There REALLY Is No Such Thing As A Silly Question When It Comes To Financial Education
December 18, 2012Whenever I facilitate a financial education workshop for employee groups, I always encourage the attendees to ask questions that come to mind – no matter how basic or odd they may think the question is. I promise them that there are no silly questions, and I’ve heard quite a few that prove employees are hungry for financial education. As a financial planner, a benefits specialist, HR representative, or payroll manager, sometimes it is easy to forget that what we talk about every day can seem like a foreign language to your workforce. Here are a few examples:
Do I still have to pay income taxes once I’m retired?
Should I cash in my 401(k) when I retire and pay off my $100,000 mortgage?
To diversify, is it good to mix several of the target date funds?
Can I take a loan on my 401(k) to take my family to Disney World?
While the answers to these questions may be obvious to a financial planner or benefits specialist, that may not be the case for someone who doesn’t deal with these issues for a living. (Consider some of the questions you may ask about a topic you know little about.) For every one person asking the question, there were likely several who were thinking the same thing but were too afraid to ask. But without the question, these are topics I may have neglected to address and many participants would have been left with misconceptions that could be dangerous to their financial well-being.
Likewise, we can learn the same information by ASKING questions. Jimmy Kimmel’s show last Thursday featured his Pedestrian Question segment asking about the fiscal cliff. When asked if he was concerned about the fiscal cliff, one man says he is concerned, but then couldn’t explain what it was. So the reporter asked why he was concerned if he didn’t know what it meant, and he said since she looked worried when she’d asked him the question, he felt he needed to be concerned. Perhaps the politicians and the media need to do a better job explaining what the fiscal cliff is rather than just telling us how worried we should be about it.
This is one of the reasons that our workshops are facilitative. For example, I love to play a game we call Money Madness, which is similar to Jeopardy. Under the category of “budgeting,” I ask what percentage a car payment should be of monthly income and just last week I had a participant tell me 50%! Luckily, I wasn’t the one who had to tell her she was incorrect since her buddy sitting right next to her busted out in laughter and told her she’d be broke and she’d better get that payment down to 10% (and she WAS correct) before she ran over her own fiscal cliff. Seeing her friend’s reaction was probably a lot more impactful than just hearing me lecture about how much to spend on a car payment. If this experience caused her to keep her car payments within a reasonable range, I’m sure she would agree that the money she will save over the years was worth any momentary embarrassment she felt.
Talking about finances can be intimidating for people but not talking about it can be worse. So whether you’re conducting a benefits communication meeting or bringing in an outside financial expert, find a way to give your own employees the opportunity to ask “silly” questions and provide “silly” answers in a safe environment. You may be surprised by how much everyone learns and there’s nothing silly about that.