Listen now to ‘Fund Your Future with DRS’
‘Fund Your Future with DRS’ is a new podcast, available on all major platforms. It’s created by DRS customers, for DRS customers. Each episode focus on easy things you can do to understand your money and improve your finances.
For the average employee, your pension will only replace about 42% of your salary. For most people, this isn’t enough to have a comfortable retirement. However, learning how to budget and manage your money will help you save more and be better prepared for retirement.
‘Fund Your Future with DRS’ aims to help people have more money conversations and provide information they can apply to their finances now.
Some of the first episodes include:
- How to understand your spending habits
- How to analyze your income
- What is an emergency fund
- Best methods for tackling debt
Hosting the podcast is two DRS employees, Seth Miller and Jenny Curtiss. They open-up about their own finance journeys, including working temp jobs, managing credit card debt, and tools they use for budgeting. Specifically, they share about money mistakes they’ve made and what they learned from it.
Why is DRS hosting a podcast?
At DRS, we manage the retirement accounts for 300,000+ public employees currently working in the state of Washington. Customers include city and state employees, firefighters, law enforcement officers and school employees. Currently, DRS has several free tools available to customers around planning for retirement. These include a Benefit Estimator tool, a DCP calculator and online webinars.
In addition to helping people meet their retirement goals, we want to help customers gain a better understanding of their finances. We want to provide them with tools to manage their money and help them save for short term goals.
One of the podcast hosts, Seth Miller is the Retirement Readiness Director at DRS. He manages a team of people who teach free webinars about planning for retirement. “As soon as people find out that I work for DRS, they always have a ton of questions for me” recalls Seth. “I wanted to start a podcast to talk about some of those common topics and encourage more money conversations.”
What is a money conversation?
Talking about finances can be intimidating for many people. Miller recognizes that “we don’t talk a lot about money as a society.” A recent survey by Wells Fargo found that 44% of Americans see personal finance as the most challenging topic to discuss with others. Even more challenging than subjects like death, politics and religion.
Podcasts open doors for these kinds of conversations to start happening. Ultimately, the conversation doesn’t have to be between two people. It can also be an introspective one that leads to self-reflection.
Having a money conversation with your spouse or a friend doesn’t have to be intimidating. You can simply talk about what’s helped you in your financial journey. Help each other make a plan. Sometimes, it can be as easy as asking them: ‘What’s the best piece of financial advice you ever received?’
“If DRS can make those conversations easier to have,” says Miller “then we help them better prepare for retirement.”
Subscribe and share
Know someone who could benefit from this podcast? Encourage them to listen on their favorite platform.
“Fund Your Future with DRS’ is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Podbean App, Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible, iHeartRadio, PlayerFM and Listen Notes.
Recent news
Rumors. They sure can be wild at times. At DRS, it’s not unusual for us to speak with customers who have heard a rumor that, as it so often turns out, is not exactly accurate.
The 2023 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) reflects our on-going commitment to accurate and transparent financial reporting of the retirement systems.
Department of Retirement Systems recently learned of several email and phone schemes targeting public employees.
