Financial Wellness Month: How to Make the Most of It. Employers can help reduce financial stress that hinders productivity by providing tools that help employees pay down debt and save for retirement.

January is National Financial Wellness Month! It’s perfect timing because Americans are facing their New Year’s resolutions and preparing for tax season.  

Here are 5 areas of financial wellness where employees need support most:

Helping Save More for Retirement

Employees experience debilitating financial stress when it comes to retirement and they want employers to provide tools and support that ensure they’ll have enough money saved to last through retirement.

Preparing for Future Healthcare Expenses

Long-term healthcare, like nursing homes or assisted living, is expensive and although 70 percent of Americans will need it, more than 60 percent have nothing saved.

Tackling Student Loan Debt

Student loan debt surpasses $1.5 trillion and it is affecting your workforce. Student loan debt is affecting all age groups, it’s keeping younger employees from major life milestones and it is making your employees sick.

Spending Smarter

More than half of Americans spend more than they earn and 70 percent consider their level of debt to be problematic. Almost 50 percent have credit card debt, more than 40 percent have a mortgage or a car loan and over 30 percent have student loan debt. Employees need help spending smarter so they can pay down their debt and start saving.

Bracing for Recession

There’s a 23 percent chance of a recession in the next 12 months, and employees are not ready for it. The Federal Reserve Bank’s latest report found 40 percent of U.S. households cannot cover a $400 emergency expense, leaving them unprepared and vulnerable to financial crisis in a recession.

How Employers Can Help

An effective financial wellness program, like Best Money Moves, can help employees budget spending better, pay down debt, save for emergencies and plan for retirement. Best Money Moves combines technology, information, smart tools and live money coaches to help employees measure their level of financial stress in 15 categories, and then sends relevant information and tools to help them reduce that stress.

Employees use the program’s point-based rewards system, which assigns point values to every action possible on the site from setting up income and expenses with the budgeting tool to reading articles and measuring stress. Each month Best Money Moves hosts a global contest with a cash prize for the user who has earned the most points during the month. This ongoing engagement strategy keeps usage at 25 to 51 percent.

What sets Best Money Moves apart? We aren’t trying to sell your employees anything and we aren’t a “robo-investment” platform because we believe that employees need unbiased information they can trust.

Learn more about how Best Money Moves can make a difference for your employees by contacting [email protected].

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