Wednesday, June 6, 2018
4:00 – 5:30 pm, eastern time [archive and transcript to follow]

Research indicates that providing financial wellness training and tools in the workplace is a key trend. Is your company in line with this trend and does it incorporate equity compensation into its financial wellness programs? This session will provide insight into how and why companies are taking a proactive approach to helping their employees save and prepare for retirement and how equity compensation can be incorporated into this objective. Learn how to help your employees maximize their benefits to prepare for their future and improve their overall financial health.
Featured panelist(s):

• Kurt Grunsfeld, CEP, Executive Director, TC Wealth Management, HighTower
• Adam Stein, Director of Business Development, Computershare

Index
Financial Wellness
Roadblocks
Elements of a Great Financial Wellness Program
The Road to Financial Wellness Through Equity Awards
 
 
Kathleen Cleary, CEP, Education Director, NASPP:  Good afternoon everyone, welcome to today's webcast, “Equity Compensation and Financial Wellness.”  Providing financial wellness training and tools in the workplace is actually a key trend and today's experts will provide you with some insight into how and why companies are taking a more proactive approach, helping their employees to save and prepare for retirement, and how your equity compensation programs might be incorporated into that objective.
 
First introductions, my name is Kathleen Cleary and I'm the Education Director for the NASPP.  Today I'm happy to welcome Kurt Grunsfeld, Executive Director with TC Wealth Management at High Tower and Adam Stein, Director of Business Development at Computershare.
 
Just a couple of housekeeping items, the slide presentation for this webcast is posted on Naspp.com and you can download or print it from there, take notes on the slides and use it however works best for you.  If you're logged in to GoToWebinar as opposed to just dialed in by phone, you should see the slides moving as we go through the webcast, and you'll also have an opportunity to ask questions.  We would ask that you hold your questions until the end, or if you do decide to type them in during the webcast, just know that we will try and allow some time at the end for questions.  We have a lot to cover, so we just want to make sure that we get through the content first.  If for any reason we're not able to get to your question during the webcast, then we'll follow up with you afterwards by email or always feel free to email me as well.
 
We'll also post an archive of today's program within the next day or two and then a transcript will be posted in just a few weeks.  You'll be able to access those from the webcast page, just as you did for today's live link.
All right, let's go ahead and dive into the webcast and I will turn it over to Kurt for some introductions.
 
Kurt Grunsfeld, CEP, Executive Director, TC Wealth Management, HighTower:  Thank you, Kathleen and thanks for having us as a part of your NASPP webcast series.  Good afternoon everyone, I am Kurt Grunsfeld from High Tower Advisors.  Many of you on the webcast may not be familiar with High Tower, so let me just give you a quick overview of who we are and what we do.  High Tower is one of the largest registered independent advisory firms in the nation, and we have a presence in over 30 different states.  The services we provide at High Tower are very similar to what you'd expect from a large brokerage firm or a big bank, including financial planning, wealth management and investment management. 
 
A key difference between High Tower and other financial institutions is that all of our advisors are fiduciaries, meaning that we all have a legal obligation to put our clients' best interests ahead of our own.  In practice what that means is that basically the employees of the companies we work with get access to unbiased advice and guidance on their personal finances and investments, including their equity awards.  They also get a much higher level of transparency related to any recommendations that we make, fees and potential conflicts of interest, than they would get from working with a typical advisor.
 
We call my team TC Wealth Management and we specialize in corporate services including equity compensation, pension and retirement plans, cash management and employee financial wellness.  We also work with employees at all levels of the organization from those just starting out their careers all the way up to CEOs and board members of companies.  It's a pleasure to be on the call, and I'll turn it over to Adam to introduce himself.
 
Adam Stein, Director of Business Development, Computershare:  Thanks, Kurt and thank you all for jumping on this webinar today.  It is the first week of June and I know I'm eagerly anticipating a vacation in a couple weeks.  I'm sure you guys are too, so I'm kind of glad we’re speaking in early June, before all of you are away enjoying the sun.
 
My name is Adam Stein and I work with the business development team at Computershare.  You're all likely familiar with Computershare as a transfer agent, but you might be surprised to know that we've also been offering stock administration services for over 25 years.
 
We operate in seven global regions across the world and offer administration services for the equity award products used in those specific regions.  My primary focus is on aligning our services to ensure that clients are maximizing the benefit of their equity plans for their employees and their business objectives.  This includes aligning our internal efforts to provide and form paths forward for clients as well as developing third party alliances with companies like High Tower to deliver services beyond traditional stock plan administration. 
 
We're going to talk to you about financial wellness today.  And on a personal note, this topic is pretty near to my heart.   I've got young children and live in the Bay Area where paying for a salad can cost $20 these days, so there's a tremendous amount of stress trying to figure out how my wife and I can provide an opportunity to our kids today, while making sound decisions to ensure that we can support ourselves into retirement, and most importantly, for me to leave a legacy for my kids and grandchildren.
 
Equity award vehicles and the financial literacy programs that we can develop have a real impact on how all of us work to achieve our financial security.  Kurt and I have been working together for the last year or so to develop financial wellness programs for Computershare clients and their employees and the efforts have been pretty rewarding. 
 
We've had a lot of interest from our award participant base and their feedback has given us ideas about how we can enhance the material we're delivering.  This is a somewhat new way of looking at delivering value and understanding for equity benefits, and I think it's going to be new for you as well.  It's been fun to put on a creative thinking hat and think about ways that we can deliver this new service.
 
Over the next hour, we're going to explore employee financial wellness and the context it can provide equity awards.  We'll look at what financial literacy means, why it matters and most importantly, what companies are doing about it.  All right, go ahead Kurt.
 
Return to Index

Financial Wellness

 
Grunsfeld:  All right, let's start with talking about what being financially healthy really means and why there's been such a growing awareness of how financial wellness programs can actually benefit employees.  First, financial health and wellness is a relatively broad concept and the reality is financial wellness means different things to different people.
 
However, if you talk to enough people about their views on their financial health, what you find is that there's some common characteristics and the first is the feeling of being in control.  People who have high levels of financial health and well-being feel in control of their day-to-day finances and month-to-month finances.  That means they can cover their expenses, they can pay their bills on time and for the most part, they don't worry about having enough money to get by.
 
The second element is the capacity to absorb a financial shock.  We've all been there before, a damaged car, maybe you were laid off from a job or maybe you've had some unforeseen medical expenses that you had to deal with.  When these issues occur, financially healthy people have a safety net.  It could be savings, it could be insurance or even a family member to help stop that particular shock from turning into a long term set back. 
 
It's really a feeling of financial security.  It's also being on track to meet your financial goals.  People with a higher sense of financial wellness tell us that they're on track to meet their financial goals, they're setting goals that are important to them, and they're working towards these goals.  It could be something as simple as paying down student loan debt or maybe paying off a mortgage on a home in “x” number of years or being able to retire comfortably.  Goals are going to vary from person to person.  But those who have made it far enough to being able to plan and be on target for their goals, are moving towards a future of financial freedom.
 
Lastly, it's having the financial freedom to make the choices that allow you to enjoy life, whatever that means to you.  Whether it's taking a family vacation, going out to eat or working less to spend more time with your family, financially fit people have the flexibility to do what they value most and what makes them happy.
 
What employers have been discovering in recent years is that employees who check all of these four boxes tend to be more physically and mentally healthy, more engaged and more productive at work, they're absent less, and they have higher levels of job satisfaction and morale, which results in a less turnover—which we know can be costly—and they're more loyal to their employer.
 
There's many good reasons for employers to want to help their employees achieve financial health and there's also financial benefits to the company as well.  Money and finances have been the number one source of stress for employees since 2007, and that's because employees today bear most of the responsibility of their own financial lives and lack the resources and tools to help them manage.
 
It's also why employees are now turning to their employers for solutions that can help them achieve and maintain financial wellness.  How did this all start, begin or happen?  It really started when pension plans fell out of favor and that trend has been going on for about 20 years.  Complex regulations and higher administrative costs, coupled with the employee desire for more portable retirement plans, led to a steep decline in pension programs and the rise of the 401(k) or defined contribution plans becoming the primary source of retirement funding for employees.  What that did was shift the retirement and the investment risk from the employer to employees, and that added some stress.
 
We have rising healthcare costs—healthcare costs have been rising six to seven percent a year.  Most companies are passing those increases on to the employees by way of increased premiums and higher deductibles.  Employers are also moving from conventional healthcare plans such as HMOs and PPOs to high deductible health plans that shift the responsibilities and the risks to the employees.
 
For someone like me, I plan on retiring in 20 years or so and I hope that I'm going to live to be maybe 90 years old.  That might be a stretch, but I'm hoping for that.  My estimated healthcare expenses are $1.1 million, of which Medicare is going to cover only 800,000.  So I have a shortfall of 300,000 that I need to fund out of my savings or retirement.  If I add my wife, the shortfall goes up to 530,000, so it's a significant amount of money.  Unfortunately, most employees haven't planned for this expense.
 
By the way, since we just talked about Medicare, I saw a report that came out yesterday from the government, saying that Medicare will be insolvent by 2026.  That means by the time I retire, there most likely will be an increase in the age at which you can qualify for benefits, and also possibly a reduction in benefits.  These are things that continue to add stress on the employee.
 
Then we have high consumer debt.  The American consumer has been loading up on debt for a long time now, we have had five consecutive years of annual household debt growth which includes increases in mortgage, student, auto and credit card debt.  Last year, the debt in the nation hit an all-time high of $13 trillion, so that's a real problem for all people, including your employees.
 
Then we have life expectancy, people living longer and longer and the risk that you're going to outlive your money is greater now than it's ever been.  This might make you chuckle a little bit, but this is a real statistic, a real comment as feedback from a company that did a survey.  For those employees nearing retirement, the fear of running out of money is actually greater than dying, so people actually fear running out of money more so than death.
 
The challenge is going to be for the employees to accumulate enough savings over the course of their working lives to generate enough income to last as many as 30 years.  The alternative to that is delaying your retirement and unfortunately many employees are planning to do that.
 
Then we have Social Security, and there's been a debate about whether or not it'll be around 20 or so years from now.  The good news is it's going to be around, the bad news is that the trust fund is projected to be insolvent by 2034, mainly as a result of boomers leaving the workforce and living longer.  What this means for your employees and possibly you is that when we get to 2034, the funds aren’t going to have enough money to pay three quarters of its promised benefits.  Without any meaningful change between now and then, basically you can expect a 25 percent cut in benefits in just over 15 years.  This is more of a financial burden on the employees.
 
Then the last thing I'll say on this particular slide is that the personal savings rates fell 2.4 percent last year, which was the second lowest annual saving rate on record.  Roughly one out of four people have zero savings, 40 percent of all employees have less than $50,000 in their retirement accounts.  The number's even higher if they are millennials—66 percent haven't saved a dime.  All these factors put a lot of stress on the workplace and have given rise to this term financial wellness and to the launching of financial wellness programs.
 
Return to Index

Roadblocks

 
Grunsfeld:  Next slide.  There are many financial planning benefits associated with owning equity awards and participating in your company's ESPP.  Personally, I think they're a great tool for employees to build wealth and they can go a long way towards increasing the employee's financial security.  Equity awards are a convenient, cost-effective way to acquire shares in your company.  They can help employees increase cash flow so they can fund short term needs, maybe paying off a credit card or paying the rent.  They can also help employees meet their long term financial goals, maybe buying a home or saving for retirement.
 
With equity awards you have relatively easy access to your money versus other employee benefits, such as retirement plans, which have penalties associated with early withdrawals. 
There's also tax benefit if you hold your shares long enough, and then to top it off with the ESPP programs, most plans offer purchase discounts on the look-back, which means pretty much a guaranteed gain on your investment.  What's not to like about equity awards?  I mean, they're good from a financial planning perspective.
 
The issue is, most participants don't see it the same way as I do and perhaps you do.  More than half of all participants don't understand the value of equity awards, and I'm sure you know this, but ESPP participant rates are extremely low for most companies.  I saw a recent survey that was done and it indicated that two thirds of eligible employees aren't taking advantage of their company's ESPP, which is really unfortunate.
 
There's got to be something holding the employees back, and I think HR and equity compensation professionals tend to focus on plan design or employee communications and trying to figure out why participants aren't really appreciating their awards or valuing their awards.  I think they both play a role but that's not the whole story.
 
There are plenty of other factors and I would personally argue that those include high levels of employee financial stress, which is negatively impacting your employee and your business. Employees having low levels of financial literacy will result in employees not being able to understand or appreciate the value of your equity awards.  There are just too many financial priorities that are competing for your employees' attention and in the case of ESPP, competing for their hard-earned dollars.  Next slide. 
 
The most recent unemployment rate matched the lowest point in the last half century at 3.8 percent, there have been good signs of rising wages, we're in the midst of the longest bull run ever in the Dow and the S&P's second longest bull market run ever.  But despite all this, more than half of working Americans are experiencing some level of financial stress and one in four have experienced extreme financial stress similar to PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder, so it's pretty extreme.
 
That's because the average employee is broke.  Nearly four out five working Americans live paycheck to paycheck and it's not just the low-income earners either.  Thirty percent of employees making more than $100,000 are also living paycheck to paycheck.
 
Forty percent of employees would have to borrow money or sell something to pay an emergency expense of just $400, and that number goes up to 61 percent if the expense was greater than $1,000.  Nearly half of all working Americans, have more debt than savings.  And here's a great fact that I like to share with issuers—there are more payday loan stores in the United States than there are Starbucks or McDonald's.  That just shows you how deep the problems really are.  And it's really not just a problem for the American worker—in the Middle East, 61 percent of employers identify financial stress as the top issue in the workplace.  In India, one in three employees say their financial problems negatively affect their lives.
 
In the U.K., financial stress cost employees $160 billion last year.  If you go to Japan, almost half the workers expect to work to age 70 or beyond, compared to just 12 percent four years ago.  It's no wonder the World Health Organization has called financial stress the health epidemic of the 21st century.  This is concerning and why financial stress really deserves our full attention.
 
Poor financial literacy is one of the biggest reasons why people are financially stressed and another big reason why equity awards are undervalued and ESPPs are underutilized.  If you're a financially illiterate person, you have working knowledge of basic financial concepts and tools that are available to help you make the right financial decisions, whether that is in terms of saving, budgeting, managing debt, investing and so on.
 
Unfortunately, 63 percent of employees are financially illiterate and struggle to understand basic financial concepts, such as how interest rates work, why inflation matters, how to evaluate investment risk, the importance of compounding and diversification.  These are all basic concepts that employees need to understand to effectively manage their employee benefits, including their retirement plan, their equity compensation plans, and even their health savings accounts.  Not to pick on women, but one survey I saw just the other day referenced only 29 percent of working women demonstrating basic financial literacy versus 43 percent of men.
 
Here's a funny but not really funny statistic from that same survey: if you ask that same group of people how they would assess their own financial knowledge, 76 percent gave themselves high marks.  There's a big gap between what we think we know about our personal finances versus what we actually know, and that gap needs to be closed for employees to truly value their equity awards.
 
Employees with poor financial literacy are also more prone to making poor financial decisions.  So how does that come in to play in the equity awards space?  For example, letting options expire in the money, exercising options that have plenty of time value left prior to the ones that are closer to expiration, or maybe maintaining a highly concentrated stock position rather than diversifying the risk.  We see that a lot of with executives that we work with where a large part of their comp is tied to the company stock.
 
They also misjudge when to start saving for retirement or misjudge how much to save.  They pay higher fees on credit cards, which is another example of how poor financial literacy comes into play, and they're also less confident, which leads to what we call inertia.
 
I think inertia could really explain why ESPPs in general are underutilized by employees despite plans having discounts and look-backs.  With inertia, your employees are more likely going to prefer their current state, which in this case of ESPPs, higher take home pay and no enrollment hassle, more than they're going to value participation in the ESPP plan.
 
In the 401(k) space, inertia was once a problem too.  We all know that 401(k)s are great tools for people who want to save for retirement.  Tax free contributions, tax deferred compounding growth on your investment, what's not to like about it, right?  Up until 2006, participation in 401(k) plans was in the mid 60 percentile, which is pretty low.  It actually took an act of Congress and GW's signature on the Pension Protection Act of 2006 to solve that problem.  The Act was basically to allow for automatic enrollment of 401(k) plans. 
 
Companies that adopted automatic enrollment saw their participation rates climb from the mid-60s to roughly 90 percent, which is a good number.  But those that haven't—I think 30 percent of all companies haven't adopted this practice—basically have seen no increase in participation rates over the past decade plus.
 
If you think about it for a moment, all the marketing and the news around the importance of savings for retirement, all the tools and resources available to employees on retirement provided by either the employer or the providers, but it took an act of Congress to get people more engaged in their retirement plans.  Now think about your ESPP plans and your equity awards in general—what's it going to take to get your employees engaged on those items? 
 
The last item I'll just cover quickly before I turn it over to Adam to go over a few slides is competing financial priorities.  The idea behind this slide is that workers have many competing financial priorities that prevent them from taking full advantage of their employer benefits.  Sometimes their more immediate needs get prioritized over spending time to fully understand their equity awards or participating in their ESPP.
 
You have millennials who are mainly focused on just getting by.  Many of them are new parents and they're focused on supporting their children, maybe paying down some student debt.  Gen-Xers are mainly folks on retirement, baby boomers are focused on retirement, some of them are even taking care of their parents.  The challenge for us in the equity comp space is not to distract these participants or employees from their financial issues with our equity awards, brochures, videos and FAQs, in the hope that it'll resonate with the employee and they get more engaged.  What we need to be focusing on is educating employees on how their equity awards can be part of that solution.
 
For example, providing education on how equity awards can help participants pay down debt or how contributing to your ESPP plan could supplement your retirement savings or pay for your child's education.  It's really tailoring that message to the employee's financial needs—that's what's going to resonate the most.  That's the direction we have been going with our webinars with Computershare and we've seen some success there.  Now I'm going to turn it over to Adam to take you through the next few slides.
 
Stein:  Thanks Kurt.  When Kurt and I were talking about this presentation, we wanted to make sure that we covered the history of equity compensation and do it in a brief way, to help explain what's driven complexity and the awards that you are issuing to your employees that we all administer on the vendor side.  I think it helps to give us a better understanding of exactly what's driving us to make sure the plans we're developing are beneficial to our goals as a business and retaining and incentivizing employees to perform.  But the complexity for a lot of people to digest—and I think it really puts people in a position where they might not take action, instead of feeling empowered to really understand what they need to do and how.
 
We'll look back from the 80s, and it was interesting when I was researching for this presentation.  Probably many of you know this already, but the first option was granted in 1952 by Pfizer—not even a tech company—many years before the 1980s.  Equity structured awards like options were not really prevalent until the 1980s, when technology companies started really using them as a tool to attract and retain talent.  Then through the 80s and 90s you saw companies adopting this practice across many industries and really utilizing equity globally.
 
The reasons why these were such a successful award tool was some generous accounting that made options a relatively cheap way to retain and attract talent.  Companies were able to use equity to provide some real benefit to their employees, either through retaining those shares, but in most cases doing a cashless exercise, and getting cash once those awards were vested and able to be exercised.  This wide utilization across the 90s for these awards started attracting a lot more attention from regulators and governments across the world.  Into the 2000s, with a downturn and the bear market correction in 2000 leading to stock valuation declines, then coupled with the corporate scandals like Enron and Tyco in the early 2000s, a lot of rules began to creep up that regulated these awards and made it a little bit more challenging to issue stock options.
 
Sarbanes-Oxley in 2002 obviously required a lot of disclosure and made procedures for internal controls around equity comp more stringent.  There are a lot of tasks that administrators and an issuer started having to keep track of, in terms of making sure that they were being compliant with the rules and regulations of Sarbanes-Oxley.
 
With the FASB adoption of ASC 718 in 2004, companies were required to book expenses on their option grants.  That was all taking place in the early 2000s and by the mid-2000s, we saw a lot of variety in awards that were issued.
 
Now we're in a place where participants don't necessarily understand their stock plans all that well.  There are various forms of equity; you can get an option grant, an RSU, an ESPP, a bonus grant, stock appreciation right, et cetera.  There are a lot of different award types and each of those has a different date or a rule around them that you have to worry about.  There are vesting dates, an exercise date, an expiration date, enrollment, and purchase.  There are a lot of dates and other rules to keep track of.  There are tax implications for each of these awards, whether your tax selection is on an RSU, what the treatment of a restricted stock grant will do or of an ISO exercise versus a non-qualified exercise of an option, the AMT tax that is usually applied, or can be applied with ISO exercises.
 
There are a lot of tax implications on the ESPP side and disqualifying dispositions are always a fun topic to talk to employees about.  There are also dividends being paid on these grants, dividend equivalents which are kind of a unique thing and I get to talk about those in September for the NASPP conference, which I'm pretty excited about.
 
You get the picture, there are a lot of considerations and on top of that, with the 10b5-1 rules and insider trading policies, you get a sense for why employees can be overwhelmed. 
 
We're trying to deliver a benefit and equity awards are an outstanding tool to reward employees, but there's a lot of complexity that has to be overcome.  I don't think there's a shortcut around providing information that gives people the rules and regulations, and how the awards work that should all still be presented.
 
I think there's an opportunity for us in the future to build a context around the awards that helps people understand where their true benefit can be in terms of how this award helps them towards their financial goals and security.
 
Next slide please, Kathleen.  You're looking at a snapshot of employee education today, how we've designed a lot of the communications that surround the granting of awards.  There's not a real opportunity to get direct feedback from clients with providing documentation on a website that people can reference having stagnant communications out there—video or other things that are interactive are great for people to engage with the system on.  I know there's going to be a presentation with NASPP in the next month where we talk more about education, and there are a lot of new tools out there that are able to track what people are looking at on a webpage that will help us understand how these people are engaging materials more effectively.
 
But that's still a really one-sided communication, so lack of a feedback loop.  There's always so many variables with the employees that we're reaching out to.  You can have employees with a high degree of knowledge around their investments and what these awards look like, and then you can have people who have just gotten an award for the first time and really don't understand.
 
Developing communications that can speak to specifics but also be broad enough for people to get something out of is important and is where we're at.  I'm not going to go through each one of these, but I think communication is a really important task, and the important part of communication in some ways is to develop a context to help people understand why something is important to them.
 
There have been various studies where I've read about the connection between employer compensation and benefit communications, and employee benefit satisfaction is pretty well documented.  Employees who consider themselves well informed with respect to the available employee benefits will consistently give higher favorable ratings to their employer sponsored benefit package, and more than half of the employees working in the U.S. today feel that their available benefits are poorly communicated to them.
 
Static unengaging benefit communications can lead to a host of negative consequences such as uncertainty in the decision making, more questions and phone calls to your human resources department and benefits teams, as well as last-minute enrollments or not well thought out engagements with the tools themselves, and just lower satisfaction in general.
 
All of this can lead to lower productivity—I know Kurt's going to cover some of this as we move forward—but lower productivity from your workforce and higher benefit costs.  It can feel like you're spending money ineffectively so the compensation expense can feel like it's not being effectively used.
 
There's also—and I think this is important—these plans are a big investment for everybody that issues them to their employees and you want to generate goodwill and satisfaction from your employees.
 
If these things are confusing and aren't communicated super effectively then you can actually lose out on the opportunity to generate goodwill amongst your employees for these services that the company spends a lot of money on and you all work a lot of time to develop and deliver.  Next slide please Kathleen.
 
Grunsfeld:  All right, thanks Adam.  We hit on the impact of financial stress, low financial literacy, too many financial priorities, employer communications, complex equity compensation and how that all impacts the employee.  But the thing is, it doesn't just impact the employee, it also has an impact on the company and the company's bottom line.
 
The overall cost of financial related stress for employers in the United States is estimated at over $300 billion a year, and that's because employees are less productive at work so employees are spending on average three hours per week while at work occupied by their personal finances.
 
If you think about that, that's 19.5 work days per year dealing with non-work-related issues.  Financially stressed employees use more sick leave and are absent from work more often.  Three and a half days are lost each year to financial related stress, 12 days a year are lost to something called presenteeism—I'm not sure if everyone's familiar with that term—but what that basically means is although the person maybe physically at work, but if they're suffering from financial stress, they're most likely going to be distracted and can't focus properly on their job.
 
They're going to be spending less time on their tasks, they'll produce poor quality work and they'll also spend more time sorting out their financial problems while they're sitting at their desks.  Employees with financial stress have more ulcers, migraines, severe anxiety, depression, heart attack and muscle tension.  All things that aren't good and that translate into increased cost for employers—it's estimated to cost an additional $413 per worker for employees who are under financial stress than those who aren't.  And they're also more likely to quit.
 
If you're a stressed employee, you're going to view your employer as part of the cause of your financial challenges and you're going to be less likely to be satisfied with your job, your benefits, and you're going to be more likely to look for greener pastures.  In fact, 40 percent of all turnover is tied back to employee financial stress.
 
There's other things that impact the employee stress and the company as well; there are higher levels of workplace accidents, delayed retirements, also increased cost to employers and there are many more than we covered here.  I just wanted to get the point across that it's a real problem impacting the company as well.
 
We've spread around enough doom and gloom for now, but we thought it was important to share our thoughts on some data about the state of the worker today, so we can talk about what steps we should consider and possibly take to improve the employee's financial health.
 
Return to Index

Elements of a Great Financial Wellness Program

 
Grunsfeld:  Before we specifically talk about what you can do with your equity compensation program to help your employees achieve financial wellness, I just want to give you some perspective on what a good financial wellness program actually looks like, because I think there's a lot we can learn from how they get designed.  Maybe we can borrow some of the stuff in the equity comp space to improve the lives of these stock plan participants that some of us have control over, at least the communications that go out to those folks.
 
From an employer perspective, the goal of a financial literacy program is to improve the financial, physical and mental conditions of the worker so that maximum attention and effort can be exerted at the workplace, so it seems a little bit self-serving.  But to achieve that goal, the financial wellness program must be holistic, in terms of who they target, what they target and how they target.
 
In other words, what does that mean?  The program must target the entire population, cover the most pressing, if not all the financial issues employees face, and help employees take concrete actions to improve their financial health.  In essence, these programs are designed to change employee behavior with their finances.
 
What we've seen from the companies who do it well is that they know their employees, they've done some research on their employees, they educate beyond just retirement for a much broader education, they make it accessible to everyone not just executives, they offer real human advice and they measure how they're doing.
 
Let's talk a little bit about each one of those individually.  One of the greatest challenges employers have when implementing a financial wellness program is getting and keeping employees engaged.  From the very beginning, companies with good programs make sure that they understand the employees' financial needs and select programs that meet them where they are.  The best and easiest way to understand what your employees need and where they are is to ask them.
 
Surveys and focus groups are tools used by companies to learn more about their employees' interests and pain points related to their financial health, or maybe to test their financial literacy or knowledge of company benefits, as well as to try and find out how the employees would rate themselves on their own financial health to set up a benchmark, if you will.
 
Surveys are also good at identifying employees' communication preferences.  Did the employee want to receive information in print, via phone, in person, group meetings, webcasts, online and so on?
 
One really good example of a company who uses surveys to identify some of their employees who are struggling financially is Wal-Mart.  They did a survey about a year ago and that survey uncovered that employees had serious concerns about meeting their immediate short term financial needs, things like rent or mortgage, utilities and some cases even food.  What Wal-Mart did was to ease their workers' financial strain, they added a new benefit that allowed their employees to receive wages before their next pay day.
 
Instead of having to wait two weeks between checks, employees can now use a financial app that's called “Even”, so these employees can now access a portion of wages for the hours they have already worked, and this is a free benefit that the company provides to employees.
 
What's good about that is it helps the employee make their ends meet, but it also helps workers avoid dipping into their retirement savings or possibly taking costly payday loans or falling into other debt traps.  This is one just one of many examples where a survey was able to uncover specific needs of employees and the company is able to use that information to provide a solution.
 
It's also important to dig into the data on your employees.  You can talk to your HR folks to get some important data on your employees and you can make good assumptions based on knowing just who works for your company.  Does your company have a high number of single professionals?  If so, they're probably more likely to be struggling with student loan debt, or probably finding it difficult to start saving because they're worried about the day to day, month to month expenses.
 
Maybe you have a significant percentage of employees in your organization that are in the “building a family” mode.  Their focus is going to probably be more on purchasing a home or saving for a child's education.  Or you could even have an aging population and those folks are going to be concerned about running out of money in retirement so they may need assistance with supplementing their retirement savings or maybe estate and tax planning help.
 
The first and probably the most important step in the process is knowing the employee, that's critical.  Employee education is definitely a core part of any successful financial wellness program.  Historically most financial wellness programs mainly focused on saving for retirement; that changed a few years after the financial crisis of 2007 and the subsequent bear market that lasted about 17 months.
 
Today the goal is to target education to employees' financial needs, not just their employer or employee benefits.  Targeting their needs is going to be more effective since it'll resonate with the employee.  It seems very obvious to all of us, but far too many companies—and I think Adam hit on this a little earlier—still use generalized communications to reach a diverse group of employees.  On this slide, you're looking at a customized education calendar that might seem creative for one of our corporate clients, and this particular company had employees that span four generations in the workforce, so we need to account for that as we develop their program. 
 
We also coupled that information with the data that the company provides with surveys to employees to figure out what topics they felt would be the most relevant.  You can see, at least for this particular company, how diverse the topics can get when you’re talking about an employee's financial health.
 
You can also see that it's a full year program, so there needs to be a year-round communication strategy if you want to be able to increase awareness, keep the program top of mind and reach employees when they need the help the most.  Next slide.
 
Today's workforce is really disconnected and dispersed—in many cases it’s deskless, so they are not even working in an office.  I think the stat I saw was 50 percent all employees spend at least some time working remotely or from home, yet most HR communication professionals continue to rely mainly on technology, such as email and the company's intranet, which is really designed for the purpose of reaching an employee at their desk or in the office.  We have a little bit of a conundrum here.
 
The two biggest reasons for this disconnect is communication technology budgets have been stagnant for the last two years and lack of support from senior management.  The companies with good financial wellness programs are able to overcome these obstacles. 
 
If you're considering doing things differently in your communications, at least as it refers to stock plans, you're going to need to get buy-in from your senior management and you're probably going to need to get funding.  You'll have to make a business case for it and hopefully some of this data can help you get there.
 
Secondly, we know that employees today have a wide range of communication preferences from those that want hand printed materials, maybe a seminar, all the way to those that want to track the information on their own, using their personal mobile phones.  Good financial wellness programs are designed to meet the employee where they are, they take into account employees’ work schedules, their technology capabilities, and any concerns employees may have on confidentiality of their information. 
 
The best results come from—and this is going to be stating the obvious—a multichannel offering that engages the employee based on the employee’s preference whether it be online, in person, virtual, phone or even snail mail.  Accessibility is really critical to the success of a financial wellness program. 
 
Next slide.  I hit a bit on this earlier, but one of the big goals of a financial wellness program is to shift employee behavior as it relates to their finances, keeping the employee from making bad financial decisions like selling their awards at the market bottom, or making good decisions like contributing to their ESPP or saving for retirement.  In order to change behavior, some employees are going to need coaching and they're going to need to be held accountable—and that's where the human component comes into play.
 
The ability for employees to have access to unbiased counselors or coaches by phone, video, call, email or in person is critical to the success of any financial wellness program and each year more and more employers are starting to recognize this.  In fact, 49 percent of employers today offer some level of financial advice to their employees whether it be in person or virtual.  This is up from 36 percent just two years ago, so the trend is clearly going upwards.  And this is good because financial counseling, access to advice, has all been proven to be effective in reducing financial stress, increasing productivity and ultimately reducing the employer's cost.
 
How does it work?  Normally a company, through their financial wellness program, will offer employees the ability to meet with a trained counselor or coach, one-on-one to discuss their personal financial issues.  In that initial meeting, the counselor or coach would review the employee's entire financial situation including their assets, their liabilities, income and credit history, and then from there they would work with the employee to set financial goals and create an action plan for achieving those goals.
 
If the goal is to start budgeting or saving or maybe pay down debt, regardless of what the goal is, the counselor is there to provide the employee the tools and resources and the subject matter expertise to guide the employee in the right direction.  The goal of the counselor or the coach is to stay engaged with the employee.  It's not just a onetime interaction, there's follow up meetings or calls set up to keep the people accountable for progress towards their goal and ultimately change the participant's behavior.
 
It's also good for the company from a tracking perspective, these coaches and counselors can track and record changes in behavior and issues and so on, to provide feedback to the company so that the program can evolve as it goes forward. 
 
Next slide.  All right, I'm going to accelerate a bit, because I see we're getting close to an hour already.  Just a few good practices, documenting and organizing, usage, participant feedback and behavior change.  For plan sponsor parts, that's really important if you want to be able to measure success and keep people engaged and see how they are doing.
 
Annual surveys of employees are a great tool to find out what additional information they may need.  You can also go back and look at companies’ internal data records to see patterns and areas for improvement, such as fluctuation in healthcare costs, financial assistance requests, or a retirement savings plan going up or down.
 
Lastly, good companies revise their program strategy as needed.  All good programs are continuously collecting data and adjusting based on the information they gather—whether it be from the third-party provider offering some of the services or directly from the employees who are engaged in those services.
 
Next slide.  Here's basically a snapshot of what a good financial wellness program consists of.  As you see, employees who have access to online tools to help them better manage the finances could be spending or budgeting, have access to relevant information at the seminars, workshops, active one-on-one professionals, financial tools and apps to better manage their finances.
 
Employee debt reduction programs, maybe a student loan benefit program we've seen at some companies where they make matching contributions to the loan balances of employees who have student loan related debts.  On the right side of the slide you can see a grouping of financial wellness technology providers.  I call what most of these companies offer “turnkey” solutions.
 
They give you the technology, have dedicated marketing support so they can help you with the communication strategy, and they also do a good job at tracking and reporting.  The turnkey solution is pretty good, as they can keep the cost down, and then you just have to supplement one of these providers with maybe another organization to provide the coaching and counseling services.
 
Next slide.  Here's why companies do it—the number one reason why companies have these programs is because it's the right thing to do.  But there's also a financial incentive for companies, as I mentioned earlier.  Employers typically see return on their investment of $3 for every dollar they spend investing in a financial wellness program.
 
There are other ways you can determine the value.  You can look at employee engagement in the programs, you can look at participation numbers to get a sense of how it's being received, and you can also look at employee retention numbers, healthcare costs, number of sick days, and employee productivity.  All this stuff should swing in the favor of the employee and the employer, after the launch of a financial wellness program.  You should also see ESPP enrollment rates go up, less 401(k) loans and hardship withdrawals go down, higher contribution rates into the retirement plans—things like that.  There are ways to track it, but there is definitely a return on investment for employers.  This is how your business pays for doing a program such as a financial wellness program. 
 
Next slide, and I’ll turn it over to you, Adam.
 
Return to Index

The Road to Financial Wellness Through Equity Awards

 
Stein:  Sure, thank you Kurt.  As a side note, I started out in this business working for another provider and it was one of the brokerage models.  Back in the early part of this century, we used to have a lot of boots on the ground, and we would have brokerage teams in different regions where our clients were heavily concentrated.  We'd be able to have in person meetings and I thought that was a real benefit to a lot of our clients at the time.
 
But working for Computershare, we don't offer a wealth management service and we're not a broker, but we do partner with High Tower and others to make sure that we can get that service to clients.  In reviewing some of these services and looking at ways to augment our offering with these partnerships.  It's amazing the level of interaction you can have with technology today.
 
Kurt, when you talk about the modeling tools, with calculators and other things people can self-serve and not feel like there's an obligation to having a conversation around their equity, but they can find information just by using some of these tools. 
 
I think there are also a lot of benefits to the one-on-one coaching that I know you have at High Tower and I'm sure some of the vendors on the brokerage side do this as well, but there are hotlines and other things that you can set up.  Looking at some of these tools that provide your employees and other award participants the ability to engage when it's important to them and not feel like there's any pressure around it, is really an important tool to leverage as we continue to see advancements in technology and ways for people to engage online and virtually.
 
Jumping back into some of the things that you can do on the equity side, Kurt talked a lot about the benefits of a solid plan for financial wellness.  For all of us working with equity awards, I think developing that context and making sure you can deliver information to employees to make sure that they value their awards and are understanding what decisions to make, it starts with partnering with your HR group and understanding the demographics of your employee base.  Is your employee base primarily millennials as a lot of the tech companies over here in the Bay Area are, or is there mix of Gen X and baby boomers?
 
There are going to be a wide variety of demographic differences across all industries and regions.  If your business is particularly millennial, they view equity more like a bonus or slush fund.  Making sure they are aware that there is more to it and then to start thinking about how they're going to invest to pay off debt or reach other financial goals is what you should focus on.  Maybe they’re just recently coming out of college, so developing programs to speak to what their needs are and give them a sense for where they can be 10, 15 years from now, are going to be good.
 
Gen X and baby boomers are looking for what the long-term benefit is and how they can provide for themselves into retirement.  It's weird that Gen Xers are saying retirement, but I know that it's around the corner, depending on how my next 20 years go with work.  Reach out to your partners and understand your partnership, as well as talking to your peers.  Other colleagues in the industry are seeing what works for them, but also just within your business and talking to the team about what they're doing around 401(k) conversations, you get a sense for what level of financial stress your employees might be having.
 
If you look at a 401(k) and determine how many employees are taking early withdrawals or loans out of their plan, are the contribution rates low for the plan?  Are people utilizing the HSA functions?  All of these are indicators of good financial practices.  Are people making sure that they're financially literate in what these benefits mean?
 
If you're seeing some trends on the 401(k) side, it might indicate that there's something going on with the equity side as well.  It might be a good opportunity to leverage that knowledge to develop some things on your side, but also partner with the people on the 401(k) side to make sure that you're developing a more holistic view that includes the 401(k), ESPP and the equity awards and provide guidance and information.
 
You also want to look at the stock plans you’re offering.  If you're offering an ESPP and low participation is a problem, what is it that's keeping people from engaging in their ESPP plan?  I don't design plans, but if you're able to identify what some of the motivators and possible roadblocks are, then I think you can really start to develop stuff that's will ensure employees want to take advantage of what you're offering.  You can also look at how quickly people exercise to sell shares when they purchase or when they get options.
 
There is a lot of analysis that can be done based on the information you or your vendors have and can really help you understand the trends and behaviors of your employees, to make sure that they're getting the maximum value and that you're delivering a quality product that's going to make sure they want to stay with you and continue to be productive employees.  You can also reach directly out to your employees and survey them.  You can do that through a test of their knowledge, maybe make it a fun quiz, or you can have open forums and find out how they view their equity awards.  Have an open discussion through a town hall or other things where people can raise issues, questions or challenges.
 
You can have a portal that takes some of these frequently asked questions or develop frequently asked questions and answers yourself.  To Kurt's point earlier about creating content, delivering it and making it accessible to all employees, you should definitely incorporate that into any kind of survey with employees, with questions like how to engage with this material, what is most beneficial?
 
It's hard to be everything for everybody, but if you have an idea of where the most interest is in some of these mediums to get this information across, I think it's really beneficial to understand that before you start to develop everything.  Once you have a good understanding of your employees, you can start to tailor your stock plan program towards the needs of your employees.  When we say tailor, we're not really saying just tailor how you develop the education and deliver the information, but also how to inform and design awards going forward.
 
Maybe there are certain features of the ESPP that are going to drive behaviors, maybe there's some feedback you can give on the structure of your performance awards that may be really challenging and confusing.  Maybe there's some leeway for you to continue to evolve your award structure as well to make it a little bit more user friendly.
 
There's a graphic on this next slide, I know it's very exciting for you guys.  We haven't had too many graphics yet.  It can be challenging to come up with a good educational strategy for your employees and we've already discussed how many of these employees actually passively engage in the materials that we're creating.  We're always faced with the challenge that people aren't going to engage with us until they have a question or something's gone wrong and then we're all scrambling and there's a fire drill to deal with, which can be a real challenge.
 
I think we do a good job of developing educational programs and understanding for awardees around awards and transactions.  I think if we look at a holistic equity approach and take into account three areas, we would start with what the award is. 
 
The first thing that is great for employees to know is that the award is a recognition of the value they bring to the organization, so always communicating that value and showing that you appreciate their services and what they mean to the business is an important thing to do when you're issuing equity awards.
 
The mechanics of an award are critical, details like what is a vesting schedule, how does that work?  What is the performance goal criteria?  What are the termination parameters?  What happens if I leave or if I'm on a leave of absence?  A lot of these things need to be communicated, and they're usually in long documents, so it's sometimes difficult for employees.  But that needs to be a part of the communication and understanding; how these awards work and what the contract is with the employee when they get the awards or buy into an ESPP plan.
 
Introduction to the administration platform is also really critical.  If you use an administration platform or have some other means of helping people navigate their information, it’s important that they have their user ID and password and understand who they can call for help.
 
Keeping all information around the creation of the award front and foremost in your communication is going to be important, for example, how to take action on the awards, developing user guides that help people navigate the site, where participants can place an election for their RSU vesting tax election.  How can they enroll in the program for an ESPP?  How do they price model for a stock option exercise?  All these things are in the user guides and “how to” videos are things you should consider and put out into the sphere for education.  Giving a general overview of tax consequences is important, so tax guides are a good thing for end of the fiscal or tax year.  Come April, when people are having all these questions, it's important to have that information available.
 
Information relative to the transaction and what you need to communicate at that point is also important, and then information towards financial literacy as well.  The financial literacy piece is what we've talked a lot about today and I'll say it again, although I know it's repetitive, but creating that context is really important to help people understand how to make informed decisions and feel empowered by these awards and their ability to provide for their future needs.  Working with your vendor to make sure they're developing and instituting these programs, and even going out to some of these turnkey solutions to provide something beyond what your traditional stock plan administrator might be able to support is important.
 
As Kurt brought up, some programs can be rather expensive to maintain, maybe you can find ways to talk to the people on the 401(k), the HR side or the benefit side to see if they're having some of these similar issues and want to contribute bit of their budget as well to help pay for these extra services.  It's really a tremendous benefit that you need to be providing to your employees if you're able to develop this part of the financial literacy education around equity awards.  Moving on please, Kathleen.
 
Grunsfeld:  I recently came across a Schwab stock plan survey—so I'll give credit to Schwab for pulling it together—but there were a few stats from that survey that jumped off the page for me.  The first stat was that only 50 percent of stock plan participants are confident in their ability to make the right decisions about their awards on their own. 
 
The second one was that only 24 percent of participants have exercised options or sold shares that are part of their equity compensation.  That means 76 percent of people who have equity awards have not done any exercises to date.  What does that tell us?  Maybe these participants can see into the future and they know that their stock price is going to be much higher.  That's a possibility I guess.  Or maybe they're just all so financially healthy that they don't need to sell anything to fund any of their bills whether it be short term or long term.
 
But neither of those explanations really make sense to me.  What the survey said was that the number one reason for not selling any equity awards was the fear of making a mistake.  They probably feel this way because they don't understand their equity awards today.  Maybe they're not financially literate, maybe there's too many other priorities going on in their lives, they're just not engaged or maybe the awards are too complex for them to understand.  When things get complex what happens?  We talked about this, people shutdown, they do nothing, so inertia.
 
In essence what's happening within your equity compensation plans is that participants are failing to plan for their equity awards.  They clearly need help managing and planning for their equity awards and that includes helping them make decisions on their awards and financial planning support for when life gets in the way.
 
Let me just spend a few minutes just going through the decision support process and there are all sorts of decisions participants need to make on their awards.  How they are going to pay taxes, when they should sell, what to do with the proceeds, just to name a few. 
 
These decisions happen throughout the lifecycle of the award and throughout the life stages of the employee.  One of the most common questions I get—and it's a participant favorite—is when should you exercise or sell?  What I like to do is flip that question back to the person who's asking and ask them the question.  The most common response I get is, “Well, when I need money.”  It seems like a logical response.  But if you're not financially literate and you don't need the money—let's say I'm a typical millennial, I have a decent salary, little or no savings and a fair amount of credit card debt but I'm getting by.  I can cover my monthly expenses, I don't need to raise any funds from other sources like taking a loan out of my 401(k) or selling my equity awards.  I feel like as a millennial I'm doing pretty good, I'm getting by, better than my peers.
 
At this point most people in that situation just take a mental shortcut and come to the conclusion that they don't need to sell their awards and they just move on to something else that's nagging at them in their lives. In their minds, the answer to that simple question, “Should I exercise or sell?” is no.  But what if the rate on my credit card is 15 percent and the return on my company stock is averaging eight percent, would it be wise to sell some company stock? 
 
The answer most likely is yes.  Let's just say that your employees are wise enough to know that they need to sell some of their investments or awards to pay down high interest rate debt.  Well, what if they have stock options, company stock from an RSU vesting, shares purchased from an ESPP, or other investments outside of your company stock in an IRA or an investment account, which investment do I sell first to cover that debt?  You can see it just got a lot more complex, right?  Now I need to get into the weeds of everything that I own, so for my stock options, I need to understand each option's time value, I need to understand stock option leverage, option cost and the tax consequences of selling my options. 
 
I'm not going to get into ISOs versus non-quals in this discussion.  For restricted stock, I need to understand how capital gains work—if I make more than $200,000, I may be subject to net investment income tax.  What does that mean?  For ESPP I need to understand disqualifying dispositions and both income taxes and capital gains tax.         
 
Let's say I figure all that out, now I need to know how much I'm going to sell and how to sell it.  Should I do a market order, should I do a limit order?  Market order seems like the logical conclusion.  What if my stock is trading at the 52-week low or what if the trading volume for my stock is very low?  Maybe I should consider a limit order or spacing the sales out over the course of a day or a week or a month to not impact the stock price and not impact my proceeds from the sale.
 
Let's say now I have the proceeds of the sale, should I be worried about the additional income pushing me into a higher tax bracket?  What should I do with the rest of the proceeds?  Now you get into the diversification discussion.  Then let's throw in a major event in your life, a merger, college tuition payment or maybe you need to go on medical leave.  By now I guess everyone's getting the point.  It gets complex and it can get confusing very quickly.  My point is education alone is not going to be enough for the employees to make all the right decisions when it comes to their equity awards or ESPP.  They're going to need someone to talk to, they need access to advice and guidance whether it is a financial counselor or financial advisor. 
 
In the Schwab survey, 80 percent of the people responding said that they would be extremely confident or very confident making decisions on their awards with the help of an advisor.  Go to the next slide, please.
 
If you want your stock plan participants to achieve financial wellness you have to give them what they want.  They need access to someone who is going to help them understand how their equity awards fit into their overall financial plan to help them build a plan so when the time comes for them to make a decision on those awards, they make the right one.  The slide you're looking at is just an example of the planning process for equity awards.
 
The first step is educating employees on what they have.  Most companies do that today, some are better than others.  Steps two through five are all personal to the employee and require either a financially savvy employee or unbiased help from an advisor.
 
If you look at step two, helping the participant align their awards to their financial goals—it can be buying a car, getting married or helping them figure out exactly how much they're going to need when and what investments, including their awards, they're going to use when the time comes to fund that goal.
 
Also, to help them understand the risks of company stock ownership and that there is market risk, you have idiosyncratic risk, you have concentration risk, you have diversification risk.  Now if you're listening and you understand all those terms, you're probably one of the few that doesn't need any help.
 
But I can almost guarantee that a majority of your employees don't understand all the risks with their equity awards and the fact that they have control over all those risks with the exception of market risk, but that’s where the advisor can come in and help them to manage those risks a little better than they're doing today.
 
Figuring out step five, what to do with the proceeds or which order to sell the shares in, all those decisions could have a huge impact on a person's long term financial health.
 
Stein:  I'm conscious that we're running out of time, so I'll try to keep this short and sweet so there's still enough time for some questions.  We covered a lot today and there's a lot of really good information and things to think about around providing financial wellness.  Some of the key areas are around access and human touch that Kurt brought up, as well as creating a virtual calendar of webinars.  You can do this on your own by giving the feedback or working with your administrator or vendor to make sure that you're delivering and leveraging some of the programs that they've built together.
 
I know when we first started this, we had built in a survey after the webinars to elicit feedback, and that led us to start doing a more tiered approach of education information around basics and then more advanced financial planning.  We're continuing to get feedback that's helping us deliver new more tailored or focused solutions on retirement or 401(k) plans and other things.  If you have a feedback loop after a webinar, having virtual advice within days or having a helpline is also really nice on the virtual side.
 
Onsite town hall meetings, presenting sessions with your HR and benefits team to your employees is great, doing something with your vendor and letting them onsite to have a conversation is good as well, it's a more personal touch.
 
Then total rewards, I've always been really appreciative when my company gives me a total rewards statement and helps me see how all my contributions are doing towards my financial health.  I know a handful of the administrator vendors out there offer both 401(k) and admin site services, so they can put that information into a benefit statement in a way that people can see equity awards and their 401(k)-retirement savings in one place.  A lot of vendors don't offer that service, and still other vendors have partnered with 401(k) providers to pass that information on.  It's not that difficult to get a line item in a statement or onto a landing page for a 401(k) provider to give that information in detail.  Making sure that you're thinking about how employees are seeing their information and their compensation will help them get the bigger picture and then that helps them make the informed decisions that Kurt was talking about.
 
We really appreciate all of your time and we are excited that we could have this conversation with you.  I hope our listeners found it educational.  If you have any questions, let us know.  
 
Cleary:  Great, thank you.  We do have a few minutes left, so for our listeners, please feel free to send in any questions you might have.  I hope that all of you got some great ideas about offering financial wellness programs at your companies.  As Kurt and Adam said, I encourage you to reach out to your vendors.
 
I think a lot of people aren't aware how much information and assistance you can get.  Invite your vendors onsite and ask them to speak with employees.  Often times they can give them not only just information about your plans, but sometimes tax basics and financial planning as well.
 
If you can get your executives to support providing financial wellness education for your employees, it will help to make your employees appreciate their awards that much more.  I always say to people that your equity awards are not an incentive if nobody understands them.  It's not going to motivate employee behavior the way you're hoping if they don’t understand the value, so encourage your executives to have financial planning sessions.
 
I'll also just mention on our NASPP website, there is a Q&A forum, so feel free to post questions out there and ask your peers what they are doing, what works for them, things like that.  That's a great resource for you as well.
 
I don't see anything coming in, but if you happen to think of any questions afterwards, please feel free to email me and I'd be happy to respond or put you in touch with Kurt or Adam to make sure you get the information that you need.  If there are no questions, I guess we'll close up just a little bit early.
 
I want to thank Kurt and Adam for all their time preparing for and presenting this webcast today.  I thought it was really interesting and helpful and I know it gave me a couple of things to go back and think about.  I don't want to be living paycheck to paycheck!
 
I also appreciate the audience for joining us today and listening in.  I hope you got some great tips and I hope to see you all at our conference in September.  If there are no further questions, I'll just say thank you everyone and that ends our webcast for today.
 
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