I spent my nights as a teenager rolling my eyes at dinner as my Mom lectured me about whatever the hell a 401k, IRA, Roth something something was. As a person that grew up in a family living well below the poverty line, she didn’t want that life for me. Her preventative measure? Make sure I knew as much as possible about the benefits of investments and saving. She wanted me to be financially literate.

I didn’t realize just how special it was to have a parent teaching me about all of these things until I got to college and realized very few of my peers knew anything about how to manage money beyond “I have this much to spend.” In fact, quite a few of my friends have told me over the years that I was the person who taught them about money. My Mom would be so proud.

Then I ended up taking a 45% pay cut at the end of the dot-com bubble anyway. I was living paycheck to paycheck. My diet consisted of chicken nuggets and spinach. I remember reading an article about how spinach was the healthiest and lowest cost food. I still can’t eat freezer chicken nuggets without cringing a little. I was so stressed about bills, car payments, and student loans, I broke out into hives almost daily.

Why Financial Wellness Matters

I did all of this while working my 9 to sometimes 9 job in marketing at a well-known job board. While I know I did good work, I surely wasn’t at my best. I had to use too much of my mental energy to think about how I was going to pay for the next mishap. When you’re living paycheck to paycheck, there’s not much wiggle room in the budget, if any. Let me tell you - it seems like there’s always some kind of catastrophe when you’re already worried about overdrawing your account.

That financial wellness education I had as a kid made me think I was worse off than I actually was. I wasn’t struggling as much as the average American. Today, nearly 72% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, with less than $2,000 in savings. US employment right now? 60%.

That means the venn diagram of people who are working full time jobs and living paycheck to paycheck is way too close to a circle. Whether they have financial wellness programs or not. Look at Amazon. According to a report released by the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois Chicago, 53% of 1,484 Amazon warehouse workers across the U.S. say they have experienced one or more forms of food insecurity in the past three months, and 48% of these workers face housing insecurity. More than half were not able to pay their bills in the last 3 months.

Financial Literacy

But where are people supposed to learn financial wellness? Well, there are 25 states that require a financial literacy course for high school students to graduate (see if you live in one here). But what happens if you live in the other 25 states or grew up before this program was in place? That’s where corporation can step in.

Now, the obvious answer here is for corporations to pay people a livable wage. The not so obvious answer that most corporations ignore is that you can also help people with financial literacy that allows them to more successfully manage that money. That doesn’t mean “save your money, eat less avocado toast.” That means teaching people about tax breaks at different income levels, tax free investments, and offering tools to incentivize investing in the future. Investing in experts and guides that are free to employees.

Corporations have the opportunity to bring better mental health to their population with this plan. But they have to listen first. Ask people what they need. And again, they need to pay a livable wage.