Financial literacy has hit a 10-year low, and money stress follows staff to work. What employer programs can, and cannot, be expected to change in ABA.
Key Takeaways
- The knowledge gap is measurable. U.S. adults answered 47% of the 2026 P-Fin Index’s 28 personal finance questions correctly, the lowest in its 10 years, and Gen Z adults averaged 38%.
- Employers are a common channel. The index’s authors name workplace wellness programs as a scalable route to working adults, and Brett Blevins proposed short, paid, voluntary money labs for ABA staff.
- Outcome evidence is thin. A 2019 Washington University study of workplace counseling at a home health agency found it reached employees who needed help and improved some credit outcomes, but it did not measure retention or ROI.
- Pay comes first in the model. Blevins’s guidance was to make pay predictable before teaching budgeting, keep any program private and voluntary, and avoid promising a return on investment.
Midway through an October 22 webinar on employee financial stress, Brett Blevins put up a slide summarizing research that complicated his own subject. It described a Washington University in St. Louis study of one-on-one financial counseling offered to low- and moderate-income employees of a home health agency. The people who needed help used it. Some improved their credit. They liked it. But the researchers, Blevins told attendees, “were not able to link that to any effect on absenteeism, quality, retention, or return on the investment.”
He did not present the finding as a reason to abandon the idea. “These are all considerations if you are thinking about rolling out some sort of financial wellness program in your agency,” said Blevins, Founder of Behavioral Wealth & Finance, a fee-based financial planning and advisory firm. His slides noted that he had founded and exited two ABA companies, disclosed his firm, and stated that nothing would be sold or promoted during the session, which ABA C.A.R.E.S. hosted on BehaviorLive.
The question he was weighing, whether teaching money skills at work changes anything an operator can measure, has become more pressing as ABA leaders, facing turnover that Acuity has reported as a retention problem, look for tools beyond the hourly rate. The case for looking is easy to assemble. The case for expecting results is harder.
Employee Financial Stress Data for ABA and Health Care Workers
In the Federal Reserve’s survey of household finances in 2025, 16% of adults had not paid all of their bills the previous month, and 47% of adults ages 18 to 29 had received help from someone outside their household to pay an expense in the prior year, according to the Fed. PwC, which designs financial wellness programs for employers, surveyed nearly 3,500 employees in January for its 2026 Employee Financial Wellness Survey. Fifty-nine percent said they were stressed about their finances, and 49% said their compensation was not keeping up with costs.
Health care workers carry more of certain debts than other workers. A 2024 study in JAMA Health Forum by Kathryn E.W. Himmelstein and Alexander C. Tsai, drawing on Census Bureau survey data from 2018 to 2021, found that 13.9% of health care workers held medical debt, compared with 11.1% of other workers, and that 26.7% held educational debt, compared with 16.5%. Among home health workers, 21.8% held medical debt. The study does not break out Registered Behavior Technicians, and the authors described associations rather than causes.
Financial Literacy Hits a 10-Year Low in the 2026 P-Fin Index
The knowledge side of the problem has its own longitudinal record. The 2026 TIAA Institute-GFLEC Personal Finance Index, which surveyed 3,602 U.S. adults in January, found that respondents answered 47% of its 28 questions correctly on average, the lowest result in the index’s 10-year history. Gen Z adults averaged 38%. The share of adults with very low financial literacy rose from 20% in 2017 to 25% in 2026. Comprehending risk, which covers insurance, investing, and borrowing, remained the weakest area.
The report’s authors pointed to employer-sponsored wellness programs as a scalable channel for reaching working adults. Blevins made a version of the same argument and added an observation about why it rarely happens. “It doesn’t get talked about,” he said. “It’s kind of taboo, but it shouldn’t be.”
What Workplace Financial Counseling Research Found at a Home Health Agency
The study on his slide is one of five research reports the Social Policy Institute at Washington University produced on employee financial wellness programs, a series that also examined workplace credit building and employer-sponsored small-dollar loans. Its authors, Ellen Frank-Miller, Sophia Fox-Dichter, Sloane Wolter, and Jenna Hampton, studied a counseling benefit called Trusted Advisor Financial Snapshot, run by the nonprofit Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners and offered from March 2018 to April 2019 at a home health agency with about 2,300 workers. Counselors introduced the service at new-hire orientation, reviewed a free credit report with each employee, and followed up mostly by text message. The report drew on program data for 108 participants and interviews with 10.
The participants started out financially fragile. Two-thirds had no credit score, and 42% had accounts in collections, with an average outstanding balance of $1,657. During the study period, 19% of the unscored participants established a score, and 30% of those with collections reduced the amount they owed. Interviewees described feeling calmer and better informed about the financial system.
The report did not measure absenteeism, retention, or return on investment, and its authors noted that the sample was too small for anything beyond descriptive statistics. Blevins’s slide summarized that limitation as no measured effect on those outcomes. What the interviews did surface was a caution. Few participants connected the benefit to how they felt about their employer, which the authors called “an important finding for employers to consider” when justifying these programs on return on investment. The agency, they noted, did not measure ROI at all. A 2020 journal article by Frank-Miller and colleagues, based on interviews with managers at three caregiving employers, made the broader point: evidence of the business advantages these programs claim “remains thin.”
The report also described a delivery problem that ABA operators will recognize. The agency’s aides work in patients’ homes and are rarely at the office, so the program reached them through a mandatory orientation with a counselor available immediately afterward, then kept in touch by text. In-home technicians work under a similar arrangement. The fourth of Blevins’s five closing takeaways for ABA leaders read, “Track your numbers and adjust. Don’t promise ROI.”
Pay, by contrast, is the factor workers name first. Among the figures Viventium provided to Acuity this month, 75% of care staff named higher pay as the top factor in whether they stay, while 37% of administrators believed pay was the primary retention driver, Acuity reported. In the Behavior Analyst Certification Board’s exit survey of former technicians, 57% cited inadequate pay, and 34% cited pay that varied unpredictably. Pay itself is bounded by reimbursement, the constraint at the center of the Verbal Beginnings strike in Maryland this summer.
Why Blevins Puts Predictable RBT Pay Ahead of Financial Literacy Training
That ordering ran through his presentation. Its second slide told employers to compare technician and analyst pay against local competitors, look up their county in the MIT Living Wage Calculator, and, if they fell below either line, raise pay before adding any program. His behavior-analytic summary of money stress ended on a single line: “no money skill replaces missing income.” The second of his five takeaways was to make pay predictable before teaching budgeting, a sequence some operators have built into scheduling itself; Autism FIRST, for one, covers open hours as paid non-billable time rather than sending technicians home.
How a Workplace Financial Education Lab for ABA Staff Is Structured
Once pay is steadier, Blevins proposed four 20-minute labs, each built around one topic and one tool the employee keeps: paycheck and cash flow, budget and buffer, debt and credit, saving and investing. The sessions are paid and voluntary, with separate sessions for technicians and analysts. “You’re not going to force them to do this,” he said. “You don’t want to shame anybody or embarrass anybody.”
His teaching examples used ordinary figures. A technician who normally takes home $700 a week might plan bills against a $575 light week instead. A $1,000 credit card balance at 24% APR accrues about $20 in interest in the first month. Ten dollars a week becomes $520 in a year. A 3% match on a $60,000 salary is worth $1,800 if the plan matches dollar for dollar.
The structure borrows from the field’s own methods. His habit framework asks each employee to pick one small, observable behavior, such as checking every Friday which bills are due in the next two weeks, make it a two-minute task with a phone reminder, track it with a checkmark, and reinforce it. Balances are never written down. “Pick one small habit, make it quick, make it easy, track it, and reward it,” he said. “It’s the same thing we do day in and day out.”
The cost, as he described it, is calculable. If ten people attend a 20-minute lab, the employer is paying for 200 minutes of work, a figure he said an owner could work out “on the back of a napkin.”
Privacy Rules and Measuring a Financial Wellness Pilot in ABA
Most of his ground rules concerned privacy. A five-question self-assessment he shared asks staff how predictable their paid hours were over the past four weeks and whether they could cover essential bills in a reduced-income week. Employees keep their answers. Only the fifth question, which asks what employer change would make income more predictable, is collected, and only anonymously. His scorecard slide added that personal financial information should never be used in a performance review.
For analysts, he suggested employers could arrange an annual meeting with a financial planner as a benefit, with a caution: “Make sure it’s not somebody who’s going to do a hard-pressure sale.” Blevins, whose firm offers financial planning, also told attendees he would be glad to talk with any analyst about personal finances.
He proposed piloting the whole model over 90 days: a baseline of canceled and lost hours and anonymous staff input in the first month, the cancellation procedure and labs in the second, and a comparison against the baseline in the third, followed by a decision to keep, change, or stop. Attendance, usefulness, and whether participants started a habit would be measured alongside turnover, the kind of before-and-after comparison one multi-site provider used when it redesigned RBT onboarding and tracked early turnover.
Asked during the question period how a manager raises money with staff at all, Blevins said the answer depends on the relationship. “If you’re genuine and people know you care about them, and you’ve always been straight with them, I never had a problem with those types of conversations,” he said.
