Nicole Smith, Author at Best Money Moves

What’s The Best Move When Your Employees Are Stressed About Healthcare Costs?

by Nicole Smith | Feb 21, 2018 | Blog

In this week’s Best Money Moves roundup, we take a look at news stories and new research studies that may impact employee benefits and HR issues. We hope you find this news roundup helpful, and we’d love your feedback.

Healthcare costs are rising as uncertainty around the fate of the Affordable Care Act mounts. And, soaring healthcare costs translates into a higher level of financial stress for your employees. More than half of employees worry about what will happen to their finances if they become ill and are unable to work. Research shows that significant financial stress leads to lower rates of productivity and higher rates of absenteeism. Financial stress has also been shown to cause physical illness among some employees, resulting in even worse health prognoses.

But, there is a solution. The best fix for fears around money and financial stress is knowledge. Increasing your employees’ knowledge of the benefits you already offer, while providing access to key information, tools and solutions will help your employees be less financially stressed and more productive while at work and throughout their lives.

Your Employees Are Stressed About Healthcare Costs. What Can You Do?

Your Company’s “tax inversion” may cost you big time. Tax reform is turning the tables on companies who have previously moved overseas to (get this!) save money on taxes and experts are predicting a shift and a return home for US companies based abroad.

Will new taxation bring companies back to the US?

Fact: Employees with money angst are less present and less productive. Nearly half of employees who are worried about their financial health miss more work and are less productive when in the office. How can you bring your team to a place of financial wellness

How Improving Financial Health Boosts Productivity

Is your company’s innovation at a stand-still? Studies show that lack of time is the largest barrier to organizational growth and innovation. Nearly 82% of study participants said they’re too focused on day-to-day challenges and simply have no time to be creative.

5 ways to inspire innovation

Financial stress is bad for your health. It not only causes medical costs to become more difficult to manage, financial stress actually causes poor health. Being stressed about money can put you – and your employees – at higher risk for low quality health.

How chronic money stress affects your health

Is HR responsible for creating an ethical workplace culture? Or should it fall on the executive team to set the right tone? Someone needs to take the reigns and responsibility for creating and maintaining ethics within the workplace. Here, two experts debate.

HR or executive team – who’s responsible?

How do you budget for your business? Good budgeting is a key component when starting and building a successful business. Is not knowing where to start preventing you from taking that important first step?

10 Budgeting Tips for Your Business

Which legal missteps does your business need to avoid? Being successful in business doesn’t require an MBA or a law degree. But you need to know when it’s time to ask for help to avoid making rookie legal mistakes. Read attorney Ticora Davis’s insight on the subject.

Common small business mistakes to avoid

Have something to add? Email info@bestmoneymoves.com.

A Feature on Best Money Moves’ Co-Founder and President, Angus Carroll

by Nicole Smith | Feb 14, 2018 | Blog

Get to know the team behind Best Money Moves!

This week, I’ve had the pleasure of highlighting Best Money Moves’ co-founder and President, Angus Carroll. Before founding Best Money Moves with Ilyce Glink, Carroll held executive positions in technology, marketing and business development at Fortune 500 companies (Dun & Bradstreet, Ceridian) and small technology companies (Medicus, MindLeaders). He was VP of Editorial and Production at Cengage Learning, one of the largest educational publishers in the U.S.

When not overseeing development for Best Money Moves, Carroll lives outside of Detroit with his wife Susan, their son Ian, their two cats Stormy and Marshmallow and an attic full of dinosaur fossils and rare books.

Angus, explain Best Money Moves in one sentence.

Best Money Moves helps people reclaim control of their finances by creating a budget, paying down their debt and saving for their future.

How did you get involved with Best Money Moves?

Well, BMM didn’t come out of the blue. It’s the brainchild of Ilyce Glink, a personal finance expert and consumer advocate with more than 20 years of experience helping people take control of their financial future, as seen in her best-selling book, 100 Questions every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask (now celebrating it’s 4th edition). She knows how to talk to people about their money.

I met Ilyce while we were working on a project for Medicare. We liked working together and made a great team. We knew there was more we could accomplish when it came to financial wellness, so we built a career successfully managing financial wellness projects for large companies. But, everyone we worked for was trying to use financial wellness to sell something as opposed to just helping people. There was no platform on the market that provided financial advice without a sales pitch – so we built one ourselves.

Why is Best Money Moves the best personal financial wellness platform?

Ilyce’s background as a finance expert along with my experience building online services has helped us create a best-in-class product. We believe that financial wellness is something that every employer should provide to their employee, and now they can – at an affordable price. Our content is unbiased and focused entirely on helping people make better decisions. No ads, no “special offers” – it’s all about quality content and guidance.

Are there any new features or milestones on the horizon for Best Money Moves?

Yes there are! Mid-year we’ll make it possible to choose to link your Best Money Moves account to your personal bank account and credit cards. That way, you can view a complete picture of your spending. In March, we’ll be releasing another optional feature allowing users to access their credit score – completely free – and import it to their Best Money Moves account. We are very excited about these new features and how they’ll help complete the journey towards financial wellness.

What’s most exciting about the growth of Best Money Moves to date?

The best part is seeing how engaged our users have been with the product. One of our customers has nearly 50 percent of their employees actively engaging with Best Money Moves. That’s extraordinary. This means people are getting real value from our product.

Where do you think your growth will be next year?

We’ve just hired two account executives and they’re off to an incredible start – they’ve had immediate success. I think they are going to be the key to our growth in 2018, selling into medium to large businesses.

If you weren’t building Best Money Moves, what would you be doing?

I would be digging dinosaurs! A friend of mine owns a museum and I join his team in the field whenever possible. I usually go at least once a year, for a week or so to dig with them in the badlands of Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota. A week is about all I can stand – the food is horrible in the field!

Why is now the best time for Best Money Moves?

Companies are realizing how significant of an effect that employee financial stress has on their bottom line. Financially stressed employees have higher rates of lost productivity and absenteeism and even higher healthcare costs than employees who are without financial stress. It just makes sense to provide tools to help employees lower their financial stress – and that’s exactly what Best Money Moves does.

Is Protecting Confidential Employee Data A Priority For Your Company?

by Nicole Smith | Feb 13, 2018 | Blog

Is protecting confidential employee data a priority for your company?

Today, confidential data is at a higher risk of being stolen than ever before. A data security breach can quickly lead to identity theft, creating a chain-reaction of ever-growing problems.

Identity theft is not just stressful for your workforce, it costs your business money. More than half of identity theft victims reported missed time from work. Did you know that work-related stress leads to lost productivity, higher rates of turnover, lowered levels of financial wellness and even puts your employees at a greater risk for significant health problems?

Safeguarding your workforce from identity theft is a constant battle. Stay vigilant when collecting (and storing) sensitive employee data and stay informed on the latest and most innovative cyber-security options.

Show your employees you care about employee data with these five strategic steps.

The Equifax hack may be worse than previously reported. Last year’s hack affected 145 million Americans. In addition to Social security numbers, birth dates, driver’s license numbers and addresses, it is now being reported that tax identification numbers and driver’s license issuance dates were also stolen.

Hackers are stealing your identity – here’s what you need to know

Small business owners need to know about Amazon Web Services. AWS provides software to not only large corporations, but also to small businesses who may be seeking a way to offload software and infrastructure management.

Why your small business may benefit from AWS

Companies understand that happier and healthier employees are more productive. Improving their benefits will help retain your workforce and is much less expensive than raising salaries. With this year’s tax cut, companies are starting to spend a bit more on employee perks – do you know which employee benefits your team wants?

Which perks are the best perks after the new tax cut?

#MeToo hasn’t lessened harassment on professional social media sites. Since October 2017, there’s been a “public reckoning over workplace sexual assault and harassment.” So, why is it still pervasive? Why are inappropriate messages (still) being sent on professional networking sites? Are your employees receiving (or sending) harassing correspondence?

How to deal with cyber-harassers and their victims

Can tax reform influence defined benefit funding decisions? How will these benefit funding decisions impact pension management strategies? If your company is in the midst of figuring out how tax reform will affect everything related to short and long-term spending options, here are four steps that can help guide you – and your decision making.

2018’s tax reform and your company’s spending decisions

Are you attempting to build a diverse and inclusive workplace? We certainly hope so! Here are the most impactful recruiting trends when you want to recruit for diversity, inclusion, and social fit. Do you need to completely overhaul your company culture?

Refresh your selection criteria for an inclusive workplace

Color, texture, technology and atmosphere. These aren’t necessarily the words you think of when imagining positive affectivity and productivity in an office space. But, workplaces have come a long way – investing in person-friendly work environments improves efficiency, enhances productivity and inspires innovation.

Top workplace design trends for 2018

Mastering the High Stakes Benefits of Employee Financial Wellness

by Nicole Smith | Feb 7, 2018 | Blog

More employers recognize that financial wellness is table stakes for employees. What has also become apparent is that simply providing a 401(k) and retirement planning advice isn’t enough to reduce the financial stress almost all employees feel. Your employees need more.

Many employees struggle with paying down debt. They often have significant, unreimbursed, medical expenses or may be experiencing other financial hardships. This means they don’t always have the option to set aside funds for retirement, and have to “opt-out” of employer-sponsored savings plans simply because they can’t afford it..

From the employer’s point of view, adding one more benefit to an increasingly expensive pot might seem like a waste of money, especially if the employee benefits you’re providing aren’t being fully utilized.

But when it comes to financial wellness, the calculus is different. Forty-nine percent of employees feel that their workplace productivity would increase if their employer-sponsored benefits included financial planning programs in addition to existing retirement savings assistance. While retirement planning benefits are important, they don’t come close to capturing the full financial wellness needs of your workforce. Employees with financial security are much more motivated and focused at work.

In this week’s blog post, we run down the reasons that:

Financial Wellness Is About More Than Just Retirement Planning Advice

Do you feel like workplace financial wellness is out of reach? Ideally, financial wellness programs will lower health costs, enhance productivity, boost employee engagement and reduce employee absenteeism and turnover. Often, the only barrier is getting employees to try something new.

How to improve workplace financial wellness

Is your onboarding process thorough enough? If your onboarding process goes beyond basic training to include “acculturation,” then it probably isn’t. Whether it’s for new hires or internal transfers, when you consider the amount of time, staffing and money that goes into your onboarding process, shouldn’t it be fully comprehensive?

The importance of expanding your onboarding process – across the board

Positive investments in small businesses is driving economic growth. Small business investments continued to grow at the end of 2017 as payment delinquencies and defaults remained low. However, some warning signs in financial health are starting to emerge.

Small business investments – what you need to know

How do you know if your corporate wellness program is successful? The answer is much more nuanced than simple numbers and charts although those are important as well. Beyond standard metrics, a successful program will show employees with more energy, enthusiasm, productivity, creativity, higher engagement and lower absenteeism.

Here’s why financial wellness goes beyond numbers

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has altered two important tax breaks for homeowners. Homeowners with large mortgages and home equity loans should be paying attention to the new tax laws, as there are new limits on deductions for state and local taxes. There are fine details that you should read about to see how they’ll affect you – and your employees.

The new tax law may affect you more than you think

Is there a magic number that tells you how much to save for retirement? Or a magic 8-ball that tells you what to do with your retirement investments when the market drops? Unfortunately, magic won’t help you save for retirement. But, planning, saving, thinking outside of the box, doing a lot of research and speaking with an expert just might.

Your retirement savings goes beyond a market dip

Have something to add? Email info@bestmoneymoves.com.

The Student Debt Crisis is Growing and Affecting Your Workforce. What Can You Do?

by Nicole Smith | Jan 30, 2018 | Blog

America has a student loan debt crisis. Employers are paying the price.

Over 44 million Americans are carrying a total of $1.48 trillion in student loans and chances are your employees (and possibly even you) are among those affected. Employees facing significant student loan debt are more likely to defer saving for retirement, buying a home, getting married and having children. (And they’re spending between 12 and 15 work hours each month fretting about their finances.)

They’re also more likely to seek out additional employment to cover their expenses. As a result, their concentration, productivity and overall physical health suffers – as does your company’s bottom line.

Meanwhile, the financial cost of higher education is only increasing with time, matriculating well-educated, inexperienced and deeply indebted graduates into the workforce.

Empowering your employees with financial know-how is the key to reducing financial stress, managing their student loan debt and creating financial wellness.

Make no mistake: student debt affects your employees’ ability to plan for the future and build productive and meaningful relationships. For employers, providing access to financial wellness through financial literacy and financial planning benefits programs means you’ll be able to attract and hold on to talented employees.

The cost of a higher education shouldn’t cost your company a good work force and it shouldn’t hold your employees back from planning their future. Read this week’s story to learn about 10 things you need to know about your employee’s student loan debt.

Employee Student Loan Debt: 10 Things You Need To Know (Part I)

How does a dynamic team stay on the same page? Between remote workers, local employees, freelancers and executives, Quartz has found that “virtual coffee breaks,” annual summits and transparency through a 1,000+ page handbook keeps everyone in their company looped in to cultural norms and work processes.

Can transparent communication guidelines actually connect your team?

Are you trying to grow your female IT workforce? Women make up a smaller share of both the private and public IT workforce. Five female federal executives offer advice on how women can succeed in public sector IT, despite making up a smaller share of the labor pool. See how the tide is changing.

5 Tips to Stop Backslide of Women in Government Tech

Corporate tax savings have arrived! What are America’s largest corporations doing with their millions in slashed taxes and instant savings? Here is a list of S&P 500 companies that have announced bonuses, wage increases and other special investments for their employees based on their new lower tax rate.

Tax savings allows greater investment in employees

It’s never too late to start a late-stage retirement plan. Don’t wake up in a cold panic anymore! Yes, you should have already begun your retirement savings plan – your retirement looms closer every single day. But if you haven’t started already, isn’t it too late? It’s not.

9 immediate steps to take today, to begin your retirement savings.

Cost is no longer the driving force when it comes to benefit platforms. What are the many factors taking priority over cost? Ease of use for benefits administrators and their employees as well as the ability to integrate new benefits technology with existing HR information systems – and that’s not all…

Employers are choosing user experience over cost.

Are you living in a Smart City? In March, the Smart Cities Council 2018 Readiness Challenge Grants will announce 5 winners from a list of 9 regional finalists. They’ll access workshops, products and services to bolster initiatives in infrastructure, open data platforms, Internet of Things (IoT), public Wi-Fi, sustainability and more.

What would you do with a Readiness Challenge Grant?

Is your city in one of the top six US office markets? 2017’s commercial property market experienced a lag in tenants, while office space availability has remained steady since 2016. Tenants at the end of 2017 occupied 21 million square feet more office space than they did at the beginning of the year.

How will economic diversity and population flow affect the office market for 2018?

Have something to add? Email info@bestmoneymoves.com.