Work/Life Trends
Finances Are Now the Leading Work/Life Issue
by Barbara McMahon, Practice Leader

In 25 years of business, we've never seen such a tremendous demand for financial counseling services. In fact, our financial-related call volume doubled from 2007 to 2008. In the past three months alone, our Call Center has answered roughly 1,500 calls related to financial issues. (That's nearly one call every hour-and-a-half … 24 hours a day … seven days a week.) And financial issues are now the number one reason people call us, exceeding even child care and elder care.

A couple of months ago, we conducted a poll asking your employees to tell us what's making them unhealthy. Their top response was “lack of exercise” — at 24%. Not so surprising, right? But their number two response was “stress about finances” at 22%, nearly tying “lack of exercise” for the top reason that people say they're unhealthy!

I think that speaks volumes about how profound the need for financial counseling is.

Let me drill down a little deeper to give you a better idea of the kinds of help your people are seeking from LifeCare. Most of the calls we answer fall into two basic categories: 1) people seeking financial counseling and 2) people seeking financial assistance. We define financial counseling as guidance on credit and debt issues, credit repair and debt consolidation. And we provide this counseling to people through free 30-minute telephone sessions with financial experts nationwide. We define financial assistance as offering people information about how to take advantage of state and county programs that help them with things like child care subsidies, utility assistance programs, rental assistance programs, food stamps and the like.

Believe it or not, we've even had to help people find temporary housing because of the mortgage crisis and the housing market collapse.

Recently, financial planning seminars have become a very popular service and are the third most popular seminars we offer in terms of client requests. (See the article, “Most Popular Seminars of 2008” in the Other LifeCare News section of this issue.) Indeed, these seminars have been so popular that we recently added a series of 15 new financial seminars, all of which were created exclusively for LifeCare by Jean Chatzky, award-winning journalist and financial editor for NBC's Today show. Jean's seminars have been a huge hit; we've rolled out the first five seminars and in the first three months alone nearly 600 people have attended.

We've also seen a tremendous increase in demand for our online webinars. Originally, we planned to hold one financial webinar every month. We now hold as many as four per month. We also planned to cap attendance at 50 people per webinar but we've had to cap it at 100 per webinar.

Clearly, people need our help when it comes to finances. I believe that offering LifeCare's services to your employees—especially in these extremely stressful times—is going to pay tremendous dividends to you in terms of employee loyalty, attraction and retention, and “employer of choice” status.