Discussing financial wellness with your employees

We met with Jon Tudor, CFP^TM, Workplace Financial Consultant, Personal and Workplace Investing for Fidelity. Jon has been with Fidelity for 19 years and provides retirement planning education and advice to Mass General Brigham 403(b) participants. He helps people find solutions to their investing needs, including retirement, brokerage, college savings, and estate planning strategies.

What drives your passion to be a retirement advisor?

For most people, there’s no stress or anxiety like financial burden. And conversations about retirement planning can trigger a whole host of financial wellness topics—whether it’s household budget, emergency funds, debt, credit cards, savings, etc. This can be overwhelming.

My experience has been that if you don’t learn about investing for retirement in school—and unless it’s taught to you by a family member—you might not learn it. That’s why I have a true passion for helping people avoid that kind of stress, learn about investing for the long-term, and for making it as approachable as possible.

Do you see this stress impacting a person’s mental health or well-being?
When I talk to people about their financial planning, they are sometimes unsure of themselves and apologize a lot. They feel guilty that they may have been ignoring it, and if they don’t feel good about their situations, the conversation causes them fear. They often approach it like, okay this is like pulling a giant Band-Aid off, and I know it’s going to hurt.

Is it common for people to feel that way?
You’d be surprised how common it is. Conversations about retirement planning make people very honest and very vulnerable, and you can hear it in their voice. When you’re under stress, you get a kind of tunnel vision. You stop looking at or paying attention to the big, important things.

How do you help them in that case?
So many people get wrapped up in some of the details that they can’t pull back and look at the big picture. I’ve found that when you know how to get advice and how to make decisions, it relieves an enormous amount of worry and tension.

How do you get the conversation started? What do you pay attention to?

I like to follow the policy of good old-fashioned courtesy and empathy towards a person and their situation. If you just dig right into the numbers with people, there’s no connection. And that starts with understanding an individual, their fears, challenges, hopes, and goals.

How is trust such an important piece of a good planning partner?
It’s important to really get to know people and their priorities so you can start to build trust. Our goal is to be honest. And we don’t always deliver good news. And that’s why it’s so important to really listen to people, understand their situation, and help them understand what they need to do.

Are you only focused on retirement planning?
Not at all. Financial wellness isn’t just saving for retirement, obviously. In fact, it’s a lot like whole body wellness. It’s not just going to the gym and being in shape, but also taking the time to meditate, take care of your brain, your spirit, and your mental health as well as your body.

Like wellness, you want to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff. And I think it’s the same with financial planning and financial wellness. For example, you don’t want to over emphasize saving more for retirement if you have credit card debt that’s earning double-digit interest.

If someone is in that situation, I always say, let’s find a plan to get that taken care of, and then we’ll get to retirement planning. My job is really about helping people to step back and look at the overall big picture.

Sometimes saving for retirement isn’t the No. 1 or most pressing thing you need to accomplish. We help people in two ways, to plan and learn. Helping people with both helps them financially and mentally, we can see it.

How can you see that manifest itself?
Once you get to the planning stage of the conversation, you can hear the relief in their voice. Their shoulders come down a little bit, the cadence of their speech slows down. When you help someone understand what to do as their next step for retirement planning you can see the transformation in them, and (I imagine), it’s very liberating.

Is that something that looks the same for everyone?

Do we help people in unique ways? We do it all the time. With everyone, really. For example, I recently worked with a woman who had been in an abusive relationship, and she needed access to some money to get out of the relationship and protect her young family.

She didn’t know where to start, and I knew she was very stressed out about finances, I could hear fear and uncertainty in her voice. At the time we talked, she had a thousand things on her mind more important than financial planning. We talked about some creative ways to access some money, save a little money on taxes and penalties, and be a little creative, without destroying her retirement future.

It was gratifying to let her know that I was there to help her. She was not going to need to call some 800-number and go through the whole thing again.

How does sound retirement planning help improve a participant’s health and well-being?
Knowing that the financial planning for retirement part of your life is taken care of lets you focus on other things. I've found that when your financial life is in order, when your bills are being paid, when you know you're saving, doing the things you need to be successful down the road, it’s a massive weight off your shoulders.