Many Americans do not take advantage of their employers' perks and benefits that are available to them. Eric Calciano, lead benefits advisor with New City Insurance, joined Cheddar News to discuss the range of offerings that you could be missing out on.

<div class="block">Many Americans do not take advantage of their employers&#39; perks and benefits that are available to them. Eric Calciano, lead benefits advisor with New City Insurance, joined Cheddar News to discuss the range of offerings that you could be missing out on.</div>

Stretching Your Dollar

Stretching Your Dollar: Taking Advantage of Employee Perks & Benefits

Only about half of you are taking advantage of all the perks available through your workplace and you might be missing out. Well, some companies offer everything from shopping discounts to wellness programs to helping pay off student loans. So for more on the range of offerings that you need to know about to stretch your dollar. I'm joined by Eric lead benefits advisor with New City Insurance. Eric. It's great to have you on the show. And I think for a lot of our viewers, they know that their employer probably offers health insurance. But what are some other kinds of benefits specifically related to their health that workers should take advantage of? Yeah. So there's quite a few that are very common. Your most common ones beyond just your medical health insurance is going to be in insurances like dental and vision and then other common insurances are gonna be things like life, disability, critical illness, accident, hospital, indemnity, and those should all be covered by the by your employer as you go through your open enrollment every year and explaining to you what's available. Do companies ever offer incentives for participating in wellness programs? Yeah, they do they do about 30% of companies offer incentives on their wellness programs. And that can be for things like completing biometric screenings or completing different health activities. And we can see reimbursements between being between anywhere between 50 to $200 depending on what the tasks are. Professional development is. Another thing that seems to be in a lot of demand these days, Eric, are there opportunities an employer can help you cover in that regard? Yeah, that's something that's very common these days. And we see it having a huge effect in uh what the uh in in employee for as a benefit for the employees as well as for the employers. Because we see that about two thirds of employees that put their jobs cite inadequate career development as a key reason for leaving. Uh so many employers are uh creating professional development programs that provide training for specific tasks on the job as well as certifications and leadership advancement. How common is it for companies to help pay off student debt? We know so many Americans uh saddle with debt, almost $2 trillion in total. Yeah, that has been a pretty slow adoption by employers. We've we're seeing about 8% of employers are offering student loan repayment and that's uh and that's been about the same for the last five or so years. So while it's something that we see is a big demand for employees, especially those that are just entering the job market with that student debt. We haven't seen employers adopt it as commonly as we would think at this point in terms of perks for families. Are there extras besides paid parental leave? Yeah, paid parental leave is a big one. And we're seeing that as now as states require that for companies, but there's also flexible spending accounts. Uh specifically dependent care, flexible spending accounts that many employers offer, which allows as a pretax account for, for parents to fund to be able to uh pay for dependent care services like day care or day summer camps, uh and after and before school programs as well. And then another another component to note there is that for all health insurance plans that are affordable care act compliant, they are required to offer to include pediatric dental and vision. So in your health insurance plans are included dental and vision coverage for dependents under the age of 19, discounts are very popular. We all like to buy low, sell high. What kinds of discount programs Eric do companies provide? There, there are a whole suite of different discount programs that companies will provide. Oftentimes they'll have a standalone discount program or it's offered through your health insurer or your dental insurer. Uh But you can have anything from access to discounts for travel, like hotel and car rentals. You can have uh discounts for restaurants, events, theme parks uh for for and the list goes on. Is it possible to get reimbursed for buying things that you would need for work, even like home office gear, something that might not necessarily be in your actual place of work. It, it is possible that just depends on if the company has that as part of their policy to reimburse for that. We are seeing as more and more individuals move towards working from home that they do. Uh they do provide those reimbursement programs and many companies these days are also laptops for their employees that helps, that helps allow them to make sure that their employees have strong uh strong equipment for their work and also for security purposes as well. All right, Eric Casiano, lead benefits advisor with New City Insurance. Eric. Thank you.