The Importance of Financial WellBeing

An alarming 50% of Americans are under-prepared for retirement, and 40% of personal bankruptcies are caused by excessive bills. Financial wellbeing impacts every area of our lives and is important to our overall quality of life, but what does it take to have financial wellbeing? It takes financial literacy and planning, but you first must know where to start. Traci welcomes Jennifer Schuster and Josh Meyers from Segal Benz Communications, a firm that works with multiemployer plan sponsors to enhance the communication and the delivery of financial tools.

Transcript

Narrator  00:02

This is the World of Multiemployer Benefit Funds with Traci Dority-Shanklin. We believe in demystifying retirement solutions, upholding retiree dignity and contributing to economic stability through union organizing, pension reform and legislative activism. In short, we're devoted to busting myths about the labor movement. If you're interested in the enduring power of labor, well, you've landed in the right place. Experts and activists will share their insights, expertise, and stories. Time is short, so let's get started.

Traci Shanklin  00:35

Hi, it's Traci here, I am very excited to share today's episode about financial wellbeing. One of the core benefits of being a union member is the pension benefit and the health and welfare benefit provided. However, many union members don't completely understand how these benefits contribute to their financial wellbeing until they have a health crisis, or are within a couple years of retirement. Generally, most Americans are underprepared for retirement. Many studies point to a potential retirement crisis. The most sophisticated models imply that anywhere from 25 to 50% of US households, preparing for retirement, will end up short of the savings needed. Additionally, according to the National Library of Medicine, 40% of personal bankruptcies are due to excessive bills. Financial wellbeing is more than just about our ability to pay our bills or retire with dignity. Financial wellbeing impacts every area of our lives, and is critical to our overall quality of life. Financial wellbeing is so vital that multiemployer benefit funds actively seek ways to communicate the available tools and resources and educate plan participants. 

Traci Shanklin  

My two guests in today's episode are from Segal Benz Communications, Josh Meyer and Jennifer Schuster. Josh is a vice president at Segal Benz Communication. He counsels clients on the benefits of communication using a broad array of media and works nationally with many multiemployer clients. Jennifer is also a vice president and senior communications consultant. She specializes in innovating social and mobile media to connect with employees. Segal Benz Communications is a subsidiary of Segal that provides various consulting services including actuarial, health benefits, human resources, investments, fiduciary insurance, communications, and technology to a predominantly multiemployer client base. They have more than 25 offices throughout the US and Canada, all bound together by the shared mission of providing trusted advice that improves lives. Segal Benz Communications works with multiemployer plan sponsors to enhance the communication and the delivery of financial tools. So, all multiemployer fund participants can be on a path to financial wellbeing. 

Traci Shanklin  

What does it take to have financial wellbeing? The key components to financial wellbeing are financial literacy, retirement literacy, and high-level understanding of navigating healthcare coverage. It takes education and planning, but you must know where to start. Josh and Jennifer share how many multiemployer plans provide targeted guidance to plan participants. The goal is to ensure that all plan participants know where to access the available financial and retirement literacy tools and resources. We cover a lot of information and to ensure you don't miss anything, we have divided this episode into three shorter episodes. I am sure you will want to hear them all, so be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform. I hope this episode will encourage you to seek available tools and start your financial planning no matter where you are in your wage-earning years. Okay, let's get into part one of my conversation with Josh and Jennifer. Thank you so much Josh and Jennifer for being with me today. I like to start my conversations by having you share with our audience how you got into this work and any specific connections you have to the multiemployer benefits segment. So, I can start with you, Josh. 

Josh Meyer 04:49

Sure. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us today. I began my career. I studied labor relations in college without knowing or understanding of a whole lot about unions at that point I was drawn to them because of their social justice stance and their progressive politics and collective action. And I have wound up just falling in love with the movement and working with them. And I've been that's been my whole career in and around the labor movement. I started out working for a political PR and communications firm in Washington DC, where 95% of our clients were unions and doing internal and external communications, helping educate their members or potential members, educating the public about their campaigns to get the public on their side, if there was something an issue coming up. And I did that for a long time, and I was looking for a change. And a friend of mine who was in the labor movement suggested I talked to people at Segal and talked to folks around the movement that I knew and everybody spoke really highly of Segal. And one of the things that I really love about what I'm doing now is still talking to the same people I've always talked to – to union members and their families. I've expanded the audience, too. We've also worked with single employer plans, corporate clients, and public sector clients. But so, I'm still talking to the same people -- working people, and helping them empower them with what were -- the education about the benefits. In this case, I'm just doing -- I'm just talking to them from a different angle than I always did. But I'm still talking to the same people that didn't have benefits experience. But, I had experience talking to union members. And I've carried that through.

Traci Shanklin  06:33

How about you, Jennifer?

Jennifer Schuster 06:35

Like Josh, I kind of stumbled into this work. I've been doing this work for a long time, actually. I studied economics and English back in the day in college. And when I was job seeking right out of college, I started working for a consulting firm, not Segal, but a different consulting firm, and realized that I loved the communications piece of what the firm offered to its clients. What we do is really important, people might think, “Oh, we're helping people fill out a form,” or we're helping them get the benefit. But what we're really helping them do is make choices, super important choices about saving money for the future; about setting aside $1,000 in a savings account, so they could fix their flat tire; about making good health care choices; about saving money for healthcare, in retirement, all these different things that really can make a huge difference to folks; no matter where they're from; who they are; what kind of work they do. We kind of all share this need for thinking about saving money and making good financial choices, so that's why I love what we do. It keeps me interested and engaged. You know, I'm the kind of person where you know what? I might get bored with what I do, but I never do with this job because I really do feel like we're making a huge difference for the people we work for. And those are our participants, the employees that we work with, just really helping them make good choices and sound choices about what's happening for them now, and also what can be happening for them in the future.

Traci Shanklin  08:07

I love what you just said. I grew up in the labor movement, so I come from a little bit of a different experience. And my dad was a Labor leader. And he -- and I've said this multiple times on this podcast -- really emphasize to me how important it was to always remember who we work for. That it's the participants that we work for. And that sometimes our work can be a little dry, or it just gets mundane. But if you always revert back to that core principle, I think it makes what we do so rewarding. I'm excited to get the kick off this conversation about financial wellbeing. I had this epiphany if you will, and it wasn't so much of an epiphany. I wasn't unique and having it, but I found myself really aware of how many people are not planning properly for either retirement or just that -- you mentioned needing to change a tire that people are really not financially prepared in many cases. And I was curious at the time. What because I know the benefit of being a union member is often being a participant in a multiemployer plan. And I was curious what was being done to potentially educate members on this subject? I want to start with first of all, can you just explain what is included in the term financial wellbeing?

Josh Meyer 09:49

So, financial wellbeing I think is the thought about having peace of mind about your financial security, now and then looking forward to the future for when you retire. And really understanding the benefits that you have and how to use them, sort of give you this peace of mind, especially for the people that we work with. They have defined benefit pensions, which mean many Americans do not at this point. They have 401k plans, annuity funds; some have both even. And so, helping them understand what they have; why it may be that they're trading some of their wages to put into those two funds, and how it all comes together. And then why they should be thinking about saving and planning, so that they can have some peace of mind for themselves and their families.

Jennifer Schuster 10:46

If I can add to that, too, because I'm going to get back to that whole the concept of having enough money to change a flat tire, or to have a car repair that was unexpected. Or maybe you have a healthcare situation, and you have to meet your deductible. You know, all of our plans have some sort of a deductible or cost sharing mechanism that we need to meet. And so, I really like to try to help from a financial wellbeing perspective, focus people on what they might need in the here and now as well, so it's not just the look to the future, and what I might need when I'm not working anymore. But, it's how do I -- if my son falls at the skate park and breaks his wrist, and I have to pay $100 at the ER, do I have $100 that I can pay? How is that going to work? I really like to try to focus folks on that here and now, but not overwhelm them. And like kind of give them ideas on baby steps they can take to just set aside $500 In case of an emergency. And that can seem like a really daunting task for a lot of folks. And that's what we really are trying to reinforce with people to right now.

Josh Meyer 11:53

Just to add on a little bit, also that the benefits world is so confusing, and complicated. And so, to help people get their heads around what this all means and how they can make those plans and set aside the 500 bucks that Jen was talking about. It's so important to try to cut through all the technical terms, the legal terms, the insurance industry speak, and help them really understand what they have and how it fits into their lives. To help them navigate through all these complicated benefits because it's just so important to them.

Traci Shanklin  12:30

So, you both talk about working, you know, to help participants understand what they're reading and understand what resources they actually have, what tools are typically available to multiemployer participants today?

Jennifer Schuster 12:46

I could take that one, Traci. I think it's the same type of tools that are really available to non-multiemployer plan participants as well. You know, our, our plan participants are essentially like covered under the same type of healthcare benefits that non-multiemployer plans have. We might be covered through Kaiser Permanente, or Anthem, or Blue Cross/Blue Shield. And we have all the same host of tools that those plan providers make available to their members and employees who enroll in those plans. We also work with a lot of our multiemployer funds to pull together just financial planning resources, so whether that's coming from the fund; whether we’re helping them develop like a calculator to think about, “Okay, what my pension benefit might be worth in the future? What might I need to do to supplement that benefit?” So, we're working with a lot of our plans to kind of help pull together and curate all the different resources that might be available. Because what Josh pointed out earlier, it can be super confusing for folks to navigate, you know, let's say they've got 15 different apps that they can use or a website, you know, 40 links going to all these different plan providers. Our job is to really focus people, curate the tools that make the most sense for the plans they're in, and point them to those tools. So, Josh, do you want to add to that at all?

Josh Meyer 14:07

I think that's a great answer. I think I would just add that one of the things that we tried to do by doing customized communications for the funds themselves, is to tie their benefits back and put them in the context of the other pieces of the puzzle that the fund is providing. So, the recordkeepers probably do a great job of describing their plans describing the tools on their website. But what we can do by providing communications for the fund is tie, say the 401k benefits back to also the retiree health plan or their active health plan, their defined benefit plan and figure out the key messages for the fund and what goals they're trying to accomplish. And then put some context around the communications and then as Jen said, help them -- if they had this whole array of tools out there, help them understand which one to use or what and how to access those tools.

Traci Shanklin 15:09

Yeah, that that goes into the next question I have -- which I'm going to shift a little bit because I originally was thinking how are multiemployer plans currently communicating to participants about the tools and resources available? But, it sounds like the better question is that everybody is communicating in their own silo, what you guys are doing is aggregating that information, and then creating unique communications for each plan that is a client, correct?

Jennifer Schuster 15:34

Yeah, we really are. And one of the things we're doing that I think is super fun about what we do, is we really, like take a look at the demographics of plan participants. You know, so let's say, a fund with participants that skew a little bit older. For example, I worked with a fund here in California that the average plan participant is like 45 years old, so you know, not old, not young, kind of in the middle there. And so, we really think about, you know, how do we best reach somebody who may not have access to the internet in their workplace, but uses their phone all the time? And I'm a Gen Xer, and I use my phone for everything. Okay? And so, how do we reach that person? So, we really take a look again, at the demographics, and try to get a sense for who we're talking to. And then what is going to stick with them; what's going to resonate with sort of like this mix of whether it's phone-based communications, digital stuff, sending grant pieces home, in the mail, we use, like a full range of media. But at the end of the day, really want to make sure we understand who we're talking to, and how to best reach them, and what kind of messages are going to resonate with them? So, I'll come back to that 45-year-old, we're really, you know, starting to think about, “Wow, what does it look like if I'm not working anymore? What does it look like if I have kids who are going to college and need to save a little money for them? What is my health situation look like?” Because I might, you know, some stuff that's bubbling up that he didn't have, when I was 38, we really tried to take a look at who the people are talking to.

Josh Meyer 17:17

To add to that, one of the ways that we try to help our clients, that'd be because there's so many tools available so many different types of media and channels to use. We start out by talking with them about developing a communication strategy. And that gets into the point that Jen was talking about identifying your audiences, finding key messages, figuring out your goals and objectives, and figuring out the best way to reach your audiences. And then you can figure out what the best tools are to use. Because a tool that works for one group, won't necessarily work for another. You know, some people really like print; some are going to want to watch a video; some want interactive tools, and you can sort of once you take a step back, create this strategy, it really helps you figure out the best plan of action to reach your participants and help educate them.

Traci Shanklin  18:08

This is where we will pause part one of my conversation with Josh and Jennifer. One last thing before I let you go. My goal is to ensure multiemployer benefit funds find the highest quality professionals to help them grow their funds. In my work with several boutique money managers entering the multiemployer business segment, I have found some common misconceptions and avoidable mistakes. If you are an investment firm considering expansion in the multiemployer funds business segment, please visit www.sisupartnersllc.com That is www.sisupartnersllc.com. And check out our multiemployer strategy blueprint consulting service. The purpose of this program is to assist investment firms in evaluating your internal ROI if you launch a dedicated multiemployer benefit funds Client Development Strategy. Be sure to tune in for part two, how multiemployer plans communicate financial wellbeing tools, and part three, navigating healthcare will air after the holidays. Thanks as always for being part of the conversation.

Narrator  19:21

And that's it for this week's episode of the World of Multiemployer Benefit Funds. We'd love to have your support. You can show your support by sharing episodes, making comments, or heading over to www.patreon.com/multiemployerfunds for other partnership opportunities. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to next time.

Disclosure

Sisu Partners LLC host the World of Multiemployer Benefit Funds podcast which contains content and discussions that have been prepared for informational and educational purposes only. No listeners should assume that any discussion on this podcast serves as the receipt of, or substitute for, personalized advice from an investment professional as the information provided on the podcast is not intended to be investment, legal, or tax advice. This company is not an SEC registered investment advisor and does not solicit clients or raise capital for money managers.