A FinTech Idea That Is a Useful Retirement Framework

Explaining one of the most interesting projects I ever worked on

W2s get a lot of hate on the web.

Everyone is a multi-millionaire, raised themselves from their bootstraps, and started some hustle that grew to a big booming business. And don’t get me wrong, that is a great goal to have and work on - as I tell my kids whenever they ask ‘what job makes the most money?’, starting and owning a successful business.

However, many of us still have the W2, and even though it is very low probability you get mega rich on a W2, it can provide enough to live comfortably and does have its own benefits.

That disclaimer to start this post now out of the way, one of the most interesting things I have worked on in my professional life was a project from my W2. And it is one of the things that really had me deep dive into personal finance.

You see, I was lucky to stumble into a very solid career that happens to be in the top 10 best jobs for a long time. It is good pay, very secure (insurance which is never going away), and protected by regulations (insurance companies need actuaries to perform duties and sign actuarial statements to function).

[Although side note - I searched the top 10 ranking list and a bunch of Nurse & Physician Assistant roles are up there which makes me highly question that list. Most of those jobs will have you doing 7+ years of college, taking on massive debt, to earn just above $100k a year for the entirety of your career. As someone who is married to someone in those jobs with in-laws in those jobs, you will never be rich with that much debt and low of an earnings ceiling. So I question the methodology on list.]

Due to knowing I had the potential of a long, secure career with increasingly higher pay I never really cared much for personal finance in my early to mid-twenties. “It’ll work out. I’ll make more than enough to be fine.”

Sure, I was good at finance, worked with finance, designed products that helped people in all economic groups, and needed to know it. But it seemed largely uninteresting.

Then in my later 20s, the company I worked for wanted to come up with a full-service…ermm…service for our customers. They made a small group to tackle one simple question, and working on that question made personal finance actually interesting.

It started my interest in the topic and the takeaways from that project are, I think, I very useful set of lessons that we can all apply to our finances. It is one the big drivers of why I think FIRE and the 4% Rule are going to lead to a lot of people eating cat food in retirement to survive.

And drove a lot of my thoughts about de-risking, retirement drawdowns, what net worth actually is, and diversifying into non-traditional assets (Life Insurance as investments, RILAs, etc).

In this post I will lay out what the months of research and work by a small group concluded and what went into the decision. The end proposal isn’t what I personally would do, but the logic behind it is absolutely something I think we can all learn from.

So what was the simple question to answer?

“How do you optimize all assets of a customer to get the best retirement outcome for all people?”