Legal & General Group Protection’s Wellbeing Advisory Board has launched a new cost of living guide.

It covers many topics from housing, bills, debt and working life to childcare, eldercare, health, leisure activities and financial abuse.

The guide is available as a free download from Legal & General’s new financial wellbeing webpage, which also includes support for employers in the shape of a webinar with some of the Wellbeing Advisory Board members. All this sits alongside guidance on Post-Covid-19 syndrome, the first area of focus for the Board.

The Wellbeing Advisory Board is a body of specialists across a range of clinical, occupational, vocational rehabilitation and business consulting fields. The team works together to share cross-sector insights across the priority health and wellbeing issues of today, providing signposting, summaries and lived experience examples. Legal & General says the goal of the Board is to help employees and employers navigate the increasingly complex wellbeing landscape.

This announcement comes at a time when the average household is just 19 days from the breadline, according to Legal & General’s latest Deadline to Breadline report. The research also found that people affected by both Covid-19 and the cost of living have a much higher level of debt and are just one week from the breadline.

Meanwhile, a recent study by Fruitful Insights – a wellbeing-focused data and analytics business that has partnered with Legal & General Group Protection – investigated the total number of health issues experienced by those with ‘sufficient income’ and ‘not sufficient’. It found that 21% of those that reported insufficient income also reported four or more health issues, compared with 9% in the sufficient income group.

Vanessa Sallows, claims & governance director, Legal & General Group Protection and chair of the Wellbeing Advisory Board, said: “Financial wellbeing impacts overall health and wellbeing in many ways, influencing our choices around diet and exercise and even around work and relationships. For example, we found recently from research for a series of articles that loneliness is disproportionately affecting the younger generation during the cost of living crisis; income having a bigger role to play for 16 to 34 year olds, in terms of representing a loneliness risk factor, than for any other age group.

“An appreciation of this kind of joined-up thinking is arguably vital to people keeping well, nipping problems in the bud early and also managing long-term conditions.”