“Sixty-three percent of Americans don’t have $500 in a savings account.”
Americans are in financial trouble. Sixty-three percent don’t have $500 in a savings account; more than 70 percent have less than $15,000 saved for retirement.
Three-quarters of Americans are struggling with debt and the average debt per person (excluding mortgages or home equity loans) is $37,000. The vast majority of Millennials say they worry about their financial lives constantly. Financial stress has become overwhelming.
For the past 25 years, award-winning nationally-syndicated columnist, Ilyce Glink, has been demystifying money for millions of Americans through her newspaper column, popular radio show and blogs. She has also been working for financial services companies eager to connect in a stronger and more engaging way with their customers and employees. Several companies asked her to design financial wellness programs as a vehicle to either sell their products and services or get consumer assets under management.
Knowing that most employees are financially stressed, and only about half take advantage of an employer’s 401k plan, she didn’t think it made sense to try to sell them goods and services they didn’t need. So, she decided to take a different path: Create a mobile-first system that helps people measure their level of financial stress in up to 15 categories, then push the most relevant information, tools, and calculators to them so they get the help and information they need, not a thinly-veiled sales pitch for other products and services they likely can’t afford.
Glink paired her tech platform with “Money Coaches,” who are experts at providing the sort of budget, debt, credit, housing, and bankruptcy counseling so desperately needed by the vast majority of Americans. These Money Coaches undertake more than 100,000 sessions per year.
She founded Best Money Moves in 2016, launched the product into Beta in September. The company started signing up companies in 2017.