E079: Financial Wellbeing

Hi everyone. Just before we get cracking into this week's episode, I

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Hello. This is James, and this is Jane, and here we are again with another episode of a world of work podcast still going strong. All right, Jane, what

are we speaking about today?

Well, today we are talking about a subject very close to my heart. We are talking about financial well being and to do so we've got our friend Gethin joining us. Yeah, great. Yeah. We've

got Gethin from benefex, who's a bit of an expert in the world of financial wellbeing as well as employee experience. So we're gonna be exploring a range of things. Like, you know, what is financial wellbeing? What's

our relationship with money? What's for? What's the role of employers in relation to our financial wellbeing, and all that kind of good stuff. So it should be kind of exciting. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Let's get going.

Okay, so here we are in the main body of this podcast, and we're having a conversation with Gethin today, and we're gonna be speaking to him about financial wellbeing and all things to do with that before we get into that. Though, Gethin, would you be able to introduce yourself to the audience, say a bit about yourself, about your background, and maybe touch on your book if you can as well, because it's a great

read. Okay, well, thank you very much. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me. Appreciate you joining the podcast and asking me to do so. I guess a little bit about me. So I've spent the last two decades or so working in HR tech, and I've kind of been specialized in employee well being and the employee experience. I'm a regular kind of commentator and writer in HR magazines and HR websites, and my work's also been published in Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Financial Times, in The Guardian. I'm listed on a few employee engagement power lists and influence lists globally, and named as a global employee experience expert by a few different companies like sage bonfire and news lane. I'm also the co chair of the engaged success thought Action Group for well being. And as you mentioned, I wrote a book a couple of years ago that's won an award and hit the Amazon bestseller list, and that's called a world of good lessons from all around the world and improving the employee experience. And it kind of really zones in on the fact that well being, and individual employee well being is a really important part of an employee's experience at

work. Oh, thanks for that. And the book is fun, and I like the fact that it explores, as the title of suggests different places from around the world and ideas that come from different places. I think today, really, we're going to focus on financial well being specifically. And you know, in your background, you've looked at a range of different employee experiences, and I sense that more recently, over the last, you know, five years or so, you've focused more on financial well being. Could you explain a little bit about what financial well being really, is? You know, what does financial well being mean? Yeah, I

think it's a great question. I guess with loads of elements of well being, it's all largely quite subjective to the individual. But I've always kind of felt that it's financial. Well being is almost not about money. It's almost about how somebody feels about it, and how in control they feel they are their money so broadly, I think it's about kind of giving us the freedom to do the things we want to do in life, and allowing money to be controlled by us, and not allowing money to control us. And I think that's kind of what's missing with when a lot of people talk about financial well being, is the idea that it doesn't matter. The money itself doesn't really matter. It's having control. It's not about the volume of money that you've got and and it's also not just the absence of debt. Because, you know, we, I live and work in an industry that thinks that, you know, the absence of debt is where financial well being is, and it just isn't the case. You know, that's driven by a lot of people who've got money to lend and help people consolidate. And so our industry has driven a lot of that thought, because there's money to be made in getting people out of debt. But actually, if financial well being was the absence of debt, we'd have, we'd always see good financial well being with people who had lots of money, and that's just not the case either. So

what? What then do you see the relationship being between wealth and income and financial well being? I mean, in your experience, do you see people with high levels of income who've got low financial well being. I mean, how much of it is, I guess, what's the ratio between, you know, I guess, your asset position and your sort of mental position? If that makes sense as a question, yeah,

it does so. Debt charities across the world have been seeing a rise in people earning kind of six figure salaries, contacting them for debt help. You know, I think anyone listening to the podcast and yourselves will know that, you know, we, we, as we've gone on in our careers, we've probably earned more money than we did the five years previously and that kind of thing, and that that in itself, doesn't make us better with money, because we just grow into that, and we kind of expend and fit that lifestyle. And one of the big lessons of the. Economic downturn in the UK in 2008 was this phrase, the squeezed middle because you had, you know, pretty affluent families, kind of middle class families in the UK who actually couldn't want to or didn't want to reduce their expenditure. They didn't want to not go on holidays or buy the latest car or bring their kids out of private school. And so actually, they started to feel more squeezed because they wouldn't make the lifestyle changes to adjust. And, you know, financial well, being with lots of those people, as is, this kind of had a big effect on on their lives in particular. But there's a huge amount of research that says it just doesn't discriminate by somebody's income. And you know, our lives can turn on the spin of a coin. You know, we could become millionaires one day, we could become broke the next. And it's really interesting when you kind of look at if people who've acquired lots of money, so lottery winners, for example, in a very quick period of time, don't have financial well being. So, you know, there's a great example in the UK of a guy called Mickey Carroll who won the National Lottery first became really popular in England, and England and Wales in particular, this guy, Mickey Carroll, kind of won millions. I don't know how much it was, but won millions and burnt through all of his money in a couple of years and ended up in prison on drugs charges. And it's kind of like, just because he had the money, it didn't make him any better at managing it than somebody who had nothing at all.

I do, I do remember that story in in terms of things that influence financial well being. What role do you think the I guess, for sort of social context we operate in influences it? So do you think you know we do spend to keep up with the judges and stuff. What's that sort of relationship between our relationship with our friends and neighbors and their consumption choices and our own financial wellbeing?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So there's a great study that came out of the US a few years ago that looked at bankruptcy, and they found that you are significantly more likely to go bankrupt if you live in a street with somebody who's won the lottery. And it was a relatively small study, so it could probably be criticized quite heavily, but it really played to the fact that when somebody in a small street, or kind of a close won a huge amount of money and started spending that on new cars and holidays, it made everyone else around them try and spend more as well to kind of keep up that lifestyle. And it's back to that point about that the middle classes do it quite a lot, because actually, what you tend to see is, in most societies, most communities, people on lower income or live in low income households are really used to budgeting and planning, and they know that some days they'll have more money than next one month, they might be slightly flushed the month after, they might be really struggling. So they used to kind of flexing their lifestyle up and down to fit how much money they've got. Yet, the middle classes tend to actually just be like, right? This is the life I want to live, and even if my income goes up and down, I still don't want to waiver from that. So get themselves into trouble.

That's a really interesting insight. I hadn't thought about that sort of lifestyle creep and be anchoring to lifestyle points. And there's something that I thought was really interesting that I read the other day that talked about challenging, you know, definitions of inflation and talking about, you know, what we buy now that satisfies, you know, the median definition of our you know, perception of reasonable existence is is different to what it was 25 years ago. So the argument, in some ways, is that the rate of inflation that we capture in our financial measurements is, you know, inaccurate in terms of what it actually costs to maintain a medium lifestyle now. And that that's really important. Yeah,

it's quite fascinating, because I think years ago, people started to talk a lot about experience. So just generally, experiences. So right across the US and Europe, you started to see that young people in particular were more likely to spend money on experiences rather than physical things. And so we saw things like car ownership dip, and that was obviously in line with the emergence of Lyft and Uber and people like that, but like to see people kind of spend or what they the perception was they were living more for experiences than they were kind of material goods. And that kind of stuck for a while, and that almost gave people the impression that young people in particular were probably a little bit more prudent than some of the generations that had gone before. But some of the most recent research shows that, you know, two out of two thirds of young people under the age of 30 are worried about money, and part of the reason is because they blame social media for giving a false picture of what success looks like. So you know, we as a society have still in that position where, you know, people can go onto Instagram and see their friends on holiday and judge their worst days with their friends best days, and think, you know, I should be driving a car like that, or I should be having a holiday like that. These are my peers. I should be able to keep up with them. And so I actually think the when you look at the research, it's got even worse. People are actually spending more than they earn just to try and keep up with that lifestyle. Try and live what they think is a fulfilling life.

Hi Jeff, and it's Jane. I think that's a really interesting point, and it always takes me back. There's a film from the 1980s showing my age here, called Brewster's millions. And basically it's a great film, and the guy has to effectively spend a million pounds in order to get his full inheritance, which is loads more. And he effectively demonstrates that by not to give away, well, I'm going to ruin the film, but he rents his lifestyle. And it always strikes me that that's really quite a lot of how we've moved. We've kind of tied ourselves to relationships with products and services for a much longer term, because we're paying on a subscription base for quite a lot of things. And I think the younger generation certainly feel like speaking to my niece and nephews, there's lots of things that they need to be showing that they've got access to by paying those subscriptions. It really that film, really educate, like started my education into finances, because it made me really get thinking about it weirdly. And what do you think people can do to improve their own financial well being? I think education is one part of it. But what else do you think they can

do? Yeah, I think my personal view is education is quite a big part of it. I think we now have evidence from 126 different evaluation studies on financial education from around the world that proves it works. It helps people to make better decisions. I think fundamentally, for most people, that the very basic advice is make a plan, and that plan starts with kind of getting on the metaphorical scales and just seeing what your current situation is like. And if you are even in if you're worried about money, or you don't particularly get on with money, or, you know, you are in debt, that in itself, is quite a big step to take, because that means, you know, opening the letters or emails that you get sent, writing down how much is on your credit card, how much are in your overdraft, who you owe money to, and being really honest about your situation, and you've almost got to face that ugly truth to be able to start to improve. And so I think for most people, they've just got to kind of start with, Okay, where am I now? And where do I want to be? And making a plan, kind of, even from a mental health perspective, means that you can then start to project when you might be out of that situation. So even if it's five years until you're going to be debt free, you can start counting down those like, you know you've got an end point, you can actually start to see yourself achieving some kind of progress towards that goal.

And you mentioned, you mentioned the sort of middle class issue in the UK during the downturn where there was this sort of lifestyle that weren't willing to to give up. Do you? Do you feel that even when people aren't debt, are completely debt free, but have a sort of emotional, mental commitment to a lifestyle? How? How do you, how does you help someone understand that? Or, how can someone start to take control of what they're spending as well as what they owe? Yeah, I

think it's a really good point as well. I think it's, there's a little bit in here about just kind of growing up. I think, I think you naturally get to a point in your life where you start to understand what you value. And I can talk with some authority about this, because I'm a perfect example of, I know what people should be doing. I don't necessarily take that advice myself. I'm quite well known amongst my friends for spending money. I haven't gotten things I don't need. I've got a random, odd collection of things in my apartment. And I think it's it's just about trying to understand what do you want to do from life and make that money work for you. So if you can really start to think about, what does money look like for me, or what do I want money to do for me? So whether that's traveling or, you know what, all creating a nice home with my family, whatever it might be, if people can start to think, you know, what actually makes me happy, and how can I use money to make me happy, then you can start to kind of have some really clear goals around. If I'm going to give up going for that trip to the pub or that meal out once a week, what am I going to get in return? And if that's going to be your dream of traveling to a certain country, that kind of stuff, then I think that makes it a lot easier for people to achieve those goals. Financial

well being itself is a new ish phrase with the two words together, I think certainly in in sort of the general public, public side, what, what is the relationship between financial well being and kind of the other types of well being. So I'm thinking through specifically around, like mental well being, yeah, so

I think, like, almost any well being term, it's been kind of hijacked by marketeers and people trying to use it to sell product. So, you know, whether you call it financial well being, financial health, you know, kind of, I guess the name really doesn't matter, because people tend to see these new words emerge and think it's going to be a trend, and so they tend to ignore them. But I like financial well being. I think it's pretty it kind of encapsulates the fact that, rightly or wrongly, the way we feel about money and how in control of our money situation we are how that affects the rest of our well being. There is a very direct cyclical relationship between mental health and financial well being. Money the money Mental Health Policy Institute, which was set up by Martin Lewis, the money saving expert, about three or four years ago, they've done loads of research, and they found that i. Actually, when you have a mental health issue, you're significantly more likely to fall into a position of problem debt, and when you have problem debt, you're significantly more likely to develop a mental health issue. And in the UK, in 2020 worried about money is more stressful to people than their relationships or their work. So it's again, if you look at all the research around what keeps people awake, what do people lose sleep over? What do people stress about? Money is always there in the kind of top one or two things that people worry about. So it just has, you know, the stress of money and the stress of making it in society. And clearly in the UK, we've had, you know, almost a decade or so of austerity that has made that even more difficult for people. And you know, if an impending recession following Coronavirus is likely to make that that worse for people, so it's going to have a big effect on their their mental health, and subsequently, their physical health will set up because

of it. Yeah, I would say, I mean, speaking from personal experience, I don't think I've ever felt more vulnerable in my mental health than when I've been through a period of financial sort of insecurity or instability and not felt good about it. It's there's a there's a level of exposure to my own health when I don't feel 100% in control of it,

or the big important thing around getting people to some to have savings that are equivalent to at least three to six months worth of salary, or at least three to six months worth of kind of rent, mortgage, overheads, food and that kind of stuff is because the safety blanket that gives you mentally as well as kind of financially, is really important because it means that if you're in a job that you hate and you really can't stand it anymore, you've got enough money that can kind of see you for three months. And that means actually you can take a bit of a bit of a breath, and if you want to leave that job because it's affecting your life too negatively, you've given yourself some breathing space to do that. And again, Coronavirus is a great example. You've had people losing their jobs, people going on reduction reduced salaries and furloughed. And actually, those people who have that savings buffer are much able to weather this storm than those who perhaps don't.

Yeah, it's I wonder. I do wonder if the COVID policy, the furlough 80% will become a kind of different way of testing. So the three to six months savings is a really good one. It's quite well known. You know, you should have somewhere between three and six months of your overheads and your costs and to keep you going. But I do wonder if it's also like you should be able to look around always and say, I could take an 80% I could take a 20% hit on my income, if we would hit this again, and I would still be okay, because that feels like it would be a really helpful thing. Just I'm just curious, because I think so much of the challenges around finance is the fact that it's it's a constant in our lives. It's not like you can check in once a year, like I think some people do, maybe, or once a mortgage, you know, remortgage period. How do you think, what's the role of habits in financial wellbeing? Do you think that's important? What sort of habits, good habits do people have when they have healthy financial wellbeing? Yeah.

So I think it's really important. I think, you know, some of the easy habits that people can develop really, really simply, is things like checking a credit score. The amount of people I speak to, and I do kind of consultancy around financial well being at benefits, I speak to our staff all the time. We do training for them, and I will ask people to explain what a credit score is, and the vast majority of people can't explain what it is or what it does, or that they've ever even checked it, let alone checked it in the last year or so. And you know that is a tool by which lenders will assess your credibility as a lendee. And you know they used to be behind the paywall. You used to have to pay, kind of 15 pounds a month, quite a hefty amount of money, to get access to them. And because of a few different providers that have come to the market to offer those for free, almost entirely across the board. Now people can get free access to their credit score, and this will you know, two thirds of mortgage applicants in this country, in 2018 didn't check their credit score before applying for a mortgage, yet a credit rating was done on those individuals before giving them a mortgage. And although it doesn't, this doesn't this doesn't necessarily happen with mortgages. It does happen with other types of lending, whereby your score will not just determine whether they give you a loan or not, but what kind of APR they'll give you. So people just by not checking it, not keeping on top of it, literally throwing money away the next time they go for a loan or apply for any kind of credit. And so that's a really good habit to get into is just a download a free app. That means, you know, once a week you can kind of log into it, or once a month, when your your score changes, just to kind of keep on top of it. And lots of these apps are kind of driving a lot of those habits as well. So there's a great app I use called moneybox. Moneybox, you can kind of just save little bits of money from your account, even if it's just a pound a day or five pounds a month, and you can start investing in that. So you can start to get a little bit kind of used to how the stocks and shares work. And you can kind of move your money into ices, and, you know, just having five pounds a month going out of your salary into an app, and then you're tracking how that moves, you know, The End. Of the year could come along, and you can have 7080 pounds in the account, and even that 7080 pounds is a buffer, right? So when the boiler breaks and it costs you 300 quid, having 80 pounds in a savings account means that you know, a third of that hit is already taken and doesn't have an effect on you. So I think there are definitely some little habits people get into around just checking things on a regular basis. And it's interesting, when we saw the emergence of mobile banking apps the Lloyds Banking Group, I think it was Lloyds, or maybe it was RBS, but they issued a big report on the effect that those people who downloaded mobile banking apps to their phone had on their finances, and they found that almost overnight, the overdrafts disappeared for lots of people that had banking apps, because they were just becoming more familiar with their money. You know, when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, even in university, if I wanted to know my balance, I had to kind of go to a cash machine, cash machine, and print out a little bit of paper that would tell me what my balance was. And now people can just, you know, look at it on their phone and make some better spending decisions by just being fully up to date with what their finances look like every second of every day.

Yeah, it's interesting. I remember going to those, those cash points and typing in my number and trying to work out my balance. Um, you said something earlier that I just want to touch on, because it really did sort of remind me of something a while ago, like, you know, 15 years ago, or something, I ended up in a reasonable amount of debt. And you described, you know, the act of opening up your letters and opening up a post and working out what your position was, and just to kind of reflect on it, even as you were speaking about that, it reminded me of the fear of the unopened envelope, right? And, and that's, it's an emotionally scary thing if you aren't certain of where you are, and you can feel the sort of impending difficulty and stress and anxiety around those things. So it was just, I guess, interesting to me, to feel how emotionally responsive I was to you describing

that money is money is incredibly emotional, right? We have a very strong emotional link to money based on kind of how it's treated us and how we've treated it in the past. You know, I know through university, there were times when I'd kind of struggle for money, even if it was just 100 quid towards the end of the month. And I wouldn't ask my parents. I would go to Cash Converters, write myself a check that be cashed on payday, and I'd fund it that way, which was, you know, a precursor to payday loans. And exactly the same as yourself. You know there are, I would get credit card statements and that kind of stuff through the post, and I would just wouldn't read them, and I'd put them in a drawer. I don't know, I don't really know what kind of people do now, because you can't necessarily blind yourself to it as much as you used to. But before I moved to London, I was in not a huge amount of debt, but enough that I was really worried about it, and I want to move to London with debt. So I ended up signing myself up to medical testing trials, right? Put myself into a hospital for nine days, having blood taken for me about 10 days, 10 times a day. And I did that just so I could get the three or so grand cash that came with doing that to pay off debts, to go to London. And my parents hated it. They hated did that. They even came up to a hospital to kind of demand that I leave, but they wouldn't let them in. And it was, yeah, so it's kind of really, really emotional. I think it's it took me quite a long time to really get to the point where I became good with money, and I think it's, it is learned behavior. I don't think people are born good with money. I think you pick up bad habits from people like parents, but fundamentally, I saw situation and how we react to it that makes us good or bad with money, yeah,

and my experience of debt certainly fundamentally changed my relationship with money and my relationship with spending. And I'm now not in that position, and I forget what it felt like to be in that position, but it's hugely powerful. One of the things that you touched on a minute ago is you said something like you paid something out of your salary. What do you think the power is of paying money before you see it? So if you can deduct something off your pay sheet before it goes into your bank and things like that, does that does that affect your relationship with money? Do

you think yes, one of the pretty universal money tips that almost any kind of financial advice or financial well being coach will tell you is pay yourself first. And so that's the idea that you set up all these direct debits for your kind of mobile phone bill, your broadband or any mortgage or rent and all that kind of stuff. And actually you should be setting up a direct debit. From your account into a savings account, and that should be coming out when all the rest of your bills come out, ideally on payday, so that you don't get used to having that money, so that money kind of comes out and is put away. And I think that's, that's, that's really good, because we are, we're humans, right? If we've got an easy to access savings account, and our friends kind of asked us on a night out and that kind of stuff, we'll dip into it, especially if we've had a tough week, we'll dip into that money and we'll just spend it. So putting it slightly out of reach makes a big difference. And it's kind of like basically most kind of not. Theory. So Richard Thaler, the Prize winning economist, his idea of if you want people to do stuff, make it easy, if you want them to make it if you don't want them to do it, make it slightly harder. It's the same with that, if you don't want to get hold your money, you can still get a hold of it, maybe with a week's notice or two weeks notice, but that buffer of time means that you don't impulsively spend that money. So I think that's a really good piece of advice. Just

that reminded me of something at university. At one point, I used to post myself my bank card because I knew it would take a few days so I'd have some money and I'd like put a stamp on it and post it to myself.

I mean, you do that nowadays, you probably never get your card back. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But that made me smile.

What do you think the role organizations play is in relation to financial wellbeing? Yeah,

I think it's really interesting. The ederman Trust Barometer is a measure of trust in large institutions around the world. And they speak to, I think it's 50,000 plus people around the world, and just ask them questions about who do they most trust in their lives? And they look at trust in large institutions like government, media, politicians, CEOs, big business, all this kind of stuff. And for pretty much three or four years straight, financial services has become the least trusted institution in the lives of employees around the world. So it's ranked 15 out of 15 of all the major industries, yet the number one thing is your employer, and that's been pretty consistent now for two years. So globally, around 75% of people say the employer is the most trusted institution in their lives. And so I think that's really interesting. I think they don't trust the people that are kind of helping them understand financial products or holding their money, but they trust the people where that primary source of income comes from. For most people, and I think, like it or not, employees are going to bring their money worries to work. For two decades or so, we've encouraged the blurring of lines between home and work, and what that's led is means that when home life isn't going too well, they're going to bring that to work as well. So it's inevitably affecting their work. And people are distracted at work. And you know, if you look at multiple different researches, pieces of research on about average, 1.5 days off a year is what employees take because they're worried about money. So that's unauthorized absence, usually dressed up as you know, I've got a stomach ache and bad back, but they're doing that because they're worried about money, or they have some money situation that they need to solve. So, you know, in a big organization, those, those numbers stack up, um, quite significantly. And so it's having a big cost effect on employers. And

what relationship do organizations actually take in this? What do they practically do?

I think it's, you know, I first started talking about financial well being when we did a really big project with Barclays back in kind of 2013 so I would kind of not arrogantly say that myself and benefits were kind of ahead of the curb. We're talking about financial well being. And I think it's only really taken till the last year or so for employers to really understand that a, they have responsibility over the financial well being of their staff, and B, they feel like they should be doing something about it. The A on benefits Trends report from 2020, so that was published in kind of January, February this year that saw a marked increase in the amount of people who not only said they felt it was their responsibility to help their employees with money worries in about 70% of cases now they're actually saying that they have within the next 12 to 18 months, they will have specific budgets to tackle financial well being in the workplace. And what people do varies massively. I've seen some really good examples and some really bad examples. The worst examples are kind of people just making wild assumptions about the challenges their employees face. So as I mentioned at the start, people seem to think that everybody's in debt, and not all debt is bad debt, and not all debt is unavoidable. So you know, most people in work will have some kind of a debt, but they won't be worried about it. They'll feel like they're managing it. And we can look at countries, you know, I talk about Denmark in the book. If you look at a country like Denmark, they've got some of the highest levels of financial literacy in Europe, but they've also got some of the highest debt per capita in Europe, which led me to believe that actually, they're not worried about that debt because they feel in control of it, because they have all the knowledge and the skills to effectively manage that debt. So I think it needs to be a combination of kind of saving for the future, financial education, getting people to just understand stuff. So you look at numeracy skills in the UK are kind of terrible. So the new the average numeracy skills in this country are equivalent to a nine year old yet to be able to complete a mortgage application, you need the numeracy, numerical and financial literacy skills of somebody who does a level English. So people are just not equipped to make the complicated and complex decisions that we're expecting them to make around things that most people do, like a mortgage application or a loan application. So that financial education piece, I think. That employers can have a significant impact on, because at the moment, there's just not a huge amount of that being done by governments or charities in an accessible way.

I think so I went through a period of being absolutely ragingly angry about how little I'd been educated or had the opportunity to be educated as I went through the various sort of financial milestones of my life and life. So I remember, I remember researching my first mortgage, and the internet had just kind of become something that was actually useful. And I just, I remember going to, like, speak to my parents, and they were like, Oh no, we just went to the bank that we always went to. And I was like, Okay. And then I went to speak to, I think, my boss, and they were like, Oh well, I just got my dad's broker could help me, and I couldn't believe like that there was so little straightforward place, because I was thinking, surely everyone's doing this, or not everyone, but large number of people are doing this right. And there's it felt like there was this world of independent financial advice, and that was scary. I didn't really understand that and who to look to, and who to ask, and that no one around me, I seem to be the only one that was sort of asking these questions. And I it just strikes me that, you know, I grimaced facially when you said, Oh, the employers are most trusted. But actually, yes, that is exactly I would trust my especially my accounts department, for example, that responsible for paying me, they're absolutely where I would go to for advice in in sort of my early career life. So it makes total sense. Are there any are there any good sort of tricks or methods you've seen organizations, or indeed, people use? So you mentioned, for example, the little money box tool, but an organizational level, have you seen organizations do this? Well, yeah, I

think the most effective thing I've seen is something that's incredibly simple and pretty much free for them to do, but very little people seem that. Very little employers seem to do it, and that's just creating a kind of content hub. So actually creating a place that can signpost people to not just the help if they're worried about money, so signposting to debt charities or where they can get support, but also signposting them to kind of hints and tips. Because, as I mentioned before, almost every major kind of financial coach will give you the kind of same 10 tips. And so it's quite easy for employers to find out what those same 10 ones are and put that on some kind of an intranet page, or put it in their company app, or even in a handbook of some kind. We've seen some employers do, and it's because people are overwhelmed with choice at the moment. And I think you know, if you look at this country, if you wanted to open an ISA in the UK, you've got about 400 options, so, let alone understanding what an ISA is. Because if you go onto Google Now and typed in Isa, most of the first page is going to be people trying to sell you an ISA, not people trying to help you understand what an ISA is. People just need that support so the employers can help with just narrowing down the choice to actually, you know, this is what an ISA means, and we've defined it in this way, or this is our understanding. But even employers don't do anything to help people really understand their pay slips or tax codes. One of our parent companies, zelness, did some research recently and said 85% or so people don't understand their pay slips, and because it's all digital, no one even looks at it. So if their pay doesn't fluctuate, nobody looks at their pay slips. So nobody really knows whether on the right tax code or not, because people have stopped understanding tax codes and even employee benefits as well. So you know, a big part of Global Payroll is spent on benefits. That's around 22% of payroll is spent on benefits. Yet most employees say they don't understand the benefits, and we're expecting them again to make some fairly complex decisions around things like compound interest, how pensions work, retirement options, and so I think people can do quite a lot to help people understand what they already get. And pensions is a great example. Despite the huge investment that pensions has had in the UK and there's huge government support, people like Theresa May would stand up when she was prime minister and say that auto enrollment has been a huge success, with 10 million more people enrolled into workplace pension. And then a couple of months later, the money charity reported that 70% of people don't understand auto enrollment and they don't understand their pensions. So it's kind of like, what's the point in us all spending this money on helping people to retire when actually they don't understand it. And these people are going to retire well into their 70s or 80s, or probably die standing up at work because they just haven't made the effort or haven't had the opportunity to understand how these things work. And to your point as well, I think it's interesting that people learn a lot from their parents, right? I think you're absolutely right. Most people I ask say they will go to their parents for support. But products change. Products change quite a lot in this country, regulation changes. So the way my parents mortgage worked when they bought a house when they were in their 20s was different to when I used Help to Buy in my 30s. It kind of what they could tell me didn't really make me understand anything about what modern mortgages were like.

Yeah, it's funny. You mentioned that because I've got an offset mortgage, which, well, people can Google it, but when I mentioned that to my parents, they looked at me like I was absolutely longer. Is they've never heard of such a thing, and they could not get their heads around it. And yet, for me, it's, it's worked phenomenally well. I just just you mentioned, you know, James mentioned your book around that having a global perspective, and you mentioned sort of other things going on around the world. I'm really interested, because I'm I've lived in, I've lived and worked in two other countries, and their pension contribution is significantly different. And so it was only being exposed to that and understanding how much more I was expected of my own money to put in and my employer was to put in that. When I came back to the UK, I went, Wow, is this all we're putting in here? That can't be right. Um, do you do? You get a sense that here in the UK, people have less understanding about planning for the future and how, how that might be part of their financial well being.

I'm not entirely sure whether it's because they have less understanding, but you're absolutely right. We have to work a lot harder to retire in this country. You look at some countries around Europe, some Eastern European countries are paying almost 300% what a state pension would get in this country. So economies that are far less successful than ours, that are supporting their older their older people in a lot better ways, lots of northern European countries, again, have really, really good, non contributory state sponsored pensions. And I think in this country, we because of things like the NHS. I guess people are used to the fact that we have state support. And I think the expectation, and the biggest issue I have with auto enrollment is, you know, contribution rates at the moment between employee and employer sitting about 8% and I think people believe that if they're putting in what is recommended or the minimum, and I'm using both those words in inverted commas, that that's enough, and it's it's not, you know, people need between kind of 25 and 35% of their salary to be able to retire on the kind of lifestyle that they're used to now. And if you're just setting back thinking that auto enrollments done for you, you're kind of 20% away from where you need to be. And I've sat down with friends who are kind of between the ages of 25 and 35 and we've had conversations about how much they think they need to retire. And I had a couple of friends who realized how way off they were, you know, they were kind of three or 400 pounds a month now saving in towards their pensions, which is just unachievable for them. And then the couple of friends I've got who work in as civil servants or in universities have got such good pension contributions that they've realized they can never leave those roles, because 30% is being put into a pension. And even if they went to the private sector, they're not going to get a 30% pay rise. The value

of those old pensions is phenomenal, isn't it? I mean, even in, you know, my background is financial services, and you look at the legacy schemes that that are still filtering through in the employers and, sorry, in the employee population, and the disparities huge, I think we're pretty much getting towards the end of this conversation. I think unfortunately, we're out of time. Geeky as it is, I think financial well being and personal finance is a fun topic. It's something we care about. Um, just to finish up, I guess, have you got thoughts, if you were going to say to a listener, you know, just, uh, every day person out there, one thing that they could maybe do as a start to help them on a journey towards financial well being. What would your your kind of one, one recommended tip to them be? Have you got one? Yeah, I

think it's the same as it'd probably be for all well being. And that's kind of open up your door. I think you need to allow people to talk. You need to create a culture of talking about money, financial well being. You know, as I mentioned before, we've created this society where somebody's value appears to be determined by how much money they have, or the car they drive, or the size of their house and that kind of stuff, and that's wrong, and we need to change that. And we need to change the narrative that people shouldn't be ashamed to say, I'm in debt. You know, somebody can come to us and say, Look, I'm struggling with mental health. They should be able to come to us and say, Look, I'm struggling with money, and they need the support from their kind of colleagues and their employers to help them get through because just like everything, it's all temporary, right? You know something could happen tomorrow, and you know you could all of a sudden, you could be in the money, and something could happen tomorrow, and we could be penniless. So I think we just need to really have that open dialog around talking about money within our cultures at work. That's great. Thank you. And

as we finish up, is there anything people could do to learn a little bit more about financial well being, or for work that you do, or, I guess, your book, you've got a podcast as well.

Yeah, yeah. So the podcast has got quite a heavy lean on financial well being, but we talk about lots of other areas of well being as well, and season two of that is out very soon. So anyone can find that it's called a word of good. The book is called a world of good. The podcast is called a word of good, and you can get that wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out lots of my kind of thought leadership and what I'm doing around well being@hellobenefex.com or you can find us on Twitter at hellobenefex. Or you can find me on Twitter at world of good book, where I share all the articles that get printed and stuff like that. And. And obviously the book is available worldwide, in Amazon, Barnes and Noble and people like that. Cool.

All right. Well, it's been a pleasure, absolute pleasure. So I guess it's just time for me to say thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure, and we've really enjoyed the conversation. Likewise,

great. So you are back in the room with us. That was our conversation with Kevin. I think we've covered some good stuff there. Some good stuff. There quite wide ranging any key reflections or takeaways from you,

Jen, I guess the thing that I would most reflect on is how infrequently this conversation occurs in public or within anyone outside of your own household. And therefore it really just made me think about how, like, I started as I was saying things, or as getting said something, I was like, Oh, that's a term that we haven't used. How many people know that term, and I have a real lack of knowledge over how financially literate people are, even when talking about some of this stuff, yeah, interesting,

I guess. Linked to that, one of the things that struck me was, you know, the fact that Geffen really called out education is one of the key levers to change and how beneficial it is to have a financial education and to experience that at all levels of life. So, you know, even starting at a very junior age to get some of that financial education and to understand, you know, compound interest and saving and all that stuff early on, it feels like such a helpful foundation on which to build a more successful future life?

Yeah, I would agree with that, I think, and I think it's, it's what the knowledge and the education piece is, one of the few pieces where knowing what your neighbor knows or does can help rather than hinder. So in most cases, when you think about finances, worrying about what everyone else knows or thinks is not helpful. But actually, from an education perspective, you think other people might know more about it, then actually it's a really good sort of lever to say, Okay, well, other people my age seem to know what they're talking about about this stuff. So I should do, yeah.

And that whole social thing creeps in, not just in terms of a knowledge, but in terms of consumption and the goods that we buy. And you know what success looks like. So I mean, I mean, I think overall, that's an absolutely fascinating topic. I'd love to explore more around our relationship with wealth and finance and and all that stuff.

Yeah, me too. Me too. Maybe for the future, then definitely cool. All right. Well, that's it from us. So thank you very much for me, and thank you for me.