want Financial Wellness

by Ilyce Glink | Oct 2, 2019 | Blog

Employee benefits 2020: why employees want financial wellness. Financial stress has permeated all corners of the workforce and employees need your help to stop it.

In their annual survey on employee benefits, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) discovered that financial wellness is one of the top benefits most employees want in 2020.

Employee Benefits 2020: Why Employees Want Financial Wellness

Why do employees want financial wellness? Well, they’re financially stressed. Seriously stressed. A Mercer study from 2017 found that employees spend an average of 3 to 5 work hours per week working on issues related to personal finance.

From an employer’s perspective, providing overall financial wellness tools and resources as an employee benefit would have been unheard of a generation ago. But today, 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and financial stress has permeated all corners of the workforce.

There are four generations of employees in the workplace (Gen-Z, Millennials, Gen-X and Baby Boomers), and all are dealing with most of the same financial issues. But, they experience that financial stress in different ways. That’s why providing the right mix of financial wellness tools and resources that can provide personalized and contextual assistance is table stakes.

How Financial Stress Affects Your Employees

Here’s a quick look at the four generations and some of the financial issues they’re struggling to manage:

Gen-Z: They’re dealing with high student loans and credit issues due to late payments on bills. Nearly a third are worrying about paying for housing (renting, not owning) and 28% worry about hunger. Overall, there’s a lot of general money angst.

Millennials: This generation is $1 trillion in debt, which is more debt than any generation in history. Student loans make up the majority of that debt. A third have a credit score that is subprime or lower. The average age for buying a first home is 34, the highest in history and this cohort owns fewer homes than previous generations. Childcare can cost up to 50% of their income, and more than half are getting some sort of financial help from their parents.

Gen-X: This generation has the most credit card debt of any demographic. They’re in their peak earning years, but it’s also the peak debt years – and they’re caring for children and their aging parents (25% provide financial support to their parents) all at the same time. They’re saving for college tuition or paying their parental contribution, or just providing financial support (nearly 50%) to their adult children. That’s why they’re so retirement un-ready: One third has no retirement savings at all.

Baby Boomers: Their financial stress centers around longevity – theirs. Baby Boomers are living longer and since they don’t have much in the way of retirement savings, they’re staying in the workforce longer, too. They worry about paying for their grandchildren’s college educations and their own healthcare costs in retirement. They need to work, but they want some flexibility, too.

More on Employee Benefits Trends and Financial Wellness

5 Must-Have Benefits for Millennial Employees

How Does Financial Wellness Affect Health?

5 Fast Financial Stress Statistics

Hiring Trends to Watch in 2020

What Is Financial Literacy and Why Is It Important?

4 Big Employee Benefit Trends for Family Planning

How Can Financial Wellness Be Improved?

Top 10 Employee Benefits for 2020

Best Money Moves to Provide Financial Wellness for SAP SuccessFactors’ New HR Community

by Ilyce Glink | Sep 13, 2018 | Blog

LAS VEGAS, NV – September 13, 2018 – Best Money Moves, an award-winning financial wellness technology platform, announced it has been selected as the financial wellness provider for SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) SuccessFactors’ new Community, designed to tackle the most critical people issues facing human resources (HR) professionals and business leaders today.

SAP SuccessFactors is starting with a handful of best-in-class organizations of all sizes, from enterprises to startups, to co-create “simple solutions to big problems” through stand-alone, purpose-built and easy-to-consume applications.

“Today, we are seeing unprecedented levels of innovation in HR technology,” SAP SuccessFactors President Greg Tomb said. “We believe this wave of innovation will result in a ‘human revolution’ that will allow businesses to focus time, talent and energy on the thing that really matters: the people that lead to business outcomes. With this community, we can help assemble the right set of solutions for our customers’ diverse needs. And, if they don’t exist yet, we can co-create them together.”

“We are thrilled to be adding our financial wellness + coaching platform to SAP SuccessFactors’ new HR Community,” said Ilyce Glink, founder and CEO of Best Money Moves and an award-winning financial journalist and book author. “SAP SuccessFactors’ provides best-in-class HR technology to thousands of companies and millions of employees globally. We look forward to helping all of them measure and dial down their financial stress.”

The new community consists of partners organized around six initial pillars: well-being, pay equity, real-time feedback, unbiased recruiting, predictive performance and internal mobility. SAP SuccessFactors offers customers a curated set of solutions to augment their existing systems and tap into the latest sources of innovation faster than ever. SAP SuccessFactors also provides an open platform and tools to help developers and entrepreneurs create the next generation of HR solutions. SAP SuccessFactors will continue to expand its network of partners and pillars in the coming quarters to cover all aspects of the employee journey.

SAP SuccessFactors is working together with Thrive Global to operationalize a culture of well-being and improve the employee experience overall. Like SuccessFactors, Thrive Global believes that to inspire peak performance in employees and companies, it is critical to focus on the human element. Together with SAP SuccessFactors and Thrive, organizations can truly offer a comprehensive well-being strategy for their employees.

In addition to Best Money Moves, a number of additional partners in the community are working to solve critical people issues:

Ensure employees are paid equitably with PayScale
Provide insightful feedback to enhance employee effectiveness with Cultivate and CultureAmp
Achieve diversity goals and eliminate recruiting bias with Blendoor and Brilliant Hire
Assess talent more accurately to hire the most qualified candidates with Plum and HiredScore
Mobilize the workforce to cover understaffing with Andjaro

“An open community focused on solving big people issues is exactly what business leaders and HR leaders need today,” said Penny Stoker, Global HR Services Leader for EY. “From curated content enabling behavior change to bias-free hiring and financial well-being management, SAP SuccessFactors has curated a set of rising stars in the HR tech industry.”

About Best Money Moves

A cloud-based, mobile-first financial wellness technology platform, Best Money Moves helps employees measure their level of financial stress and dial it down using a unique content-mapping system, powered by machine learning. Best Money Moves measures stress in 15 categories, and incorporates live money coaching as well as an extraordinary level of company-level customization, so that employers can dig into unique insights, and understand more about how their employees financial stress impacts everything from retention, turnover, and workplace accidents, to unexplained absences, healthcare costs and outcomes and other issues. Best Money Moves placed 3rd in the 2017 Next Great HR Tech Company competition, and was named a Top 20 Financial Wellness provider by MyShortlister. For information, visit BestMoneyMoves.com.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 404,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com or the SAP News Center.

Why I Started Best Money Moves

by Ilyce Glink | Sep 6, 2018 | Blog

Updated September 19th, 2019: The Best Money Moves Team is heading to HR Tech and SAP’s SuccessConnect in Las Vegas. Will you be attending either of these events? If so, please stop by and say hello. We’d love to show you our Best Money Moves financial wellness solution and explain why we’re winning awards, closing deals and making employees everywhere smarter about money.

The Best Money Moves team is headed to HR Tech and SAP’s SuccessConnect. While we’re en route to Las Vegas, I’d like to share with you why I started Best Money Moves, a mobile-first, cloud-based technology + coaching platform designed to help people measure their level of financial stress and dial it down in order to get control of their financial lives.

I’m a longtime financial journalist, syndicated columnist, book author and radio talk show host. I’ve been helping people make smarter decisions with their money for more years than I care to count! Five years ago, I was hired by three different companies to design financial wellness programs. Their intent was to create an opportunity to sell their own services by giving a veneer of financial education to employees.

Given that we were in the aftermath of the Great Recession, I didn’t think that would work. And, it didn’t. None of the companies wound up creating a successful product because the truth was – and is – that the majority of employees are broke.

How broke? Forty percent don’t even have $400 in cash for emergencies, and less than 75% don’t have $15,000 saved in a 401k. In my book, that’s pretty broke.

One day, I had an insight that would change the trajectory of my career – which up until then had been spent as a financial journalist and the owner of a content production company specializing in financial information.

I realized that financial wellness companies fall into a couple of categories:

1. Niche products. These try to solve student loan problems for Millennials, or they claim to help you save for retirement by taking the change from a cup of coffee (which you shouldn’t be buying) and socking it away somewhere or helping you earn a little more interest on your savings, or they help you get paid faster, sometimes by the end of the day so you don’t have to get a payday loan.
2. Products that try to sell you things. Like the products I was asked to design, these push credit cards, loans, different types of insurance and other things that most employees don’t need and can’t afford.
3. Financial education products. These are typically course-based and require employees to do a lot of general learning about money before they can figure out how to solve their problems.
4. Products that try to get assets under management. These tell you all about saving for retirement, and encourage you to get into their robo-investing platforms with whatever cash you have available.

Here’s my insight: No one was attacking the problem from the perspective of the employee: They’re extremely stressed about money and have pain points they want to solve now. And, they need help.

So, what if we designed a program that would help the employee understand the root cause of their financial stressors (because, there’s always more than one), use algorithms and machine learning (you know, the cool stuff) to push relevant, personalized information and solutions? What if we helped employees solve the financial problems they have today, across a wide spectrum of issues? Everything from student loans and credit card debt to identity theft, marital issues and elder care?

And, what if we let employees drive it?

Best Money Moves is my answer to the problem of employee financial stress. I know it has a huge ROI for employers, whether you’re trying to measure the effect of financial stress on healthcare costs and outcomes or retention or workplace accidents or unexplained absences. (Our technology can be used to measure all of these issues, and more. Just ask us how.)

Having spent a long career helping people make smarter decisions with their money, I knew there was a better way to help. So, we created a mobile-first platform that is simple to use, easy to understand, yet provides a great depth of knowledge across a wide spectrum of issues. And, we used the latest tech tools so the product would be smart enough to be personalized and relevant. And, we offered employers real-time metrics so they would have the same wonderful experience that they were providing to their employees.

Best Money Moves came out of beta in 2017 and has been winning awards, customers and accolades ever since.

Financial wellness is getting a lot of attention these days, but wherever we go, CEOs, CHROs, and CFOs are fascinated by the Best Money Moves Stressometer™, which is our primary financial stress assessment tool. We break down financial stress into 14 categories and use interactive algorithms to delve deeper and identify the root causes of someone’s financial stress.

The Stressometer™ is just one tool that differentiates Best Money Moves from other financial wellness services. We also have 540 original pieces of objective, custom-created content: video, written articles, calculators and other tools. We’re gamified, with contests that carry cash prizes. We allow our customers to customize Best Money Moves to an incredible degree – because each company is different, and we want to support their company culture.

And, it’s working. Financial stress levels are starting to go down for our customer’s employees. It’s not a magical overnight experience: Financial stress is real, and does more than keep your employees up at night so they’re less productive during the day. But for those employees using our product, they’re finding relief. And, that’s just the beginning of the ROI that companies enjoy.

As Founder/CEO of Best Money Moves, I’m proud that we’re helping people reduce their level of financial stress. We’ve figured out how to help your employees understand their finances better, dig their way out of debt, and feel more empowered to handle the everyday money issues they face.

So, if you’re at SAP SuccessConnect or if you’re attending the 2019 HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas stop by the Best Money Moves at booth #2550 to say hello and learn how you can bring financial wellness to your company in 2020.

Money and Health Are Tied Together. Here’s What We Know

by Ilyce Glink | Apr 5, 2018 | Blog

The Connection Between Financial Stress and Poor Health Outcomes

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the connection between money and health – specifically how the financial stress you feel translates directly into poor health outcomes.

In short, when you’re stressed about money you are much more likely to get sick, maybe even really sick.

This past week, I gave a talk about the connection between financial stress and health at the Health Benefits Leadership Conference, at the Aria hotel in Las Vegas. In doing the research for this speech, I looked at several studies that have proven this connection – something you probably knew inside your head and heart, but are probably glad there’s some hard data to back it up.

In 2014, researchers published a review of 33 peer-reviewed studies demonstrating serious health effects related to indebtedness. Individuals who couldn’t make their monthly loan payments thought about suicide and suffered from depression more than those without debt.

If you can’t pay your bills, you’re also likely to have poorer subjective health and health-related behavior. Like Cardio Vascular Disease. Turns out, financial stress may increase the risks of incident CVD and all-cause mortality, particularly among men.

The risks are greater in men living in single households and in women who don’t have cash in the bank at the end of the month. (Living with a partner seems to protect men, but not women, from getting sick because of ill-health associated with financial stress due to a lack of extra cash on hand.)

Of course, According to L Casey Chosewood, director of the Office for Total Worker Health, a the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, work influences critical choices around tobacco use, physical activity and other health behaviors. Workplace stress affects these choices. But when you feel like you don’t earn enough, you’re much more likely to smoke more, workout less, take worse care of yourself, use drugs and eat less healthily.

All of this factors into poor health outcomes. And, much of it can be reduced, if not avoided, over time. But it take times to implement new programs that will lower workplace stress, and help employees take back control over their financial lives, lowering financial stress.

Millennials Turn To Employers For Financial Wellness

by Ilyce Glink | Nov 16, 2017 | Blog

Who cares most about money? Millennials do. And in a twist, they’re turning to their employers for financial wellness information and tools they can trust.

According to new findings from Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s 2017 Workplace Benefits Report Millennial Supplement, Millennials spend more time at work worrying about their personal financial wellness than their older counterparts, and they are actively looking to their employers for tools, education, support and guidance.

Around 40 percent of employees say they would like their employer to provide additional help with financial matters, but an even higher proportion of Millennials are asking for help.

According to the 2017 Workplace Benefits Report, a significant number of Millennials say they feel unprepared to manage their finances and need help with topics across the financial wellness spectrum, including saving for retirement (43 percent), general savings help (40 percent), paying down or managing debt (34 percent), saving for major expenses (36 percent) and budgeting (31 percent).

The report also found that:

More than 40 percent of Millennials say that they left high school and college unprepared for the real world
43 percent want more help with investing
40 percent wanting more information on how to do their taxes
21 percent of Millennials say they want more help with saving for a home
18 percent want help with their student loans

Nearly half of Millennials want their employer to provide access to a variety of financial wellness tools, including a financial professional who can help create a personalized financial strategy. Forty-six percent of Millennials want their employer to bring in financial experts to provide additional training and education about financial matters. And, 45 percent want their employer to provide education and tailored training that is tailored to specific age groups or that is customized to financial issues they’re currently facing.

Financial stress is a huge issue for employers and employees. Mercer recently released a study that concluded that $250 billion is lost to financial stress each year, with employees spending an average of 12 work hours each month focused on their financial issues. PwC’s 2017 Employee Financial Wellness Survey found that 53 percent of employees are stressed about their finances.

Millennials, who are burdened with the weight of student loans, are more financially stressed than any other generation, so it’s not surprising they spend more work hours than average focused on their personal financial issues.

One of the surprising findings of the Bank of America Merrill Lynch report is that the lack of confidence in financial matters affects Millennials’ workplace behavior. On average, employees spend 3 work hours each week (12 hours per month) dealing with financial stressors. However, more than 60 percent of Millennials are spending an average of four work hours each week on personal financial matters, the study found.

Changing the Financial Wellness Paradigm at Work

Thirty years ago, employees would have never dreamed of asking their employer for help in reducing financial stress and solving big financial problems. And, employers wouldn’t have thought to offer.

Today, more employers have made the connection between financial stress and lower levels of productivity and retention, higher absenteeism and health care costs, and their related outcomes. They’re listening to their employees who are asking for a best-in-class solution that identifies the underlying causes of financial stress and proffers personalized solutions to dial it down.

But providing reading material doesn’t help employees reduce financial stress. Measuring financial stress and then creating personalized action plans based on deeply specific, personal insights is what Best Money Moves does best.

Best Money Moves is an award-winning, cloud-based, mobile-first platform+coaching program that provides unique insights about money and financial stress to employees and employers, and uses machine learning to drive personalized information and solutions.

Find out how we can help you reduce financial stress for your employees, customers, faculty and students. Visit BestMoneyMoves.com for details or email info@bestmoneymoves.com.

Ilyce Glink is the Founder/CEO of Best Money Moves, an award-winning financial journalist, radio talk show host and the author of 14 books on personal finance and real estate topics.