Other Goodies - continuation
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- Child care assistance. A few years ago, workers at Xerox got what the American rank and file would kill for: child care grants (up to $2,500 per year) for any employee earning under $50,000. Most companies aren’t quite so generous, yet fully eight out of 10 today provide some type of help with child care. For example, 12% -more than double the number in 1993 -now offer emergency child care facilities. If your regular sitter gets sick at the last minute, for instance, your child could spend the day (or before and after-school hours) at an on-site company facility. Because these services are either free or low-cost for parents, they are wildly popular, making space extremely limited.
Some employers also offer flexible spending accounts that let employees set aside a specified amount of money, pretax, for child care expenses. A pretax, child care FSA is a great deal, but you can’t use it if you claim the childcare credit on your tax return. So if you already take the credit, you may need to run some numbers to see if you’ll save more on taxes with an FSA or with the credit.
If you feel that your company is behind the curve on the child care score, speak up. Get together with other colleagues who would like to see some sort of child care plan and approach your manager or benefits counselor with a workable arrangement, such as successful one in use by a nearby firm or competitor.
- Financial-planning and legal advice. A fairly recent trend in the employee benefits field is the offering of financial and legal advice to employees. Often such seminars are free and quite useful. Just be careful that the speaker isn’t there to hawk his or her own products or business. Unions sometimes provide such services to their members, too. Members of the United Auto Workers, for instance, are entitled to free legal services, such as the drafting of wills. So even if your boss doesn’t pay you what you deserve, you might to able to use his office to learn how to make the dollars you earn stretch farther.
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3 Responses to “Other Goodies - continuation”
When employees are happy then their work attitude will be one of production. It is wonderful that employers are now thinking of ways to assist their employees. Yes I have noticed that there are companies who are now allowing Financial Advisors to speaks to their employees about their Financial Freedom it is a very good practice. Sometimes one just have to overlook the short pay and take the opportunities being offer to help you to prepare for a better future.
By FinanciallySmartServices on Jul 18, 2009
$2500 a year for childcare actually isn’t very much money, although it IS much better than nothing. At least some companies are trying to help. Thanks for this post!
By Stephanie on Jul 27, 2009
Your article on this blog is fantastic. Well done! I’m a big fan of your blog and be sure to keep up the great work.
I plan on returning and linking to your site.
Sincerely,
Author
The Alan Haft Blog
By Alan on Aug 25, 2009