---
title: "Financial Wellness Today Episode 7 - Live Wiser"
description: "Gordon Oliver and Robert Grieb of Live Wiser Life Navigator on how rising medical costs, debt, and retirement planning are connected."
url: https://www.cambridge-credit.org/podcast-financial-wellness-today-episode-7-live-wiser
publisher: "Cambridge Credit Counseling Corp"
updated: 2026-08-25
---
# Financial Wellness Today Episode 7 - Live Wiser
In this episode of Financial Wellness Today , host Gordon Oliver sits down with Robert Grieb , co-founder of Live Wiser Life Navigator , to explore how financial and healthcare challenges are deeply connected—and what individuals, families, and employers can do to navigate them. From rising medical costs to managing debt and planning for retirement, Bob shares how the Live Wiser Life Navigator simplifies complex decisions across the seven key life stages. You'll hear practical insights into reducing financial stress, making informed choices, and preparing for the unexpected—so you can create greater stability for yourself and your loved ones. Whether you're just starting out, caring for family, or planning for retirement, this conversation highlights the tools and strategies that can help you live—and retire—wiser. Host and guest contact information: 🔗 Connect with the Host Gordon Oliver Website: Cambridge Credit Counseling Phone: (888) 544-3457 Email: goliver@cambridgecredit.org Facebook LinkedIn Instagram 🔗 Connect with the Guest Robert Grieb · Website: www.dsg-network.com · Phone: 610-608-8247 · Email: rfgrieb@dsg-network.com · LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-grieb-95a5958 · Website: www.live-wiser.com

## About this episode

Financial Wellness Today is the podcast from Cambridge Credit Counseling Corp, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit credit counseling agency. Gordon Oliver hosts conversations about household money, debt, and financial stress. This episode runs 22:30.

## Listen

[Listen to this episode](https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/thecambridgeconnection/Live_Wiser_9182025_draft2.mp3?dest-id=3056111) or [view the episode page](https://tinyurl.com/FWT-EPI-7).

## Full transcript

### Introductions and show purpose

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Financial Wellness Today. Today in this episode, we will explore how your health and your finances are more connected than you might realize. Our guest is Bob Reed, co-founder of Live Wiser Life Navigator, who joined us to talk about the partnership between Cambridge Credit Counseling and Live Wiser. We dive deep into the real challenges people face with debt, rising health care costs, and planning for life's major stages. From starting out to retirement, Bob shares how Live Wiser provides simple, structured guidance to help individuals make smarter decisions, reduce financial stress, and prepare for the unexpected.

If you've ever wondered how to balance getting out of debt, retirement planning, medical costs, and just an overall plan to be debt-free while still building a secure future, this conversation is for you. Here we go. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Financial Wellness Today. I'm your host, Gordon Oliver. And just if this is the first time that you've heard our show, it's important to understand that Financial Wellness Today was created with the purpose of helping consumers to achieve financial wellness.

And with an economy like we have today, consumers are struggling. 23 trillion as of today. 95%. And our organization is a national nonprofit that helps people to alleviate debt problems. And in that, we have many great partners that we work with to get partnerships that allow people to know that we exist when it comes to a debt problem.

### Introducing Bob and Live Wiser background

But today is a very special show because I'm working with an organization and a product that really deals with the connection of health and wellness and financial wellness as a tie-in together to offer people a pathway to get to the goals they want to achieve. So it's my pleasure to introduce Bob Grebe with Conviva One and Live Wiser. Bob, welcome to the show. Thank you, Gordon. Appreciate the opportunity to be here.

Just a bit of background and overview here. I've been working for over 10 years now focused particularly on the integration of health and finance. And what we have found is because of the silos both in the healthcare industry and the financial services industry, people don't tend to see the interconnections and they really miss a lot of cross-impacts there and it can cause significant problems. A place where we have seen this particularly and where I'm going to focus today is in the employer-employee place. And there has been quite a bit of research done there and we've done quite a bit of work to look at the issues focused with the workplace and how Live Wiser can help to alleviate them.

Yeah. One of the most important things, Bob, that brought us together and again just an amazing unity that we have here is our organization has recognized that most employers don't have a great plan for this wellness. Everything's kind of scattered. So the fact that we're working together, one that definitely does not exist is debt counseling when an employee is struggling with debt problems. And we'll get into that with this.

### Employee stress and financial burnout

But what we both agreed on and I want you to kind of talk about this a little bit is employee stress. Obviously, people struggle in the workplace for various reasons. So what is employee stress and how does it impact the workplace? Well, really stress and I'll use the term stress but also employee burnout is something that the researchers use a lot. But it's basically burnout they describe as a state of disengagement and exhaustion based on stress.

And what we have found is that finance is the number one cause of stress. But I think what's important here is it's not just for lower paid people. In fact, 52% of employees earning over $100,000 have some form of financial stress. Half of employees spend more money each month than they actually earn and 37% say they have more debt than they can manage. So one of the things that this leads to, obviously, you've seen a lot of it in your business, Gordon, but over 60% of the personal bankruptcies are tied into and related to medical-related debt.

And what's interesting there is that the majority of these people are actually employed, they're college educated, and they're homeowners. And 80% of them had insurance when they first got sick. So it's not something that you just think of for poor people with no coverage. When you look at the workplace, 47% of employees say that personal problems affect their work performance. Distracted employees then really, they weaken the company morale.

They're nine times more likely to have trouble with coworkers. Half of distracted employees are actually in job searches. So it really has an impact on the workplace. That's funny. When we started talking and I kind of did my normal presentation deck, these were some of the things that I was highlighting that was an immediate match together.

### Financial impact of stress on businesses

And what really, and again, my research came with a number that I was offering employers about $5 billion annually, but it's actually worse than that. So what is the financial impact on businesses when an employee struggles? Well, if you look at individual businesses, one area particularly has to do with retirement. And in fact, currently 40% of employees say that they're going to delay their retirement because they just have to for financial reasons. And the impact on an employer, when you think about that, ends up meaning that they are still paying the higher paid employees and they can't transition to lower paid newer employees for given positions.

But when people have done research to actually estimate the direct cost and the numbers that we see, if you're talking about non-manager employees, it can be $4,000 a year as the cost of stress. For managers, that can be $10,000. For executives, it could be $20,000. So if you look at a company with, say, 1,000 employees, the cost of stress in terms of the impact on productivity and the workplace and costs associated with different things can be as much as $5 million a year. That's incredible.

One company of 1,000 employees, that is insane. In your research, because we obviously work with employers and kind of get some of this, but for the key stakeholders for employers, what are some of the drivers of the cost to the businesses? Well, I think the costs that drive that number, first associated with productivity loss, if you will, and there you're looking at absenteeism, when people just have to take off to take care of an issue. Presenteeism is a term that's used where, okay, I come to work, but I'm really so distracted, I'm not really focused and working well. Turnover is a major issue.

Higher medical insurance costs. If people have issues that are driving medical insurance, particularly with larger employers, their medical coverage, cost is going to be experience-based, and that can get driven up. And then you have the just overall productivity loss, and think about one employee can have issues, but then that can impact a whole team. So if I've got problems and I'm not pulling my weight, then that's impacting other people that I'm working with. When you just look at turnover, the cost there, you've got the loss of institutional knowledge when you lose someone.

You've got the cost of hiring temps or paying overtime when somebody leaves, and then you've got recruitment and onboarding costs. So it can really add up for an employer, and it's not just theoretical costs. I mean, these are real dollars that come into play here. Yeah, so for our audience, if you don't know what a KPI is, it's a key performance indicator, and those are productivity, quality, cost, delivery, safety, morale. Those are what companies of these sizes measure, and even some smaller companies will measure at least a few of these because it's important about keeping employees on the books employed, and you just said it yourself, the cost of onboarding new employees and the time and training that it may take.

### Prevention versus treatment in employee support

It's important that these are paid attention to. Well, I like to think of the term that's used often in the medical area where you look at treatment and also prevention, and I think what's important is you need both, really. And many of the, I'll say the employee assistance programs tend to be more treatment. They tend to take care of it and address a solution after a problem has occurred. What we do with Live Wiser is we do that, but also we focus much more on trying to prevent problems before they occur, and we do this with things like financial wellness, education resources, identifying key issues and then solutions.

When you get into the financial side, and this is where Cambridge really comes in, the personal budgeting support and debt planning and debt management support. So through Live Wiser, we really bring all of this together to really help employees. Yeah, you know, preparing for this discussion, another piece that's alarming with what you just said is the actual percentage of employees who actually use this employee assistance program is very low, and I think what we're going to get into today is going to help stimulate the utilization of what a company invests in for their employees to really benefit from what they're offering, and that's, again, an important piece to segue into the Live Wiser Life Navigator program. How, can you please explain how Live Wiser Life Navigator helps employees? Yes, and just quickly, just a note on the point you made is Live Wiser is not designed to replace other programs, but it really will support them, whether it's EAPs or health insurance benefits or other employee benefit programs.

So I think that's important to note. But basically, the way we help individuals is we help them address broad financial and health care issues. We help them manage what are the drivers of debt rather than getting into debt itself, and then prevent stressful events so that eases the situation at the workplace, or if they have an event, to be able to point them towards solutions so that they're actually reducing the stress. And we do this, and when you look at what you bring through Cambridge, which is now embedded into Live Wiser Life Navigator, you've got the credit preparation, you've got debt management, and you've got debt resolution. So between them, we're really able to help employees to understand, number one, the interdependence, between health issues and finance, help them to really see and address key life issues before they become major problems, and then if they do have problems, to help them resolve them.

So this really, in turn, this creates a healthier, less stressed employee. to the more productive workplace and you get greater employee satisfaction and ultimately an enhanced bottom line for the company. Yeah, I think it's important too. Like even if, so if there isn't a debt problem and let's say an employee has really great credit, they have no debt, there's no debt resolution that's necessary, Cambridge won't even become an option. That's just the one that's in this journey if a person needs that.

### How life navigator program works

So it would be great if you could explain how Live Wiser Life Navigator works and what the experience is for the person that works through it. Well, I'll go through this at kind of a high level. The first thing is it's organized into seven different life stages. So somebody would select a life stage, it might be where I am today, or it might be I'm concerned about things for my parents and they're in a different life stage or whatever. But they go from starting out to family years, empty nest, pre-retirement, and then actually three different stages of retirement.

And a key point here is that these are based on how you're living. They're not based on how much money you have or what your income is. And I think that's important. But then within each life stage, there are five critical areas of focus or topic areas. And those are identifying risks and solutions, saving, investing, and finance, managing expenses and insurance, managing caregiving and wellness, and managing the medical process.

So each of these, what happens, I would go into the life stage I'm concerned about, then I would see a topic area that I'm interested in, and I would click on that. And then what I would get is a series of frequently asked questions. So they're very specific questions. And with each one, there would be a short answer, if you will, but also direction for additional guidance if that was necessary. And again, so what we're talking about here, it's not broad, generalized support.

It becomes very specific. And what we have identified for the frequently asked questions are things that people in a given life stage are going to tend to think about and be concerned about. And they're things that generally aren't covered well by other people. So people will find this, I think, extremely helpful. We will be attaching a short deck to this podcast, which will give a more complete overview of the program.

### Employer access and implementation details

So this is for employers to learn about, how would this work for an employer? Well, basically LiveWiser is generally provided by institutions or companies to their employers or members or customers. The company would make a group purchase, which would then give access to all of their employees to LiveWiser. And then from that, really we're supporting the individual. As we go through this, the way I've described it, hopefully you can see to some degree, we're meeting the employee where they are today and we'll engage them when they're ready to be engaged.

We'll provide specific education based on their individual needs and then immediate answers. In terms of the employer itself, we are able to support whatever kind of communication they want to have, whatever they use to communicate with their employees. We'll also, if desired, we would love to do webinars and other programs for the employees to just educate them more directly and help them to understand how this tool can help them further. Yeah, and on the credit preparation, debt management, debt resolution, we would be very happy to help with webinars with that as well to help, again, engagement of the employees so they see the great information that's being provided to be able to see that there are solutions for them to make a game plan. We are getting tight on time, so if you could just tell the audience, either employees or employer, because you want to have your employer in a very healthy situation, what would be the financial impact for an employer?

### Return on investment and next steps

Well, if you just very quickly, if you think about the numbers I talked about before in terms of the cost to employer of stressed employees, and if you take that and look at it, if LiveWiser can just handle a fraction of that, you're talking about a cost of, depending upon the size of the employee group, it's pennies per month per employee. And when you look at the potential savings and the research has shown, for instance, for a company of 1,000 employees, there could be a cost of $5 million a year in terms of the cost of stress. If we can just reduce that a fraction, you can see where the benefit of the small investment in LiveWiser can be 10 times, 20 times, or even more. So there is potentially just a very significant return on a small investment for this. Incredible.

Again, we know everybody's data-driven these days, right? So if you know, if you measure KPIs as an employer, if you don't know these statistics, we'll be happy to share them with you when we do a presentation for why you would want to add this as an employee benefit. And before we go, Bob, if someone's interested in learning more about the LiveWiser Life Navigator, what should they do? Well, they can contact me directly. My contact information will be attached with this podcast and would love to talk to you and learn more about your situation and discuss how LiveWiser would be able to help and even give you a live demonstration of the site itself.

I would also say we'll have attached to this a short deck which will give you a little bit more hands-on view of just how it works and the benefits of it. So be glad to hear from anyone there. Bob, it's really great working with you on this. I mean, this is a product that's going to be here for years to help the youngest of employees, the midlife employees, and even employees that are facing retirement to put a game plan together and just the help to the employer to be a healthy company with healthy employees is just paramount. So it's really great working with you, Bob, and thank you so much for joining me today.

### Closing disclaimers and legal notices

Thank you, Gordon. Yep, and for all of our listeners, I'll have all of the contact information and I'll have some hot links in the description of the podcast so that you can visit and the contact information if you'd like to reach out to us for a presentation or if you want to introduce us to an HR director or a CFO or even a CEO of a company that really cares about their employees, we're really happy to do this great work together. For now, this is Gordon Oliver, your host of Financial Wellness Today. We'll see you on the next episode. The information provided in this podcast, Financial Wellness Today, is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial investment or legal advice.

We are not licensed financial advisors and the content shared on this podcast should not be considered personalized advice or a recommendation to purchase, sell, or invest in any financial product or service. Listeners are encouraged to consult with a qualified financial advisor, accountant, or legal professional before making decisions based on the information provided. All investments in financial products involve risks, including loss of principle. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of the producers or affiliates of Financial Wellness Today. We make no guarantees about the completeness, reliability, or accuracy of the information discussed.

By listening to this podcast, you acknowledge that you're neither the hosts, guests, nor the producers are liable for any actions taken based on this information. We make no guarantees about the completeness, reliability, or accuracy of the information discussed. By listening to this podcast, you acknowledge that neither the hosts, guests, nor the producers are liable for any actions taken based on this information.

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