UK 
United States
This week is UK Savings Week – a dedicated week of events that aims to shine a spotlight on the benefits of regular saving and good saving habits can improve people’s resilience to unexpected costs, as well as boost their financial and mental wellbeing.
And yet this same week also comes at a time when Britons’ saving levels are facing extreme strain.
With inflation once again going in an upwards direction, and a much-anticipated tax-raising Budget coming in November, people’s sense of financial security is once more becoming brittle again. Recent data from the Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) Financial Lives survey reveals one in ten working Britons have no savings at all, with 13 million (a quarter of the UK adult population), now described as having ‘low financial resilience’. It also found a staggering one in five people have less than £1,000 in savings at any one time, while nearly 12 million people say they now feel overwhelmed or stressed dealing with financial matters.
Lisa Winnard
Chief People Officer
Tom Bestwick
Content and PR Manager
Trying to ease money worries
One organisation that is attempting to alleviate people’s money worries is Nottingham Building Society – the 175-year old Nottingham-headquartered mutual that has 31 branches, more than 500 employees and holds assets of more than £5 billion.
Nottingham Building Society found:
- 72% of Brits – equivalent to 39 million people – are losing sleep over money worries
- A third (33%) worry that they are using up too much of their savings to cover rising living costs
- Concerns are most acute among older adults, with 42% of over-60s worried about their savings running out
- Almost half (45%) of older adults say the rising cost of living is forcing them to dip into savings more than they would like
- Around one in three later-life savers wish they had started saving earlier
(Research by Censuswide with 2,503 UK respondents for Nottingham Building Society)
Despite operating in the finance sector, with product that offer its customers some of the best savings rates in the UK, it was well aware that its own diverse employee base were just a likely to need financial wellbeing help as anyone else.
So, when Chief People Officer, Lisa Winnard, joined the business in 2023, this was one of the first things she sought to address, as she explains:
It’s UK Savings Week – and you’re marking it by launching your own financial wellbeing service for your own staff. How did this come about?
A real aim of ours is to give our people access to a modern and compelling reward and benefits strategy. The road to this started with the launch of our new people strategy last summer – which was all about aligning our people strategy to our blue-print for what a modern mutual should be – and hot on the heels of this came conversations about what our reward strategy should be. Things we have since introduced include offering everyone 29 days’ holiday (previously it was 25) – because we found out that people were having to buy extra holiday, which didn’t sit well with us. We’ve also enhanced our maternity and paternity offering. The financial wellbeing focus was the natural extension of these conversations.
