Heard from my daughters
“Is this your bra, mom?” 🙂
If you haven’t already read in my bio, or seen on FaceBook, I have 4 teenage daughters. This makes for a lot of drama in our household, but also endless amounts of joy, and I wouldn’t trade my family for anything. So now maybe you have a better image of how I could actually start my day with a daughter holding up a clean bra, and asking if it was mine. (It was, but as it was a super comfy one, I offered it to my daughter, because that is just what moms do).
Having four teenager daughters gives me great perspective on how young people learn, what they are interested in, at what age, and also ways to engage them to think about their own financial lives, separately from our family’s. Recently, my oldest daughter started working as a Per Diem worker at a local hospital. I sat with her as we navigated her benefits options.
First of all, to all those who work in Human Resources/Benefits, or better yet, UI/UX designers for benefits websites — please take note of our observations. Navigating her world of eligible benefits online was quite confusing, and I do this frequently for my clients. Portals should be more specific as to what is/what is not available as a benefit per your particular work title. As a Per Diem worker, my daughter did not qualify for many benefits. The portal should have jumped to ONLY those benefits she did qualify for, rather than guiding us through the morass of other options that we had to ‘decline,’ even though she wasn’t eligible for them anyway.
Secondly, the benefits should be explained in PLAIN LANGUAGE — translating them OUT of HR/Benefits-speak, into real-world examples of how/why someone would want to sign up for them, as well as the associated benefits, and costs. Perhaps they should even give monetary examples of what the benefits cost to the employee, and potential savings if they are utilized.
And lastly, when additional information is required, it should flow through to those applications which would need to access that info. For example, we had to specify her ‘Beneficiaries’ in the portal - even though I’m not sure what she needed that for, as, once again, she did not qualify for any benefits. And then we finally had an application where those beneficiaries WOULD apply, despite the fact that we had already provided that info, it did not flow through to the correct application (her ROTH 401k).
Lastly, and this is for ALL readers. The earlier you start saving for retirement, the better. In our family, as our girls start to have their own earned income, we start (Beneficiary) Roth IRAs for them. Now that my daughter had access to a 401k, I sat with her to determine an appropriate amount of earnings to defer into her retirement savings. But we weren’t done! It was not at all clear how we would actually see her account. Once we finally figured that out, we looked at it together, and then had to RE-ENTER her beneficiaries (her 3 sisters). Why can’t the original benefits enrollment software link to the retirement plan?
In closing, I know what I do for a living is actually starting to stick with my daughters when our dinnertime conversation goes like this. One of them tells another one she is being annoying for whatever reason. And then my oldest daughter pipes up and says, “Be careful! I can remove you as my beneficiary of my retirement account!” (Which, at that time, had a grand total of $44). That statement made crack up, but it also made me very proud - something I’m doing appears to be working!
Contact me if you’d like to talk about your own path to financial independence, or that of your children, and how I can help you guide you all in your choices and milestones.