Alright, let’s get started here grateful for everybody’s everybody’s time taking the time to check out my interpretation take thoughts on creating a financial wellness program for an organization, what it really means. How do you do it? And, yeah, so we’ll just jump right into it, I think it is an extremely important thing. Anytime I do a presentation, I always want to start with telling people about how I’ve made lots of great financial decisions over the course of my life. And I’ve made all the stupid financial decisions over the course of my life, particularly in my 20s, I was just talking with my friend grant about whether or not we if we remembered when we were back in seventh and eighth grade, and there’s, there’s patches of it. But for me, I made the majority of my financial bad decisions, probably from about the age of 22, right up till about the age of 30, give or take. And I share that just to just to let you know that wherever you are at or specifically, in regard to this, wherever your employees are at, I’ve probably been there. And so I can identify and relate to the struggles that people go through when it comes to money I can relate to and remember, the negative bad feelings, the anxiety, the stress, the shame, and all that stuff that is related to struggling financially, and more portly, I have pulled through it and made a lot of good decisions. So and I think that that’s, that’s an important thing. And if you are somebody whose job it is going to be to put in place a financial wellness program or take one over or keep one going. I think that being vulnerable. And being fully engaged and making this stuff accessible, is really a key sort of a linchpin to having a successful program just because people go through it. And we’re ashamed of it when we’re ashamed of something that sometimes it stops us from taking any action at all. And that obviously, is is not very conducive to becoming financially successful over the long term. So once it happened, that a mother was trying to get her child to stop eating sugar, she just couldn’t do it. Just trying to figure out how do I get this kid to stop eating sugar? She just tried this, that other thing, it just it just wasn’t working. He loves sugar. Then she heard that the Dalai Lama. His Holiness was going to be coming to her town. She thought, Well, anybody can get my kid to stop eating sugar. It’s the Dalai Lama. So the day the llama shows up, she gets in line. Her and her son are wait in line getting closer and closer to the front comes their turn. Dalai Lama says welcome. Thank you for coming. What can I help you with? She says, Your Holiness Dalai Lama, can you please tell my son to stop eating sugar? Dalai Lama looks at her looks at the boy looks back at her and says come back in two weeks. While there says oh, okay, very well. So two weeks go by Dalai Lama is back in town. She waits in line get to the front of the line. Dalai Lama looks at her looks at the little boy and says to the boy stop eating sugar. Mother while glad slightly bemused said, Well, why did I have to come back two weeks later, the Dalai Lama looks at her and says why to make sure I could stop eating sugar, too. So there you go. We can intellectually understand lots of stuff. But Intel, we go through it ourselves tell we put our hand on the hot stove or had that personal experience. That’s when it sort of clicks into place for us. So that’s true of so many things like our diet and exercise program. Certainly when it comes to money, which is another reason why it’s important for you to be honest and vulnerable about any financial struggles that you may have had in the past when trying to get your employees to change their behaviors. A financial wellness program has a lot of things. It can be a painkiller. And it can be a vitamin. So odds are within your organization, it’s going to be both of those things. There’s going to be people who are struggling, it’s going to be people who have very little idea on what it takes to be successful with their personal finances. They never learned some of the basics or any of the basics. And then there’s gonna be people in your organization that are very fine, financially sophisticated, and have their acts together and have their ducks in a row. And this can be a way to help them get a little further along. So it can be both a painkiller and it can be a vitamin. Now, how you look at something makes all the difference fond of saying this, it’s our perspective and how we approach different problems and ideas. How you talk about something is also extremely important. Our viously Martin Luther King, Jr. Here is one of was one of the greatest orators in human history probably, and his ability to deliver a message in a way that was inspiring and motivating, analyze change. And he obviously ushered in brought about the Civil Rights Movement, one of the most important things that our country has ever done. And would I have a dream been as powerful a speech had somebody else delivered it? I don’t know, but I think not. So how we say something, how we say things makes an enormous difference. And when it comes to money, the financial services industry, from my perspective, is one that is built on an illusion of skill. That’s a quote from Daniel Kahneman. He’s the gentleman who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, which is a really, really important book and talked about why people make financial decisions. And a lot of it’s based on emotion anyway. But Danny also also commented that this industry is built on complexity, and a lot of unnecessary complexity and jargon. And a lot of that is just to create sort of a walled garden where people are dependent on financial professionals to get good financial information, resources and advice. And I just think that that’s the furthest thing from the truth. I think that every single one of us is fully capable of creating and executing financial plans. But we do need to number one, have the literacy be able to put it into place. And that’s where having competent people, people like Dave Ramsey, and Suze Orman’s of the world, and whoever your famous or favorite financial commentators are, they have a way of taking complicated complex ideas, and topics or whatever and making them easy to understand. So just like Martin Luther King, Jr. was the right person, the right time. While there’s a lot of great people out there, and a lot of great resources that can help you put a great financial wellness program in place for your employees. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. That being said, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drank. And if you’ve worked with human beings, if you’ve ever interacted with human beings, then you certainly know this to be true. And it can be an exercise in frustration, and sometimes futility. And certainly, when we’re trying to get people to change behaviors, it’s really tricky. People don’t want to change their opinion about their favorite song, or their favorite color, or their favorite kind of pizza, let alone whether or not they want help from you, on changing their financial behaviors. But the end of the day, all we can do is position people for success. put things in place, put in great programs, invite people to participate, and then we must let the chips fall where they may. And a financial wellness program certainly falls into that category as well. So we are experiencing a lot of problems, lots of problems, Wherever you look, when it comes to money. A lot of the problems historically are self inflicted, I think that I can speak for myself when I just was not paying attention. When I was not paying attention to my personal finances. These are very much a self inflicted wound when when I’m not saving money when I am living paycheck to paycheck, when I’m using credit cards and rolling balances over from one month to the next. These are self inflicted wounds. That being said, right now, I just read the other day that the cost of rent or rather, the percentage rent across America has just

exponentially increased by something upwards of 50%, just since 2000. And in the last couple of years, everything is more expensive. Housing is more expensive, food is more expensive, gas is more expensive. And this is obviously these are not self inflicted. So there’s a lot of problems going on. We’re living paycheck to paycheck, we don’t reproduce, not doing a good job saving money. And then there are external problems as well. And then there are additional problems. Also problems like a lot of the places where we get our current financial wellness, where we get our financial wellness programming comes from the purveyors of financial products. So for example, a lot of companies get their financial wellness programs from the company that provides their 401k. And while this on its face is not necessarily a bad thing, if you think about it the other way, if you were to get your nutritional information from McDonald’s, that probably wouldn’t be a great idea. And you can go down the line. There’s conflicts of interest. And I’m not saying that there’s conflict of interest if you’ve got a great 401k provided doing an awesome job on the financial wellness. That is probably not a problem. But I always advocate submit that taking a step back and changing the aperture a little bit could be a benefit, recognizing that there is oftentimes conflicts and just because somebody’s doing a great job, one thing doesn’t mean they’re going to do a great job of any of everything so briefly about me, I used to have shorter hair, look at that handsome guy in the picture. I am the president of money Landman Academy, it’s a financial wellness platform. I’ve been a financial person for 20 plus years honored to be named to Investopedia is listed top 100 financial advisors in the United States five years running. I’m a podcaster. So host the left blood podcast as well as the line money show. And I write and speak on financial topics all the time. More importantly, perhaps, the young man about to smash the stamp the sandcastles that I created there. That’s Jack, he’s my four year old and James is my seven year old, they’re fans of the beach, and there’s Joe, baby Joe Josephine. She is one she is a sweetheart, also husband to my wife, Emily. So I appreciate that in our busy lives, that we have a lot going on, we’ve got a lot of plates that we are constantly spinning. And it behooves us to stay on top of the most important things like our money and our finances. And that’s really one of the things that a financial wellness program is designed to do what we want. We want super happy, building engaged, people working within our organizations, you want happy, healthy? Well, employees. That’s the reason that you offer employee benefits. That’s the reason that you eat that you help it to position them for success and other aspects of their lives. Now, in a perfect world, would we do? Would we offer and do all things for our employees? Well, maybe maybe not. I don’t think that any of us want to be materialistic or paternalistic and try to push our values on our employees. That being said, it makes sense to provide the resources when people are interested in taking advantage of them. We want to be able to provide great resources so that people can help themselves so that people can learn and become financially literate and become financially well. And that is a benefit to them. It’s a benefit to their families and their communities. And it’s certainly a benefit to your organization as well. So not only is it a good thing to do, but there’s a massive business case for it, you can throw into your favorite search engine, how much does financial stress cost organizations every year, and it’s billions and billions of dollars, if not more than that. So we want we want happy, healthy people who are fully engaged in every aspect of their lives. So what is financial literacy? What is financial wellness? What is a financial wellness program? Well, I think simply put financial literacy is what we know. And then financial wellness is what we do. So that’s pretty straightforward. Pretty simple. Financial literacy, what does it mean to be literate, that means that I understand the basics, I understand how to manage my cash flow, I understand what a budget is, I understand what my 401k is and how it works. I understand the basics of investing. I understand insurance, a little bit of tax. Now I don’t need to be an expert in all these things. But the trick is, how do I take the knowledge that I have, and actually put it into place, put it into practice. And that’s really what wellness is, the world is littered with educated derelicts. That just means that people that spent a ton of money on their education, but just can’t get their lives together at all. And then there’s tons of people that have never had any formal education at all. And they are wildly successful in every aspect of, of life. So literacy is what you know, wellness is what you actually do. These are very, very, very important things. It’s the behavior gap. So gap between what I know and the gap between what I do the idea is closing that gap. And from my perspective, that’s what a financial wellness program is designed to do is to close that behavior gap. And if I’m able to successfully do that during our time today, well, I will have done you a wonderful service. So we’ll just have to see where it goes. I’ve discovered earlier today that when you put a GIF into the background, it doesn’t play. So this is Tina Fey saying no, thank you, please. And the thing here is that I am not interested in I Am I went through this exercise a little while back. Well, I wonder I don’t think I’m really offended by that many things. Thanks. And then I started thinking about it and started writing down things that I’m offended by. And it turns out, there’s a lot of things that I’m offended by a lot of things really irked me. And one of those things is, as I already touched on a financial company, throwing a financial wellness label on a crappy presentation and calling it a financial wellness program, I’m offended by that. And just like everything sort of gets co opted at some point. Financial wellness is certainly one of those things. So every year, a company is supposed to have some kind of an open enrollment meeting for the benefits. And there’s oftentimes an open enrollment meaning for the 401k. And that is not a financial wellness program, talking about asset allocation, and talking about the mutual funds that are available inside of your company’s 401k is not financial wellness, that’s just an overview of the 401k plan. So there’s a lot more that goes into an effective financial wellness program than just than just communicating information about financial things, we have to be able to make a connection with people. And that’s where you leaning on and benefiting from all the myriad of resources that are out there, free and paid for which I will go through all of those things. That’s what I’m interested in doing is being useful, as opposed to being brilliant, maybe that’s an excuse that I make, because I’m not brilliant, but here we go. So here’s we’re going to talk about, we’re going to talk about why programs fail, we’re gonna talk about the fundamentals of what needs to be in a program, we’re gonna talk about self determination theory, which is the underlying theory of it, I’m going to talk about the topics that I advocate that you provide resources on, and then how do you actually put the thing in place so that programs fail. A lot of the time, it’s number wants to start with the last one, there’s not a real plan to begin with. There’s too many tactics. So it’s just let’s let’s try this thing. Let’s, let’s do a talk on on budgeting. Let’s do a talk on getting out of debt. But there’s not a real strategy that’s in place, it’s not cohesive, we’re going to try this thing. And then oh, that didn’t really work. We’re going to try something next year. It’s not integrated into all the other financial or rather, all the other employee benefits that you have in place are your rolling out. There’s a lot of different ways that we can screw this up. But then also taking a short term view versus a long term view of it. I think that any time we’re putting in place a new initiative, it’s boobs us to take a long term view at it. But fundamentally, number one is we have to have a plan. And maybe we should take it one step further and say, we have to

have the right, the right intention, which is what we’ve been talking about, which is how do I help my employees to become financially secure, and get them on the path to financial prosperity? So I think that anytime we’re going to start a program, or bring different concepts or ideas, I think that it really benefits us to operate from first principles. And first principles are just fundamentally what what is what are true. And you on musk, whether you like Elon Musk or not, he is an extraordinary person who has either created or has disrupted a handful of industries in a very, very short amount of time. And anytime Mr. Musk decides that he’s going to get into something, be it started a rocket company, go to Mars, create a new category, or rather revolutionize electric cars and make them commercially viable, or start drilling holes underneath major American cities, or start implanting chips into our heads which allow our thoughts to control other things. It’s amazing, he operates by first principles. So if he were, if he had just followed conventional thinking, then I don’t think the Tesla would be a thing. I don’t think that SpaceX would be a thing. I don’t think that the other five or six things that he is into would actually be a thing. So instead of just looking at what everybody else was doing from a battery technology standpoint, or from a rocket ship building standpoint, he went to first principles and said, Okay, what goes into a battery? What, What materials do we need to actually make a functioning rocket? And let’s operate on first principles. So I think that doing that when it comes to our personal finances, also makes a ton of sense. But take a big step back without trying to get too fancy. Let’s figure out what do people really need in order to become financially successful? And I again, I think it’s a lot easier and a lot. It’s a lot simpler than We make it out to be none of this stuff is easy. If it were easy, then people like me wouldn’t have jobs. But it is pretty simple. We just operate on first principles, which is what we’re going to be doing in just a second. And I think that we want to design a program that builds on itself. So like our nesting dolls here, the small one goes, the next larger one goes over the small one, so on and so forth. And I also advocate that we create programs that are repeatable, easily implementable. And mostly, I guess the repeatable part is, is the most important thing, because the reality is that you’re going to have employees that are new to your organization all the time. And they’re going to need, oftentimes the basics. And then you’re going to have employees that have already been through the basics, and maybe they want to go back through. And that’s great if they do but you’re going to need an intermediate offering than a more advanced offering. And while it’s not possible to be all things to all people do think that we can put together a for lack of a better term, a wheel of training, that’s going to allow us to offer programming that will make sense to your employees, depending on what stage of life that they’re in, because your 20 year old employee is going to need something different than your 65 year old employee. So this is all common sense. But that’s really what personal finance is, are a big part of it, certainly developing a financial wellness program for your company. Just keep that in mind, which I think you probably already know, but important thing. And the starting point is figuring out what is most important. And so I thought I’d talk about the name of my company is money alignment Academy. So I think a lot about personal finance comes down to being aligned just with within ourselves. And purpose is why you do things. So helping people to better understand the impact that they’re having through their work. I think that that’s a really, really important thing. It’s essential that we coach people up on how to professionally and personally set goals, goals are what we want, then beliefs, and beliefs and our values. That’s who we are. And then habits are how we actually do things. And the idea here is, the more aligned we can be, the better off then we will actually become I think that the closer to the lives that we want, will actually get. So if I have a deep understanding of the impact of the work that I am doing, and that’s possible to find with any kind of an endeavor, then I want to get really clear on what it is that I want the human superpower, to be able to envision any life that I want in the future. And then to make plans for bringing that desired future into my current reality and then execute on those plans actually do it. If that’s not a superpower, I don’t know what it is. But the reality, unfortunately, is that only 3% of Americans have written goals and the verb is in, you write down your goals, you can exponentially increase your odds of actually achieving them. And then habits, that’s, that’s, that’s the whole game. If you have good habits probably going to be successful. If you have negative or bad habits, or no habits at all, you’re gonna have a hard time becoming successful. And this is true of diet and exercise. It’s true of relationships. It is true of our personal finances as well. And it’s obviously true for how you run your business. So this is what I want. And it’s still to help you instill in the lives of all of your employees. And you can have the purpose book, these are the four main ideas, purpose, goals, habits, and beliefs are what I cover in the purpose book, and this is free. So you can download a PDF copy of it, obviously you can buy a copy if you’re interested, but I want to, there’s gonna be a lot of resources, all the resources that we’re going to talk about today are going to be free. So you can be able to access all of them, and then putting them all together that is the part two of the trick for lack of a better term. So I think that that to be successful, we must know what is of the greatest importance. Because not everything can be the most important thing. Right? We have to have a hierarchy of what we think is the most important thing. And then we need to figure out how to do the most important things. So we need to figure out what’s most important and then we need to figure out what we need to do in service of getting those things that are most important. And so these are our standards. So it could be this is the information that we must learn. This is the activities that we must do. So I refer to these as our table stakes and hectically with table stakes are these are the buy in for a card game. If you ever played poker, there are table stakes. So to get in the game, you have to ante up some money. And I think that to get the life that you want to get the success in, in your business that you want, and to have a successful, to have a successful financial wellness program, you have to understand what your table stakes are. So these are our minimums. And the last thing that I want is for you to be too ambitious to be overly ambitious. And to try and boil the ocean. What is of greater importance is let’s put something in place that is sustainable, that we can consistently do. And then as you get that down, then you can add more things in. So that’s table stakes. So figure out from my perspective, I’m talking about you from your perspective, these are the critical things that we want to help our employees with. And I say that because you know your company way better than I do. Your company could have 1000 employees, it could have five employees. So each organization is going to be a little bit different. And what you need, or rather, what your employees need is going to be dependent on what your organization is like. So I’m going to give you lots of different ideas. And then you can take some and pass on others and say, Okay, these are what we’re going to run with for 2024. And then into 2025. And, and into the future. But we think that these are the most critical things to be focused on. So self determination theory, I came upon this idea, and I just loved it. I love the the idea of being a self manager, and I understand the importance of helping other people to develop their self management skills, because that’s what you want, you want high achieving people who understand how to manage their own behaviors, how to manage their own activities. And obviously, you and I have a hard time doing that on our own. And then we have families, we have to help our loved ones do that. And you as an employer or head of human resources or whatever position that you’re in within your organization. It benefits you to help your direct reports your employees to be as great self managed as they possibly can be, and to give them the tools that they need to become successful. And that’s what self determination theory drives them. I think it’s a big key to all of this. Fundamentally,

it’s just there’s never going to be anybody more interested in, in your financial success than then you are. And it’s true of you. It’s true of me, it’s true of your employees. So we want to give them the key to unlock their financial success. And I think that self determination theory does that briefly. There’s three aspects of it, competence, autonomy, and then relatedness. Competence just speaks to our human desire to get good at things. So I want to develop just a basic understanding sort of one on one level understanding of personal finance. And then a lot of people want to get to 202. Some people want to get to 303. But we want to help them to get to whatever desired level that they want to get to. I’m not interested in turning people into an MBA or a CFP, or a CFA or whatever, I’m not interested in turning people into financial experts that they’re not interested in that. I am interested in helping them understand. Here’s the stuff that has to happen. Whether or not you have the interest, have the desire to do it. If you do great. If you don’t, then here’s how you can get it done. Or here’s how you can loop in additional people to get these things done. Okay, so competence says, We need to know how to do things. And for the most part, people want to learn how to do things, and particularly when we present it to them in a way that’s easy to understand and easy to consume. That’s when we’re becoming successful at helping people to become competent. Autonomy simply means that I understand and appreciate you understand what autonomy means. But we want the freedom to be able to complete different tasks as we see fit. So great employees that do a great job you want them to you want to stay out of their way. You want to clear their paths so that they can run and being successful and it takes less resources from you to manage them. You’ve done a great job training and coaching them up and you’ve got a wonderful contributor. Well, from personal financial standpoint, we want to give them options and resources. Say if you want to learn about budgeting, here are several different ways that you can do it. Here are some videos that you can watch on it. Here’s a course that you can take on it. Here’s some written materials, here’s that they could get the idea. So you get to choose we’re going to make all All these different things available to you, what makes sense? What are you interested in, might not be this quarter, maybe next quarter, you’ll be interested in that. But we’re giving people the autonomy and the freedom to do it. And then relatedness says that we like to become or be a part of something, we all want to be part of something that we feel is greater than us. This is the opportunity that companies have to create great cultures, it’s an opportunity to help people feel like they’re part of an organization or a team that has their best interest in mind. We all need people around us that can give us a hand up when we need it, or it can give us a kick in the butt when we need it. And that’s really what relatedness does. It’s a community of like minded people. So how do we help to foster that? Well, I think that this is really one of the main reasons I get excited about financial wellness programs in general, because we get so much of our benefits, we get so many of our benefits from our employers, obviously, we have our health insurance, and this, that and the other thing. So this is an opportunity to also help our employees to become financially successful, and that you’re interested in this suggest that you are also cut from that cloth. So how can we fit in personal financial information, financial wellness, training and resources into our existing company culture? How can we become more intentional about creating a culture of learning and collaboration and teamwork and all of these things? How can we get that little further along? And how can we get people to take advantage of it? So that is the idea here. So it’s competence, autonomy, and relatedness that is what we are driving at. Those are the three key pillars of self determination theory. And I think something that will really help your program to get off the ground and become successful. So is there an outcome? I talked about how I want people to get whatever they want with with money. So if you want to get rich, I am here for it. Let’s go, let’s let’s figure out how to do that. If you just want to get out of debt, you want to be out of credit card debt, you want to stop worrying about money, you want to not live paycheck to paycheck anymore. Well, I’m interested in that too, more so than anything else. I’m interested in helping working class people get better at money so they can live how they want. And I think too often we put the cart before the horse, and we want to talk about becoming financially prosperous. Before we talk about financial security. Financial security is not the most exciting thing in the world. But I believe it to be the most important thing. And while I want everybody to become financially prosperous, again, you’re never going to be there, you’re never going to be able to get there until you first have financial security. And so a lot of what I talk about is based on that, based on understanding what it is that I want. It’s based on understanding the way that that my brain thinks about and I currently interact with money, it’s making sure that I have a good understanding of how all the different financial things work, and then bringing it all together. So security first, then prosperity. So I think that a good financial wellness program can have both of those components are all of those components. So here are the topics that I advocate or suggest that you put into place. So I love the purpose book. Again, it’s its purpose, goals, beliefs, and then habits. And they think that that can be a foundational piece to a wellness program in general, it’s certainly a financial wellness program. So that covers all of it. And it’s a short read. But once we get past that, I think that debt management is a massive thing. There’s a gentleman named Dave Ramsey, you’re probably familiar with, I call him Uncle Dave, I believe him to be the most impactful and important financial person. Maybe ever because he helps people get out of debt. And I believe that debt is one of the worst things that is afflicting us as a people right now here in the United States. The average American has, I bet it’s way higher. Now it was $7,000 of credit card debt. About a year ago, I think that that’s the last time I looked at guarantee it’s higher than that. And when we’re living paycheck to paycheck, that means that obviously we’re just spinning our wheels. And we’re not getting ahead financially. So having a good debt management resources to help people understand how to manage their finances, how to get out of debt, and a big part of that is just managing cash flow is essential. I think that understanding how to put together a personal budget is also an essential thing. This is what I hear about this all the time, and I’m really surprised. I speak to at large companies really frequently. And when I have an initial conversation Some people will say, you know, what my people really need is basic information on budgeting. But I bet that’s not something you do. Like, well, why? Why would you think that that’s a huge part of what I do is a huge part of the conversations I have with companies because we have to manage the the, those those fundamentals. So we need to be able to help people with a personal budget, we need to learn about just basics of investing. So I need to learn about what kind of an investor I am. Am I an aggressive investor? Am I a conservative investor, I need to understand the different accounts that are available the different investment vehicles like stocks versus mutual funds, or ETFs, exchange traded bonds, real estate investing, cryptocurrency, this that and the other thing, people have questions about all these kinds of things. And if your company offers a 401 K plan, it’s essential that people understand how that works, so that they can effectively use it. It’s just offering the plan. That’s an awesome first step, just giving people a couple of additional tools for how it actually works. Super important. The emergency fund piece, maybe outside of budgeting, is one of the least sexy things to talk about. But again, on the path to financial peace of mind on the path to financial security. This is one of the linchpin items. So how do we put together an emergency fund? How do I actually how to actually save it save enough homeownership, the American Dream, which feels to be slipping out of our fingers slowly and slowly and slowly and faster and faster and faster? Lately, we still need resources on how to put together a plan for saving up a down payment, understanding all the different costs, and how do I actually buy a house and successfully do that. So that’s really important, paying for education. If I ever want to scare somebody or freak them out, I just show him what the cost of what the cost of education is going to be 10 years from now, 20 years from now. And that usually sufficiently does it and I kid but it’s not very funny at all. So making a plan for figuring out how to help kids with education or how to position them for education is a really important conversation, retirement income planning.

It’s one thing to save enough money to be able to step away from full time employment, then quite another to actually be able to design a program or a plan for create a plan for how do I take all this money that I saved, and turn it into income that will last for as long as I need it to. So that is a key thing. And then finally, an estate planning from an estate planning perspective, estate plans for everyone. It’s one of those terms, that sounds super fancy, but most everybody should have a will. And you can do that for free. So there’s lots of different resources on putting together a will. And then the sky’s the limit for complex or sophisticated estate planning. But the majority of us just need information on putting together a will setting up guardianship topics like that. So you see that we cover foundational stuff like cash flow, budgeting, debt management, getting your emergency fund set up. So we call that protection. So protection piece, and then it’s accumulation. So how do I save money for goals and priorities? down payment on a home retirement kids education? And then finally, from a distribution standpoint, how do I take all the money that I saved up and turn it into income that will last for as long as I need it to, we cover and touch on the three different stages of our financial lives, which are getting protection, accumulation and distribution. So within this, we have information that’s going to benefit most every employee that you have. And for those employees that are super sophisticated. You can talk about bringing some additional resources to them as well. But these are the topics that I submit an advocate that you start with. And then it’s a function of how do I deliver this information. And we’re fortunate in a time where every single one of us is walking around with a cell phone on us. And through that cell phone, we all have access to YouTube. We can scroll through different blogs, there’s podcasts on literally every single topic. Those are all free. And I have gone through and curated videos, so YouTube videos, blog posts, and podcast episodes for every single one of these areas. So for all the topics I’ve gone through and curated videos and podcasts and not just my own stuff, but from Dave Ramsey and from Investopedia and from other podcasters and things like that. So I will put that in. If you are listening to this after the fact I will put it in the notes of all the different places that this video is published or this audio was published. And if you are live with us today, you can shoot me an email and I can email you the actual PDF document meant, that goes through all the different all the different resources that I’ve put together for you. So going back to the autonomy piece, your employees want the ability to consume information in different ways. Some people are auditory learners, some are visual, so on and so forth. And then, so you’ve got the videos, the blogs, the podcast, awesome. But then you can bring in presenters, or you can have somebody do a zoom call on these different topics. And I’m happy to talk about different resources or reaching out and finding out some more people that can come in and do those at a low cost or potentially even free. And then there’s lots of different places to get online courses as well, some free, some paid. But these are the different ways that I would suggest or that you provide resources that people can choose from, and participate in. Some people would not be interested in sitting in a room with their peers talking about money, some would be very interested in that because they’re open, and they’re not shy about that kind of thing. Some people want the freedom to be able to go through an online course on their own, some people just want to watch a video, I think you get the idea. So finding as many different resources as possible. And then some different tools for creating financial wellness within your organization. I think that a 401 K plan is a really, really important addition, or an important part of of helping employees to become financially well. And right now, half of employees in the United States do not work in an organization that has a 401k. And there’s very little excuse for that right now, because there’s something called the secure act. And all that is, is a law that went into effect that provides a tax credit for that will essentially pay for all of the different fees and expenses associated with putting the 401k in place. So happy to share some more resources on that. Offering group learning or experiential opportunities, which goes to relatedness bringing people together. And this is something that you could talk about, if you wanted to. And what I’ve done with organizations in the past is, if you’re doing some kind of a Wellness Week, or a wellness month, or doing a wellness, some kind of a quarterly wellness day or week, you could do things like doing a potluck, or bringing in lunches, which will help people to save money on, on going out to eat. And that will also help with just healthy wellness, like weight loss and stuff like that healthy, healthy lifestyles. So from relatedness standpoint, and this is where bringing in or doing a book club. So everybody reads a financial book of some kind. And then he talks about it. That’s 100% of free resource offering on demand financial literacy courses from an autonomy standpoint, which I already touched on, and then offering financial coaching. I think this is, for lack of a better term, a next level benefit. And this is something that you can gauge interest from people, some people already working with financial professionals, so they wouldn’t be interested in this. Some people have never, and Norton will probably will never interact with a financial professional unless you make it available to them. Like 80% of Americans have never interacted with a financial person. And I think that financial coaching is pretty cool, because there’s not any kind of a profit motive. financial coaching is just somebody coming and talking about financial behaviors, and habits and best practices versus somebody coming in and giving them investment advice and saying you should be invested in this. And not that. So something to consider is also financial coaching. And what it takes, I think that that in order for any initiative, which you know, as somebody who is running an organization or part of leading a department or something like that, there’s got to be a champion for whatever program you’re interested in a rolling out, or it will just die on the vine. And we’ve all been a part of getting excited about initiative. And then just it’s not sustainable, because there’s not somebody who’s really driving it. So I think that there needs to be somebody who is championing the initiative, the program. And at the highest levels, the better. The CEO, the president, the founder is person who’s driving it, that’s awesome. Or at least the department head and the more people from different organizations or different parts of the organization, the better it’s going to be. And I think that we must be vulnerable. We must be vulnerable about mistakes that we made, and share that because that really really helps in getting people to participate. That’s the reason I started off For today’s presentation talking about how I’ve made all the dumb financial decisions ever, barstool made a lot of great financial decisions. And that’s great. But I’ve been where you are, more importantly, I can help you get to where you want to go. And if you’ve never said that out loud, if you’ve never said, or been vulnerable about different financial mistakes that you’ve made in the past, I’d recommend practicing. And just thinking about him, man, you’re right, I have done some dumb stuff with money I did. I’ve been in credit card debt before there was a time in my life where I live paycheck to paycheck, it just makes it a lot more human makes you a lot more accessible. I

think that that’s important when we’re talking about money because we do carry around so much shame and stress and negativity when it comes to this. So the more we can integrate a financial wellness program into what other benefits that you have, or what other wellness programs that you have, that’s all for the better. So I find a lot at a time that a lot of great organizations have some kind of wellness initiatives that they’re working on. But they haven’t gotten around to the or they haven’t added the financial wellness piece yet. Or they’re they’re just offering programming from their 401k company, which is again better than nothing. So but the more we can integrate it into everything else that we have going on, the better. Utilize all the different mediums that are possible, which we talked about, and then considering or consider a Wellness Week or quarterly programming. And again, make it so it’s repeatable, make it so it’s repeatable, make it so you’re not struggling at the last minute to figure out what it is you’re going to do. So planning out in advance, we talked about how a lot of these programs fail, because there’s not a plan. So let’s look out a year or two, at least quarterly and say, Okay, next quarter, here’s what we’re going to be focusing on here’s we’re going to be rolling out. So first quarter could just be let’s talk about cash flow, budgeting and an emergency fund. Then let’s talk about getting out of debt the next quarter. And then we’re going to talk about what kind of investor you are and how to put a forum and how to better understand your 401k. And so you can put together a year’s worth of content, I think fairly easily, fairly quickly. And then talk about different ways to reinforce that. So I think a Wellness Week is a cool thing. But on a quarterly basis, that’s probably good, or twice a year I was doing through money alignment Academy, I was doing weekly, or monthly workshops. And I think that that was probably a little bit too much for organizations. But making things available that people can just opt into, that’s the autonomy piece and you give people the options or the ability to consume more information, well, then by all means. You don’t have like that you can literally put together a program for free in the resources that I put together, you don’t need to pay for anything. That being said, there are wellness dollars that are available through through insurance companies. So whoever does your benefits your health insurance, reach out to them and ask them if they have wellness dollars that can be allocated to you, your company and your wellness programs that you can then use to pay for some additional programs. And that can be really any kind, it could certainly be for this what we’re talking about today. But it can be it can also be for other things too. So reach out and find out if there is money that is available to you. When we’re talking about financial wellness, when we’re talking about financial programs, word of caution, the last thing I would ever want to do to my employees is to turn a motivated financial sales person loose on them. I don’t want them to feel like they’re in a sales environment, I don’t want them to feel like if they pick up the phone and call me that I’m going to be pitching them some kind of financial product or anything like that. And that’s a quick way to get people turned off to your program. So just be very cautious with who it is that you’re working with and who it is that you are introducing into your employees lives and your employee population. Because that’s a good way to sideline the program. And just to get it started off on the wrong foot. And again, I talked about how how it doesn’t necessarily make sense to allow the providers of the thing to also be the provider of education around it. The example I used was you wouldn’t take nutrition advice from McDonald’s. So why would I take financial wellness advice from my 401k provider? And it’s not that they’re that they’re not? It’s not that it’s nefarious necessarily, it’s just that they’re going to be talking about things that are only oftentimes siloed to the 401k plan. So they’ll be talking about the investments and and how the plan works but not be talking about how to put together personal budget how to get out of debt, and I think that those are some of the really most Important things. So that is that there’s this wonderful thought exercise talks about how, if you are I, being that we’re good people was walking past a body of water, say we’re walking past a pond, and we saw a child in the water struggling to swim there are drowning, that you and I would jump in to save them. And I usually use this exercise, when I’m talking to the employees themselves, say, are you willing to extend yourself that same courtesy as you extend to that drowning child, because oftentimes, we don’t, oftentimes, we do not give ourselves the same love and care as we give to other people. And when we don’t do that, when we’re not putting ourselves first, we’re not putting our financial needs first, which is where they ought to be. It keeps us stuck. And so odds are within your organization, you have employees that are drowning, for lack of a better term. And they need help, and doesn’t mean that you’re obligated to do it. But I do think that you are in a unique position as a leader within your organization, to be able to give them some additional resources and some different help. And that’s what a financial wellness financial literacy program is designed to do. So some resources, I have the PDF that I will put in the in the resources or the notes, feel free to reach out, you’ve got my email address here. You can go to money limit academy.com, and learn about the free resources that we have and all the programs and the courses that we offer. That’s That’s what money Lamin Academy is it’s financial wellness platform. So there is a lot of on demand, personal financial courses that you can take advantage of, we have 12 live courses that we run every Monday, just 30 minutes on all the topics that I just talked about. We got free courses, we’ve got a goals course, a values course, and then a get out of debt course which are all free. So you can add those into your financial wellness program, if you desire. If you are interested in exploring a greater or a more well rounded, robust wellness program for your organization. I work really closely with two providers called Fit pros and weldable. And if you’d like an introduction, I would like to learn more about those organizations. I can’t speak enough, highly enough about how great they are and how effective they are about providing great content and wellness resources to employees of companies. So my email address is Georgia money, lemon academy.com. And definitely we’d love to hear from you and thrilled to bounce ideas off of or to learn about what it is that is working or not working and how we might be able to work together. I am interested in my whole goal is again helping people to get better at money so they can live how they want. And I think that there’s a big opportunity at the employer level to be offering these programs these benefits, which is why we’re doing this workshop for this webinar today. So all right