While it is entirely up to your members of staff to decide how to spend their money, some employees could really benefit from financial guidance. Whether you want to keep it simple and help employees to budget more effectively, or you are looking to cover a broad range of financial issues such as pensions and debt, your staff may appreciate some expert financial advice.
Helping with budgets
Regardless of how much they earn, workers often feel they are struggling to stay afloat as their outgoings continually exceed their take-home pay. This can be extremely stressful. Encourage workers to list, in detail, all of their outgoings, including ad hoc expenses such as haircuts and window cleaning. Help them to reduce their outgoings where possible. Ask them to keep a daily expenses diary to see exactly where their disposable cash is going. Doing so can help to make workers more conscious of their spending habits.
Dealing with debt
If any of your workers are struggling with debt, it may be worth offering optional debt advice. Perhaps they are paying high rates of interest on their credit cards or an overdraft. Maybe they have taken out payday loans to tide them over and are struggling to make the hefty repayments. Look for ways to transfer the debt to cheaper options, such as an interest-free balance transfer deal. Make sure the minimum payments on all debts are met each month and that any money left over goes to pay off the most pressing debt, for example, the credit card that is coming to the end of its interest-free period.
Other financial help
It may be that your employees need advice about other financial issues such as pensions. Give them access to your workplace pension’s representative, who will help them decide how much they can afford to pay into a pension. For those with private pensions, mortgages and other financial outgoings, it may be worth talking through the available options with your employees, helping them to make the most of their hard-earned cash.
With more than 40 years of experience as outsourced payroll specialists, Cintra Payroll has a key role to play in ensuring that our clients’ employees are coping financially.