Finance For All: Making Personal Financial Management Accessible for Staff

Staff are currently facing significant financial pressures with the cost of living crisis, further impacted with rising inflation and petrol costs. To support staff financial wellbeing, Dr Natalie Oh from the School of Banking and Finance, delivered a Lunch and Learn session on “Planning for Retirement with Confidence” to Optometry and Vision Science staff. This forms part of Dr Oh’s Finance for All initiative, which is dedicated to making financial education accessible to everyone and advancing financial capability in Australia and beyond.

This session was an innovative initiative which has never been offered to Medicine and Health staff. The practical and interactive financial wellbeing session used Excel to introduce staff to personal financial management. Dr Oh aimed to equip staff with the knowledge on how to project superannuation balances reached by retirement age, the amount needed to support retirement, and how to calculate the amount and frequency of extra super contributions needed to meet any shortfall.

Staff who attended rated the workshop highly for content relevance (4.7/5), facilitator delivery (5/5) and effectiveness in motivating participants to better manage their finances (4.4/5). Quotes from staff included “….thoroughly enjoyed the session… it was very useful and continued with financial planning that night”, and “A follow-up session would be great”.

The positive feedback suggests this workshop was valuable to Optometry and Vision Science staff. A similar workshop was also offered to professional staff at the UNSW Business School, showcasing the workshop’s ability to make financial education accessible to everyone. There is clear potential that other staff may also find the workshop beneficial and promotes the case for delivery more broadly across the Medicine and Health Faculty, as well as the university.