Dollars and Sense in the Workplace

Dollars and Sense in the Workplace

Hosts: Steve Boese and Trish Steed

Guest: Ilyce Glink, Founder & CEO of Best Money Moves

Summary

In this episode, Steve and Trish discuss the importance of financial wellness in the workplace with Ilyce Glink from Best Money Moves. They explore how financial stress impacts employee mental health and productivity, the evolution of financial wellness tools, and the role of employers in providing financial education to their employees. They highlight the need for personalized financial solutions and the integration of AI in financial wellness programs, as well as the importance of privacy and security in handling financial information.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Financial Wellness

03:00 The Evolution of Financial Wellness Tools

05:56 Understanding Financial Stress and Its Impact

12:02 Generational Perspectives on Financial Wellness

14:56 The Connection Between Financial and Mental Health

18:00 Privacy and Security in Financial Wellness

24:01 The Importance of Holistic Financial Support

26:56 Future Trends in Financial Wellness

Thank you for your continued support of the show and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!

This episode of At Work in America is sponsored by Paychex, one of the leading providers of HR, payroll, retirement, and insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes. Here’s a stat for you: 85% of businesses are expecting higher revenue this year, but many are still worried about economic uncertainty, talent shortages, and rising costs. Sound familiar? That’s why you need to check out the results of the sixth annual Priorities for Business Leaders survey from our friends at Paychex. They’ve surveyed companies just like yours to uncover the top challenges and strategies driving business success in 2025 — from streamlining HR tasks to setting employees up for growth. Curious? Head to paychex.com/awiato read the full report. Don’t just guess your priorities — know them.

Transcript

Announcer 0:00
Welcome to At Work in America, sponsored by Paychex. At Work in America digs in behind the headlines and trends to the stories of real people making a difference in the world of work. And now here are your hosts, Steve Boese and Trish Steed.

Steve 0:28
Welcome back to the At Work in America podcast. My name is Steve Boese. It’s so great to be with you. I’m joined by Trish Steed. Trish, how are you doing?

Trish 0:36
Really well today, I’ve survived the cold, I think, and we’re starting to get some higher temperatures. How about you?

Steve 0:42
Oh, fantastic doing well. Excited for today’s show. Ilyce Glink is with us. Good morning, Ilyce. We’ll introduce you formally in a second. We are going to talk about financial wellness today, and who else to get to talk about that but Ilyce. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Ilyce Glink 0:59
It’s such a pleasure. It’s always great to be with you guys.

Steve 1:03
Trish, let’s thank our friends at Paychex. Of course, they have done so much for us. They continue to be great supporters for us. They actually introduced some financial well being and wellness tools into their platform at the end of last year, which so it’s a good connection right to what we’re talking about today. So we also want to invite people to check out our trends report at H3HR.com where financial well being is trend number two that we identified for 2025. You can download the report for free there. So Trish, we’re sponsored by our friends at Paychex. Did you know Trish? 85% of businesses are expecting higher revenue this year.

Trish 1:42
I didn’t know that. It did not until I read the report.

Steve 1:45
Yeah, but many are still worried about uncertainty, talent shortages, rising costs, etc, etc. Our friends at Paychex have released their priorities for business leaders survey. It’s their sixth annual one. They’ve surveyed all kinds of companies about their challenges and their opportunities and ways to drive success in 2025 and they’ve made that report available at paychex.com/awia, so please go check it out there.

Steve 2:17
Alright, let’s, let’s introduce Ilyce formally to the show. We’re excited to welcome her back to the show. She’s the founder and CEO of Best Money Moves, and we’re going to talk about well being, how it affects employers and employees. Ilyce is a serial entrepreneur. She writes a twice weekly syndicated real estate and personal finance column that appears in worth in more than 30 newspapers. She is the paid columnist for Slate Magazine, and is a business reporter and fill in talk show host for WGN radio. And then she serves on the advisory boards of incredible credit financial and the YWCA impact investing Advisory Council and a startup AI company. I don’t know how you have time to do all that Ilyce and still run Best Money Moves, but welcome to the show, and glad you’re awake with all the work you’re doing.

Ilyce Glink 3:03
I stopped sleeping years ago. I found it was a real waste of time.

Trish 3:09
Well, you know what my dad always told me growing up, like, if you need something done, you find the busiest person. And I think at least you’re the busiest person I’ve found.

Steve 3:18
I don’t want to get all weird, but you find a woman too, by the way. I mean, that’s what you do. If you need a lot of things done, absolutely.

Ilyce Glink 3:26
You just want to manage your time. That’s really all it is, right?

Trish 3:29
That’s right. That’s right. Well, we’re excited to have you on today. I mean, at least not just from the perspective of, obviously, it’s a trend that we’ve been talking about for the last few years, especially, but just in my time in human resources, and all of the times people come to HR for advice and help with financial matters, from buying your first home, your first car, all the way through retirement questions. This is something that HR leaders get these questions all the time, and we haven’t always had good tools and resources to be able to provide that sort of look at things. So maybe if you could kick off and tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about best money moves and how you’re working with your clients on some of those items.

Ilyce Glink 4:14
Sure, so we started best money moves nine years ago. It’s hard to believe we’re having our ninth we just had our ninth anniversary, and one of the great highlights, and the biggest surprises for us was being part of HR Tech’s next great tech company competition, and we placed in that. We came in third out of 160 companies, yeah. And suddenly people were really interested in what we were talking about. I don’t think before that financial wellness was a thing.

Steve 4:43
I remember that at least very well, and I feel like, yeah, that was my introduction myself, even to the concept and to certainly to technology that can play a factor in helping employees there.

Ilyce Glink 4:54
It was really a confluence of everything I’ve done in my career. I mean, you listed a whole bunch of things. That I’m doing now, but I’ve written 14 books on topics relating to money and real estate. Some of those are behind me. Can see some of the spines because, you know, like a good book author, I’m always face front. But you know, some of that knowledge and and, you know, came to me through some of the other companies that I created. One called Think link media, where we help very large financial services companies like Discover card and Countrywide Mortgage and, you know, a whole bunch of other investment companies figure out ways to better communicate all the value prop that they brought to the table without being salesy right, people will make the right decisions for themselves, and the decision really that the company thinks they should make if you present them with information in the right way. And so that company think link media was really set up to bring and bridge that gap between how people think about money, how they hear those messages right, and how companies need to push that out in order to stay in business. And you know, as a lifelong journalist, a financial journalist, I was used to translating those complicated, jargony, filled messages, you know, legalese that your your company, your investment company, is always sending you that the lawyers have approved.

Ilyce Glink 6:17
And so, you know, taking that knowledge and the experience that I had started to have with the cloud back in 2012 when it was really nascent, you know, we were paying rack space, a company I’m not even sure exists anymore, like $5,000 a month for like, this much space, right? You know, but that experience of working in the cloud, combined with my years of financial well being, combined with realizing that traditional journalism was on the way out, was really the impetus for starting best money moves. The fact that it landed in HR land, where we found you, was really sort of happenstance, because I said to myself, well, people have no money coming out of the Great Recession, and they’re not recovering. Who has money? Ah, employers might have more money than people. Maybe they should pay for it. And so without any experience in in benefit world, I landed in HR land, and it was, it took a few years to really understand how this world worked, but the needs were all the same, right? Because at the end of the day. Employees are people, and they work for one reason only. Generally speaking, I know there’s a big push to you know, just be passionate about your life, but they really work to pay their visa bill. And I understood that, because for many years, that’s what I did, too.

Steve 7:35
And now they work to pay their rent and their grocery bill.

Ilyce Glink 7:39
Right along with the visa bill, they certainly do. It’s, it’s been interesting to watch the evolution of companies understanding that they should care about how their employees think about money and how they use money. And Trish, when you said that, you know, people go to HR and ask how to buy a house, it’s, it was one of the boat most eye opening things for me, when I first started researching whether this idea might work, and I read one of the HR people that I met at a real estate company said, people ask me to solve their credit card debt problems. She said, I have credit card debt. If I could solve it, I would have done it for myself.

Trish 8:20
Right? Well, you know what, I think, at least back in the day, right? I’m talking like 20 years ago, 15 years ago, even before you had created this, you know, people would come and we would refer them to, you know, the EAP, because that’s really all we had. And you’re right, we’re, we’re trying to figure our own finances out. And I think what strikes me, though, is there’s a little bit of a perception that this is something you should be learning at home. Is something your family should teach you, right? They should teach you about money and financial matters and and the reality is that we’ve, we’ve sort of tried to put some of that, maybe into high schools and colleges, right, to teach people how to manage themselves financially and but they’re coming into the workplace, and they still don’t know there are so many that don’t have any experience with handling financial matters. So I think that’s why they do come to HR, and I’m glad that you landed in the HR land, because it’s a real need, regardless of who owns it, right? Air quotes, owns it. Are you hearing kind of that same sort of, like, who should teach people to be financially and fiscally responsible?

Ilyce Glink 9:28
It’s funny, because I do think people who had parents who were fiscally responsible and used money in the right way, you know, I think that the kids picked that up, right? I know my kids have picked it up, you know, maybe your kids did, but I look around at some other people who were, you know, they’re older than me. They’re in their late 60s. Their kids are a mess. I mean, the parents are a mess. The kids are a mess. And these are highly educated, hiring people who are living paycheck to paycheck, by the way. Like more than a third, about a third of people earning a quarter of a million dollars a year are living paycheck to paycheck. Yeah, that number has only been growing, and it’s, it’s kind of shocking, because I think we think about this paycheck to paycheck thing as being for people who are in maybe lower wage industries or earning minimum wage, not true at all. Not true at all, but, but this idea that you know, who should teach, we’ve instituted a whole bunch of different kinds of programs now, at best money moves, where we’re working with community colleges to bring a combination of sort of live training and an amazing platform together, you know, targeted towards college students. We even have one targeted towards high school students, because we feel that although there are like, 28 or 29 states that have mandated financial education for high school students, the quality of that, as you can imagine, varies dramatically. Most of it is garbage, and so kids aren’t when they think they’ve learned something, right? They haven’t. For example, I know of a I won’t name states, right, because we won’t do that, but there’s a state that still teaches kids how to balance their checkbook. Boy, the kids go, what’s a checkbook? state

Trish 11:20
Where I was from, I’m not sure.

Ilyce Glink 11:22
That’s still a thing where nobody wants to pinpoint a state.

Trish 11:25
I know, but you’re right. I think it is there. There’s always outdated things, and technology helps, helps these types of transactions move much more quickly. And you’re right. I think those people who are in high school, college, maybe just out of college, they look at financial matters really differently than maybe those of us that have been in the work world for a long time. Are you seeing kind of people gravitating more to the technology side of it, who are maybe the younger cohort, or is it pretty evenly spread across the age groups?

Ilyce Glink 12:00
You know, we have 1000 companies that are now have best money moves that they’ve made available to their employees, and they are across the spectrum, right? And I, in the beginning, I think younger people were looking at it. But guess what? We’re nine plus years old, and the people who are in their mid 20s are now in their mid 30s. The mid 30s are now in their mid 40s, everybody ages and the workforce. We’ve got five generations in the workforce now, and I think there’s been enough focus on this that older people and older employees are looking for the same solutions. One of the insights that I had, that I think some of my competitors miss, is that we all have the same set of financial problems, but different generations in the workforce come at it in a very different way. So, for example, seniors who may have may or may not have paid off their own college student debt or graduate student debt are now the fastest growing signers of their grandchildren student loans.

Steve 13:02
I did not know that. That’s crazy. Wow.

Ilyce Glink 13:06
I mean, it’s crazy. So when I talk to first of all, they don’t even realize what they’re doing when they do that, right? They do it because the parents can’t qualify right for those loans. So we’ve skipped over a generation, and now grandparents who are in their early 60s, who you know employers might want to have think about retirement right, are now signing these, these loans that are going to take them out 10 to 30 years, right? And they are significant amounts of money because interest rates are now higher, right? Mortgage interest rates, as we’re taping this today, around 7% highest they’ve been since middle of last year. Well, student loan rates go several points above that, and so you’re signing on to a very significant amount of money. You go to your employer for help, and they’re like, Oh, you need student loan help too, but it’s different. Student Loan help because you want them to be able to retire. You want your 20 something to be able to buy a house and feel like you’re giving them enough money. And so what we’ve uncovered is this idea that you’ve really got to not just personalize what you’re doing. A lot of companies talk about personalizing financial wellness. We talk about personal financial wellness, and our new AI system that we are bringing online right now takes into account every single thing you do on our platform, and then it allows you to ask personally, what I should do next. Build me a budget, tell me what my net worth is. What are the next three steps I can do to take you know, lower my credits, raise my credit score, lower my debt personalized is pretty good. We did that for a long time too, but now new large language models in AI will allow us to take this to a level that is literally unparalleled.

Steve 14:55
I want to dig into that a little bit Ilyce, especially around things like. Security and privacy, which are huge issues, particularly around financial information. But before we sort of ask a little bit about that, I maybe want to get your perspective on the connection for employers that you’re working with, one of the things we uncovered as we were digging into this at the end of last year is financial well being and financial stressors are directly related to things like just overall mental health and well being, which bleeds into things like performance at work and absenteeism and even retention, right? There’s, it’s if there’s a through line, right? And often that starts with financial stress. I’d love for you to just maybe share some thoughts about that, and if you’re seeing that, and if employers that you’ve worked with, particularly ones maybe you’ve worked with for some time, if they’re seeing some benefits through that line, right to mental health, to productivity, retention and just success at work.

Ilyce Glink 15:55
Well, you’re exactly right, Steve. I mean, you know having sleepless nights, probably because you’re worried about paying your bills. Are you, you know, finding that you’re anxious during the day, maybe you’re worried about how to make your mortgage payment, or you’ve got a tax bill due. You know, from a side hustle, you started to help pay the rent. We’re we have found that with continual access to the platform and education that our clients have seen a stress reduction of between 11 and 16% for their employees. And one of the things that we do that’s a big differentiator is we don’t just measure financial stress as in, Hey, are you stressed about money? We break it out into in our new platform that we just introduced this month, we call V 3.0 we now measure stress in 20 different categories. We look at elder care as a stress. We look at credit card debt, right, how you’re paying your bills, health care costs, right? So when you are able to break down stress into a manageable component, you’re able to solve those problems, and that’s what we’ve been able to prove in terms of how it affects performance, the amount of money that people are saving, it goes to your point all the way in a straight line. And we find that the ROI is the biggest when employees are actively engaged. And they’re actively engaged because the employer gives them tacit permission to be engaged. So a number of our companies that buy the program, they set it up. We do an introduction, and they never mention it again. They don’t run any contests. They don’t talk about it, they don’t promote the webinars we do. They don’t do anything, they still get a pretty good usage rate. I think it’s above industry average. It’s about 15 to 20% without doing anything, because people need the help. But when you give permission, when you as a CEO or a head of HR, you stand up and say, Hey, I’m just like you. I struggle with credit cards. I’m always wondering how to pay my kids, you know, sports bill, we want to go on vacation and someday hope to retire. Use this. It might help usage to rate goes up dramatically, and that makes employers feel good.

Ilyce Glink 18:10
Now, I wanted to just get to your point about privacy and security. We take that, yeah, definitely want to come around to that. We take that so seriously. So even if we know I can’t access anybody’s I can’t say, oh, Trish, have you seen our credit score? Yeah, let’s go right. Uh, can’t do that. Nobody can in the way that we’ve set it up. But what we are allowing employers to do now is to get access to the most detailed de identified information that we can give them. We’re also with our new AI. We use anthropic which is Claude. We have built it and tailored it so it allows the HR admin to ask specific questions about their employee group, any questions they like, based on every single thing that an employee is doing, but it’s de identified. And for the employee, you get all you get the same thing. On your side, you can ask Claude, well, we call him Alex, you can, you know, ask our AI, anything that you want to know about your own money, but you can’t ask about anybody else in the system. And so we feel, and we felt from the very beginning, that if we don’t protect privacy to the very best degree we can, nobody’s going to use this and nobody’s going to tell us anything. And so we look forward in 2025 to getting really an unparalleled look at how stress deeply affects all of the workplace issues that employees are employers and employees are facing.

Trish 19:40
Yeah, I’m glad you shared that. Elise, my question would be as this is something that’s a little bit newer, right, using the AI to do those sorts of answers, is that something that best money moves can take kind of a broader look at the types of questions being answered, and then. Further direct, proactively going forward, what people need like, does that help direct the way the solution evolves at all, or is that still a little bit too early to do?

Ilyce Glink 20:11
We don’t know yet, because we’re just moving companies on. But what we imagine will happen, based on what our researchers are telling us and what our dev team tells us is possible is we’ll be able to go back and literally scrape what would normally have taken 10 to 20,000 research hours to do. Pivot Tables take forever, right? You got to make sure there are no errors in them. We’ll be able to do that in a couple of hours, we’ll be able to dig in and see the questions that HR is asking, and the questions that our employees are asking, be able to bring those together in large scale reports to provide new and interesting and highly differentiated content to our customers and our clients, and we think that that’s going to be incredibly valuable for them, because I think what they’ll be able to ask is, is anybody using X, Y and Z, and if not, you know, what are the next three things we should be offering based on how people are accessing financial content? And I don’t think that there’s a an accurate way of doing that now, without getting inside people’s heads, but AI allows you to do that.

Trish 21:22
I love that, because when I’m thinking back to you’re sort of solving something that we’ve had as a problem in HR for a very long time, right? So we would think about, oh, we wish we could take our new hires who are coming in and find out what their financial stressors are, maybe the student loan debt, or, you know, other things, new homes, etc, and but we couldn’t like we knew they had it, but we couldn’t get access to that in a very secure way, right, other than just asking every person, which is also a little bit of stigma. You don’t ask people what their money worries are, right? That directly. But we wanted to figure out, how can we create our own plans and programs to help them have relief. So I think just even what you’re describing there is what’s coming like to me, I’m thinking, oh my gosh, that just opens up so many strategic avenues for HR departments to creatively and proactively have yourself set apart, right, as a differentiator for hiring college hires, for example, right? You’re helping them take those stressors out of their lives right at the beginning. So I don’t know. I’m really excited to see how this develops, just if nothing else, for that reason alone, and that was an issue 20 years ago.

Ilyce Glink 22:36
Well, just to so, you know, this is just something that we think is so cool. Not only would be able to ask, you’ll be able to segment your employees based on some of the demographic data. So we have income ranges that people report. We have a number of people in household. We have whether you’re a renter or an owner or live in a mom’s couch, right? We have your age range. We have your gender. So as you go through as HR, and you just want to know what people who are 54, to 65 are thinking, who are earning, you know, 125,000 to 250 and you want to ask questions specifically about that population. You’re going to be able to ask that so you’re, worried about your pre retirees, and you want to know what their student loan debt looks like. You’re going to be able to find that out, and previously, you weren’t able to, to your point, but we want to get at these kinds of statistics that you don’t get from, say, the work number reports, or you don’t get from sort of traditional, you know, financial wellness, or what you wouldn’t get from, say, a fidelity or a, you know, a T Rowe Price, right? Everybody out there is focusing on their own little universe of financial wellness, right? Those point solutions, but they don’t take a look at the whole picture. We are truly doing something that I think is going to be seen as groundbreaking, and we’re looking at it from a holistic perspective, and we’ll make those results available to anybody who wants to see them.

Steve 24:06
That’s fantastic, at least. Because one of the things that I thought about as you were talking about the point solutions, particularly, is we have seen a proliferation in technology around earn wage access, right? That became a thing I don’t know half a dozen years ago in the payroll tech space, right? And maybe it was driven by the gig platforms, right? And how they moved to paying out their gig workers much more frequently, and it’s become a common technology that’s been adopted by lots and lots of companies. But I wonder if companies have just said, Okay, we will. We’re doing that. We’re giving you access to your own wages on a daily basis. That’s probably enough. That’s good enough in terms of your financial well being, and not thinking about the bigger picture, right? And all the things that incorporate, you know, encompass how an employee is feeling about their finances.

Ilyce Glink 24:57
Think about, think about what a paycheck means, if you’re getting daily wage access, that isn’t solving anything. All that’s doing is, you know, making money for, you know, Silicon Valley, or wherever they’re based, right? It worries me that we’ve become, you know, that there are some employers who have chosen that now, we talked to a large trucking company, and I think they have 10 or 15,000 people, and we said, you know, it’s, we’re as we’re sort of designing their program for them. Is that something you want? We have partners who do credit building loans. We’ve got partners who do savings programs. We’ve got but we can pull in any point solution you want. This is the beauty of best money moons. We’re really a very, very flexible platform. You want to build in your own benefits. Great. You want to build in somebody else’s benefits. Great partners. Great. Ours can go out, yours can go in. They said we don’t need early wage access, because we solved that problem by going to weekly paychecks. And they were willing to bear the extra cost, fairly nominal for that in order to get rid of short term loans and to get rid of the early wage access. They felt that neither of those things would benefit people as much as just getting a paycheck once a week. And so that’s how they solved it. And it’s it’s interesting when you think about truck drivers. You know, the average truck driver makes somewhere between 70 and $80,000 a year. It’s not a small amount of money, and there’s lots of them that make over $100,000 a year. And yet, truck drivers typically die between the ages of 60 and 61 Wow. Very sedentary. Wow. They typically get divorced, there’s a whole host of other expensive things that go along with truck driving, right? And you start to think about how different populations think about their money, spend their money, and what they do with their money, and how we can help tailor a company’s approach to that to make the company more successful, like if they knew how truck drivers were feeling safe, for example, that might change how they do certain things. And this one company we were working with, they recognized that there was that need, and it eliminated the requests that they were getting on a daily basis from truck drivers for short term loans, and that’s the kind of support I think companies need today. It’s a very unstable and nerve wracking environment out there for businesses, and we’re trying to do our part to help that.

Trish 27:33
I like the idea too. Ilyce, of you’re talking that I’m like, wheels are turning. I’m thinking, you know, a lot of times leaders, whether it’s CEOs, down to, you know, your CHROs, we also switch industries, right? And so sometimes you’re coming into a new industry at a very high level position, and you don’t really know sort of all those intricacies of that industry. I mean, just in your example, now I’m thinking, wow, if I came into working in that industry myself, I might not know all of that background on how truck drivers typically spend money, what’s important to them, what points of their life is money, you know, important in different ways. I think it’s really going to be helpful not just to the employee themselves, but also to leaders, right? And sort of, whether you’re been in the industry a long time, or you’re new to the industry, having that extra bit of information so that you can make some substantial decisions about how to work with your employees, right?

Ilyce Glink 28:32
It’s, yeah, no, it’s incredibly important. We’ve actually, in our new version, we’ve added some assessment tools and some other things that I think will help with that. So one thing that we’ve done to help employers and employees is we’ve instituted the CFPB Financial Wellness score. So it’s 10 questions, and they’re all very softly focused. It’s how you basically feel about money. Can you cover a certain expense? Can you How do you feel when you buy gifts, things like that? We’ve, we’ve instituted that, but also we give people a peer score. So eventually, when enough people are on it, you’ll be able to go down and drill down by industry. Right now, it’s just everybody in the platform, because we’re just moving people on it, but we think that employers are going to find that to be hugely helpful, because knowing what somebody’s credit score is, and by the way, we offer that too. But you know, the empirical credit score can be, can be damaged by just one late payment. It may not really reflect how somebody is actually doing about money. It may have reflected that somebody just slept through the alarm and forgot to make that payment that month, like that’s just all it reflects. But the other thing that we’ve just added in is a cyber security score.

Ilyce Glink 29:46
Cyber crime is the number one issue going forward. Ai driven cyber crime for employers, it isn’t just your whole systems being held hostage, right? It’s employees who have. Access to your internal workings who have compromised email accounts. And so we now take the email addresses that were given from an employer and we run it through our system, and whether or not anybody ever goes into the platform, we give the employer a score based on everybody’s email and we tell them how many compromised accounts there are and where those are, so that they can then provide more detail and information back to the employee. But for the employee, we not only give them their own score for the employer email we then allow them to go in and test any email address they want. You have 100 email addresses. You can test them all. We’re going to give you a score, we’re going to tell you where the breach occurred, and we’re going to allow you to learn about that, and then we’re going to let you click through to change your password at the site. Nice. And then we check off that. You’ve done that, because around the country, billions and billions of dollars are now being lost by consumers who are getting fooled by cyber crime, people who pretend to be your kids, they pretend to be your parents, they pretend to be a cousin, they’re your best friend who’s trapped in Greece, and you would swear, you know, it’s me talking to you, and it’s not. It’s somebody you know, like in the Eastern Bloc. So we think that this is another value add that will help employers understand more about people’s concerns, and we’ve added a whole area of content around ID theft protection and cyber crime, so that people learn more about how to protect themselves, and the employer then gets the benefit of that right. So this new version has really gone deep to help employers with an ROI that I think is measured. It’s just a new way of looking at financial well being.

Trish 31:49
I love that you’re taking the stigma out of talking about financial well being and really describing many, many layers that even, even Steve and I probably are learning about today, right?

Steve 32:01
I hadn’t considered the cyber security angle here at all, quite frankly. And I did spend a lot of time on this at the end of last year thinking about this. So yeah, it’s great. It’s fantastic.

Trish 32:10
And I feel like also sometimes, especially in these last, say, five years, right? It feels like sometimes things are out of our control, whether that’s work wise, politically, socially, right? There’s a lot of unsure times, right? So what I love about this is it’s a it’s a tangible way to bring a bit of control back into your personal life, right, as the employee, as the consumer, having the knowledge of what you need to pay attention to, right? That someone may have never taught you or you just didn’t understand, and then also how your employer can really make that possible, which is that that bridge you need from an employee to an employer, so that there’s trust and loyalty and confidence, right? So I, I feel like it’s more than just the actual financial benefits, which, of course, are great, but it’s that I don’t know. It just for me personally, I’m I’m feeling like that would make me feel a little bit more in control of things, when sometimes it feels very out of control. Are you hearing that at all from clients, or we?

Ilyce Glink 33:17
Are we? We have had some amazing response to some of the new innovations we brought forward in the last particularly in the last year, like adding this eight unit class called decisions. Decisions, right? There’s it’s one thing to teach people about their personal finances, but when you teach them to make a decision that’s better for them, that’s smarter. I mean, my whole career, the motto of my whole career, helping people make smarter decisions about their money. So when you take it out of the blame game, right? And you stop saying things like, don’t buy gourmet coffee at $6 of, you know a thing, and this is how much you’ll save, right?

Steve 33:58
That’s the whole avocado toast, right thing, right? ,

Ilyce Glink 34:03
You say, make a decision about what’s really the most important thing to you. I think it gives a different, more empowering spin. And we are all about empowering individuals to move forward and take control. Some other things that we did this year, in the last year to really be innovative is, you know, we always had crisis counseling, but we added independent financial advisory for people, and then we took it another step forward, and we became the financial wellness platform for a program that not only would provide us, and to your point earlier, Steve, mental wellness and some physical wellness benefits doesn’t replace health insurance, but it works alongside it. So you’ve got Mind Body wallet at no cost to employers, no cost to employees, returns an extra roughly $1,000 a year to. Employees pocket, and roughly $550 per employee to the employer’s pocket. So it’s an IRS supported program. It’s becoming, I think, very popular, because now when employers say, well, we don’t have the budget, I say to them, you don’t need one. It’s it’s really just, you know, being able to provide all of these benefits in a way that’s innovative and world changing, I think, right, is really what we’re trying to do in 2025.

Steve 35:32
Yeah, I love it. Ilyce, that’s a great sort of way to wrap I know we had some, we can probably have you back on to talk about some of the ways that financial well being support kind of intersects with DEI because D I is it’s going to be our next month’s focus. After we get through our month of financial well being, we’re going to be hitting D and I really hard on the HR Happy Hour network. But there’s some interesting talking points there as well. But I think what’s interesting also to me, at least I remember nine years ago, right almost 10 years ago now, when we first met you and came to HR Tech, we started talking about the issue and where it’s come as you’ve described, the 3.0 platform, the capabilities, AI, of course, is a big factor in the development of any technology platform right now, but the holistic, comprehensive approach, and and, of course, the associated benefits to employers employees. It’s, it’s so compelling, I guess the last thing I’ll say, then, at least, is for folks in the employer space, right? Want to learn more, connect with you, access some of these resources, and really see what they can do more, more impactfully for their employees in 2025 what would you say to them?

Ilyce Glink 36:44
You know, give me a call. Follow me on LinkedIn. You know, just go to Best money moves.com. We have a brand new website up. It looks talks a lot about all the new features that we have. It’s got a little video. You know, just reach out. You can find me on any web browser, even if you don’t spell my name, right, Google knows that you’re looking for me. But, you know, we happy to just consult with companies. You know, even if we’re not the final choice, right, maybe we are. Maybe we’re not, I’m always happy to help people. And that’s just, you know, the background that I come from, journalism, right? Service journalism. How do we make this decision sort of better for you? Happy to work with you and help you do that, because I think that a number well, I’ll just say a lot of companies out there either aren’t doing anything because they think that they don’t have the buy in from CEOs or director of HR, they don’t seem to have a budget, and they can’t get around the budget idea, or they’ve heard they don’t work, right? You know, let us help you dispel some of those myths and show you exactly what the ROI is for you and your company.

Steve 37:53
Awesome. Love it.

Trish 37:55
Thank you so much for sharing all of those good resources. That’s what we hope with each show, is that people walk away with something they can actually go do and be impactful on their organization. So I think I’ve made a page of notes of things we can do differently. Ilyce, thank you so much.

Ilyce Glink 38:11
It’s been a pleasure.

Steve 38:13
Great to see you again. Ilyce, best money moves.com Find Ilyce everywhere. Also go to h3hr.com where we’re packaging together all of our financial well being content and things we’re doing. There’s podcasts, there’s workplace minute shows, there’s some articles, some infographics, all in a big bundle. So go to h3hr.com There’s an article at least, where best money moves is mentioned in there. It hasn’t published yet, but it is, so you can go look for that. And yeah, thanks so much for joining us. Trish, great stuff. I love that we’re digging into this topic. Is Trend number two of our trends report for 2025 so thank you. Thank you to Ilyce. Thanks to our friends at Paychex. Of course, remember to subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcast. My name is Steve Boese, thank you for listening to the HR Happy Hour network. We’ll see you next time and bye for now you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai