Tag: financial wellness programs

Financial wellness has taken on a new relevance in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts share tips on how advisers can figure out how to offer access to best-in-breed programs to enrich overall benefits programs and participant outcomes.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to lead to an increase in financial concerns, a Retirement Advisor Council guide suggests key financial well-being strategies.

Cash back on spending can be contributed to a 401(k), 529 plan or HSA.

Everyone needs to review their budget and financial goals in light of economic uncertainty and the recent stock market correction, BrightPlan says.

Financial Finesse enterprise (FFe) is focused on serving financial services firms seeking to evolve their impact by providing participants with access to financial coaching resources designed to accommodate all life stages.

The tool also calculates its own financial wellness score for participants and employers. 

My Learning Center offers a financial wellness assessment, retirement calculators, webinar recordings, podcasts, videos, articles and other resources previously available in different areas of the participant website, all in one location.

Among those that are, they are more likely than others to have measured their employees’ financial wellness.

It is available for all plan participants through CUNA Mutual Retirement Solutions’ BenefitsForYou website, and there is no cost to participants or plan sponsors.

“More robust programs—which go beyond just education—tend to cost more for plan sponsors. But, they include features such as on-site support, account aggregation, budget tracking and goal setting,” says Claire Daly, Corporate Insight.

The Center for State & Local Government Excellence notes that with many local governments shifting benefits decisions to workers, those workers need help understanding finance basics.

It will be available to all clients and joins a number of other financial wellness programs that ADP already makes available.

Employees expressed concerns about budgeting, health care and emergency funds, and low levels of knowledge about financial and retirement topics were reported.

Few employers surveyed by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) currently consider the financial wellness initiatives as “holistic” programs, and they noted challenges to offering these programs.

UBS Equity Plan Advisory Services released financial wellness digital content offering to equity compensation plan participants, which the firm says is a step towards a broader workplace financial wellness rollout to its corporate clients.

For a company with 50,000 employees, this could lead to a savings of $65 million to $97 million a year, Financial Finesse found.

Advisers and their plan sponsor clients will have access to financial planning technology and a hub of deployable assets, including a financial wellness assessment to identify top priorities.