SoFi Blog

With the rise of millennials and Generation Z grads, the workforce is rapidly changing. Young, educated professionals bring a lot to employers for sure—like energy, enthusiasm, and a thirst for innovation. But these days, they also come with some financial baggage: high levels of student loan debt. That debt can be crippling and distracting, and on top of that, it’s also an obstruction to both short- and long-term financial goals.

It’s no secret that organizations directly feel the impact of the hardship. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) 2016 Employee Financial Wellness Report, 28% of 1,600 full-time U.S. employees surveyed admit that personal finances cause them to be distracted at work—up from 20% in 2015. Among those workers, 46% spend three or more hours a week, while at work, dealing with or thinking about their financial situations, compared to 37% in the previous year. Yet few HR teams are taking steps to address the problem effectively and help their employees—and their company’s ROI.

In this first part of our new series on employee wellness, recruitment, and engagement, we at SoFi want to provide actionable insights on how to better understand the financial burden of student loan debt that these employees face, and what to do to help ease the pressure through financial assistance, education, training, and support.

For SoFi’s latest member spotlight, we sit down with JJ Owen, Director of Development for the Movember Foundation, to discuss mental health, finances and, of course, moustaches. We learn about JJ’s college days playing baseball, getting his MBA and how refinancing student loans became his first major financial decision, enabling him to take better control of the present to plan for his family’s future. 

For SoFi’s millennial members, Twenty One Pilots’ hit “Stressed Out” is more than a good song—it’s an anthem. And this lyric says it all: “Out of student loans and treehouse homes, we all would take the latter.”

How could it not? Roughly 70% of 2016 college graduates borrowed to get their degrees, leaving them with a whopping $37,172 in student loan debt, up from about $35,000 in 2015.

Couples in committed relationships share a lot of things, from values and goals to favorite takeout places to Netflix and Spotify accounts. But many couples share something else: student loan debt. It’s not at all unusual—nearly 70% of people holding a Bachelor’s degree leave school with college debt—but it can be trying and cause concern.

If you and your partner are in that group, you might have already discovered how student loan debt can affect your financial lives. And if you’re like 54% of people surveyed, you might even have had second thoughts about taking on the debt of the person you love.

More money, more problems, so they say. But the truth of the matter is that we all work hard for our money, and we want there to be enough of it to pay for the must-haves and the nice-to-haves. And worrying about having it, or not having it, leads to financial stress. That stress can affect not only your bank account, but also your health, personal relationships, and even how you perform on the job. From migraines to arguments with friends or family to work days missed, financial stress is taking a real toll on American workers.