Let me know your name first and last, where you're located and the name of your business,
please. And thank you. Hey, Javanka. I'm Wesley Belden calling in from Nashville, Tennessee.
I am the co-founder and CEO of Raise Financial. Nice. So I went to your site and I loved,
there's this glitch where it says financial solutions for today's tinker.
Investor. Is that what it is? Investor and child and so on and so forth. So I, of course,
want to know your vision. So that will be my first question, but I definitely have questions
about that. So tell me your vision when you co-founded this business. Yeah. And so I think
kind of what that's getting at is, you know, it doesn't matter really where you are, what you do
in this space is if you're of a certain age, saving and investing for the future is a very
different prospect than it was for your parents. Millennials and then coming up Gen Z investors,
we frankly have the time in market, but we don't have the money in market. And that's a product of
our wages, not keeping pace with the expenses that we're, you know, we're dealing with. If you
look at the decoupling of productivity increases from the 1970s, 1980s on and salaries, not keeping
pace with that. It explains kind of how things have become a lot tighter. And what that means is
we have less money to invest or buy a home or, you know, put it out there to kind of protect
ourselves in our old age or even develop generational wealth. So we build a series of products that
really kind of look at those very specific generational constraints and helps our customer
kind of save and invest around those constraints. Absolutely. And you know, it brings me back to this
thought, Wesley, is when my grandmother passed about three years ago, she was 86, rest her soul.
She left and I hate to say this on social media or whatever, but she left with debt. You know what I
mean? And so back in that, back in those days, I don't know if finances were spoken about in
different areas like it is today. And so it just reminded me like I wish we would have had this
discussion and these types of services were available way back when. And then that way she
would have had a better way of leaving her children with not debt, but with, you know, things that
they can hang on assets per se. So because it is a wide range of individuals that you help, how do
you structure that? What's the story like when you actually get someone and who's interested in
financial savings? Yeah. So we have different products with different audiences. The one that
we're working on now, our newest product is essentially doing for stock ownership what the
mortgage did for home ownership. Another way to really look at, you know, something like a mortgage
and mortgage basically allows you to buy a house today that would take you 30 years to save to buy.
Right. And so before mortgages, that's how it used to work. People would save up their entire lives
and then they would buy this house and they would retire. But we started noticing when people were
getting mortgages to buy these houses now to avoid paying rent, they were living in them and they
were also gaining this big equity increase in their net worth. Right. So basically you were owning
that house today instead of 30 years from now, which means you have 30 years of your money growing
or your equity growing in the marketplace. My co-founder and I sat down and we decided that
we were going to fix the housing crisis. About 10 minutes later, we decided we were in fact not going
to be fixing the housing crisis, but looking at that powerful outcome of how homes have really
kind of set up an entire generation to have this nest egg. We wanted to figure out how we could
replicate that same sort of equity building opportunity, but with an asset that we can
control. So essentially the way this works, we invest a large lump sum of our money into the
S&P 500 for the benefit of our customer. We choose the S&P 500 because it is a good asset for most
young people to hold and buy early on in their careers. So it's kind of that one size fits all
treatment. Basically our customer pays us a monthly membership payment and that entitles them to the
returns that that position makes over its lifetime. And so you have more money in the market
compounding and growing in the same way that you can buy that $300,000 house today and it gives you,
when the market improves 10%, you make 10% on 300,000, not on your down payment.
Absolutely. So you're speaking my language because I am a real estate agent. So with that being said,
I'm like, hey, that's actually how it is done. And you, with us, of course, we're now in this stage of
having multiple, right, to continue to invest. So you buy one, you build on that equity, rent it out.
And so when, yeah, and it keeps going and going and going. So I love that you took that piece
and made it more about the financial side because everybody's doing it, right? And I actually just
took a class about investment and it's investing in homes so that you can build that up. And so
when you are able to have this discussion, as I do with individuals, it comes, it seems so much easier
to connect with, right? Because you can use that same analogy. So kudos to you guys. That was,
that was super smart. I mean, it's a big part of kind of the American dream is being able to do
those things. And, you know, a lot of our customers are looking at this as, you know, their long term
investing thing, their network, their nest egg, so on and so forth. Some customers are actually
looking at this as a way to kind of accelerate the growth of a down payment to then be able to
get into that home, which is we all know, actually, I think the Fed is cutting rates today. So that
might make those payments a little bit easier, but we'll see what happens there. But, you know,
as we all know, down payments have been getting, you know, as a percentage, because homes have been
going up in value, they're becoming a lot larger and a lot more out of reach or out of reach for
more of us. So this is potentially a tool to really kind of help somebody really get that,
you know, that down payment together faster than they normally would have. Because you're kind of
running, you're kind of running against that, when it comes to real estate, you're running against
that, you know, that timeline, right? So you go to your bank and like, hey, you know, you need to
save like 40,000 for a down payment. It takes you like, you know, two years to do that, or however
long it takes you and you go back to the hey, I saved 40,000. He's like, well, actually, it's like
80 now. I feel like those goal posts are being moved on us all the time. And so this is kind of
a way to really, really kind of leap or jumper. And the creative part or the thought process of
what I feel like you guys are doing is doing it now, right? Let's not wait till everything
increases. And now you don't really have the money or even the thought or the want or the desire to
actually investing yourself financially. And so doing it now making it so much easier would
would definitely be something that people could actually buy in on, right? So when with this
new process that you guys have, or the things that you guys are discussing, is it something that they
can actually take out of or they want to you want to keep it in for a time period? So it is designed
for the money to be in there long term, right? It is designed for, you know, 510 1520 30 or 40 years,
right? And that's where it really starts yielding those fruits. It's like anything with, you know,
we're not doing anything supernatural. We're not like buying anything crazy. It is just buying the
market and it takes time for it to do it. But what we're really helping with, you know, our customers
young, they have lots of time in market, what we're helping with is the other component. Those are
the two kind of requirements for compounding growth and return is you have to have that capital in the
market and you have to have that time in market. It's been kind of put that thing together, basically
putting the capital together with our customers time in market. That being said, because we are
buying the S&P 500 and there is a downside protection on it. So essentially, it never drops
below that initial amount. So you're never going to find yourself in a situation in which you,
you know, owe more money than you could have. Basically, it can never go below zero.
So because of that, we do have that flexibility to roll that customer out as they need be
because it is a liquid asset. So it takes T plus two days now to close, you know, a sale position.
So yeah, we do have the flexibility. However, it's important that our customer knows that
they're not really going to be receiving that much benefit if they do roll out early. This is
really meant to be a long term thing. But we have that, you know, life happens, right, specifically
for, you know, our young demographic, things change, shops change, families change. So we do
have that flexibility. That was really important to us to build that into our products while serving
this audience. Absolutely. So how do you, what do you do to intrigue the younger generation to buy
into this and not necessarily by like, co-hears or, you know, tell them that they should. But how,
how do you attract that age and you know, that age range, because I think it's a lot harder for
them than it would be for those that are a little bit older. So I think the really interesting
demographic shifts that we're seeing now is you start skewing younger, you're seeing higher
percentages of people investing than, you know, previous generations of that same age. So it
really is, you know, encouraging more millennials were, you know, investing at 25, then, you know,
was that Gen X were at that, at that same or Gen Y, Gen X. Yeah, then Gen X were at that same age,
way more, way more Gen Z'ers are investing at 25, the millennials were at 25. And so we're seeing
this kind of shift and that's maybe the proliferation of opportunities to invest. You know,
you've got Robinhood, E-Trade before that, all these different things really got people online.
What we're seeing when we talk with our customers, kind of the focus on it, they're aware of this
problem. They've seen the horror stories, they've read the newspaper articles, they see it on TV,
they have student loans and they see how that's really changing where they can go and what they
can do. So our customer is aware of this problem, acknowledging it and really looking for ways to
solve it. Some of the real big triggers that get somebody to us is maybe they went to their bank
trying to get a mortgage and they weren't able to make it. Or maybe they've been putting 300 bucks
a month into a Wealthfront or Betterment Retirement account. And when they track that out to when
they're 70 years old, they're not going to have as much money as they need. So they've identified
this as a problem and they're out there looking for a solution that understands those constraints
and helps them into it. Yes. What makes you different from any other financial institution?
So I think for me, the ease is the ease of our business model. It shows you exactly who
compensates us. That's you. How much you compensate us, you know, and it's always going to be that.
I like that simplicity. But really, it's that lump sum of money that we invest on your behalf.
We become this partner in this investment with you. And that's what makes the big difference, right?
You know, you can think about it from just using round numbers. Investing $100 today makes more
money in 10 years than investing $10 a year for that same time period, right? It's the same money
in, but it's how you put it in makes a big difference. That's what we basically help you do.
We help you be that $100 investor, but on today's $10 budget. Yeah. And that makes all the sense in
the world. And interesting enough, you talk about this with ease and passion. And I have to know,
what's your why?
This is where I live. I live in this world. I move through this world. I meet so many people.
And I enjoy this more when people are doing well. You can see it. You talk to somebody at the DMV
servicing you or someone sitting next to you on the airplane or someone at your kid's PTA parent.
People deserve to have access to planning. They deserve to be able to take care of themselves.
If you're working a full-time job, there is no reason in this country, the richest country in
the world, that you should have trouble paying for basic necessities, that you should have trouble
doing family planning or saving for retirement. I believe that firmly. And I want to do what I can
to give these tools to these people to do for themselves. And I think that's part of the promise,
at least the promise that was told to me when I was young. And I think the promise that was
told to my parents, my grandparents. And I think that's a promise that we should continue telling
people because that's an aspiration that we should really adhere to. I think it's incredibly
important. I think it's what makes us so special and unique is that we give opportunity to everyone.
We give opportunity to the entire populace, give you the tools that you need to do for yourself,
plan for yourself, have that resilience and that dignity of being able to plan.
Absolutely.
And achieve life's goals. I think the actual investing is less exciting than understanding
the things that people are going to be able to do with their lives, the choices they're going to be
able to make and how that's going to make them feel, how that's going to make their family feel,
how that changes the view of the world, the expansiveness of what's possible and what you
can do. And I think seeing all these things is, that's my why. I love it.
I love it. I love it. I know sometimes it comes as a shock. And you being the co-founder and
the partner you came in with this on, it wasn't just something that happened overnight.
How did you get started to focus strictly on finances?
So I ran a company that was doing social media or brand management, content management,
and then content publishing. And so for about six years I built this company and we were at the
intersection of social media and consumerism. So basically selling people through social media.
And this is like, as this really started to take off, I'm looking at this and I'm like,
I absolutely hate social media and I think people buy too much stuff. And I'm right at the intersection
of this. I got to start doing something that I can feel proud of. I got to start doing something that
I can feel good about. My friends were starting to have their first round of kids. We kept getting
a bunch of different questions about, what should I be doing? What are some kid specific investments?
So I started a passion project to help parents, first time parents, create 529 college savings
plans and invite their friends and family to contribute. So getting back to that same thing
about how those budgets are a lot tighter, right? Your focus as a new parent, paying off your student
loan, saving for a down payment, getting that emergency fund, that really there's no place in
your budget to invest for your child's college savings, but you're paying off your student loans
and you don't want them to be doing it. So getting back from that consumerism perspective,
our idea was we're going to make it really easy for you to create these plans and even easier to
get your friends and family to contribute. So you can think about your college roommate on the way
to your kid's second birthday, instead of going by target to get them a toy, they put $25 into your
kid's college savings fund. That gets invested 18 years later, it's real money. So kind of
repurposing that consumerism to investing and planning for the future. And now you have this
whole network involved and interested in what your kid's doing. One of my favorite stories is early
on, we had a parent call and he's like, hey, would it be okay if my son put money in his own college
savings fund? I'm like, absolutely. His son wanted to know what his dad wanted for father's day. And
he's like, why don't you put some of your allowance into your college savings fund? And what's
beautiful about this is now this kid knows that his parents are planning on him going to college,
they have a plan for him to go to college. And now he's asking questions about what it's invested in,
how it's going, what the returns are. And so it starts this whole conversation and shows just how
involved this child's family is, friends, and how they're all really focused on this goal and how
we're all planning for it and how finances work. And I don't know, there's a lot of really good
opportunities or a lot of really good things happening there.
Yeah. And it's not just about finances. I know that that word, just enough can sometimes bore an
individual, but the way that you're mentioning it and having everyone become involved in that,
because truth be told, yes, usually we're often going to Target and I'm not buying a toy, I'm
buying a gift certificate, a gift card, because I don't want to do that. But wow, I mean, you just
taught me something. And then that story, even better that, you know, the child wanted to get
involved. And now I think a lot of us, so I'm just going to say it, I'm 45. In our discussion, I
cannot remember the discussion back when I was a child about how to fund anything. You get what
I'm saying? Like how to fund anything. And to get them started right now, that's a no-brainer,
right? It interests them in getting into college and it says, well, why should I go to college?
It brings up a whole plethora of questions that now the family dynamics can have instead of the
world having. So I love that story. It starts that conversation.
I don't know how that got started in America that we don't talk about money or that we don't share.
It's such an important thing, you know. We talk so much about the virtues of hard work and really
working towards these things. You work so hard to make this money, you need to work hard, a little
bit, you spend a little bit of time on how to make that money work for you. I think it's a really
important concept and maybe one that we should have spent, I think, a lot more time in society
teaching people about this. Absolutely. And just a little bit of information,
and just a little bit in how I can share and relate to this story is I was just speaking with
my husband and I was talking about my student loans. And unbeknownst to me, they just came out
of nowhere and now I'm delinquent. And this was many, many, many years ago. And they started taking
my taxes every year for three years to pay off my student loans. And I was like, wow. But if this
conversation would have happened later or earlier on in my life, I think that it would have been so
much easier to eat. If I'm going to get the student loans, figure out how to pay it, right?
I can come out of that fund. Or like you said, I believe on your website, it talks about crowd
funding. And I want to ask you a little bit about that. Is the crowd funding and actually people
having input into your education, and not only that, just like you said, they want houses, they
want things. But when the world begins to change and money starts, you need more of it, we're not
going to have that same amount of money then that we have right now. So when it comes to crowd funding,
is that how, what's the idea of crowd funding and having your family be a part of that?
So that's what we really focus on for the college savings plans. We want our young parents to be
focusing on their financial needs, but basically giving permission to their friends and family
to be investing in their child's college savings fund. Because you look at the stack of priorities
that, just like a basic rule of thumb, your first priority is you've got to have that emergency fund.
Then you've got to start thinking about your retirement account, or if you have high interest
bearing debt, really paying that down, getting that retirement thing organized. Then you have maybe
your down payment for a house if you're doing that, or investing something basic like the S&P 500.
And then the bottom of that stack, if you have kids, is saving for college. And that's where it
should belong. You've got to handle these more immediate things. It behooves you to really focus
on those rather than investing for an expense you may or may not have in 18 years. And an expense
that there actually is, albeit flawed in some ways, there is this whole financial vehicle called the
student loan to solve this problem. There's no loan like that for retirement. And so that is the
right way of thinking about it. But as we all know, if you don't have money in there growing,
you're going to miss out on that growth opportunity. And so essentially what we're saying is
you do what you're doing, get your stuff in order, but give permission to your friends and family to
refocus their support and effort and money from buying something from Target or whatever. Set up
a recurring contribution. Every year on my kid's birthday, my grandma puts money into that account.
That money gets invested and that happens for 18 years. And 18 years later, that's real money.
Meanwhile, all of my college friends across the entire country, that's what they do.
And so it's a really cool way to celebrate. It's a really cool way to have this community. When my
kids go to college, a portion of that will be paid for by my friends and family. I mean,
think about that. That's the very virtue of how it takes a village to raise a group. And honestly,
it's so much easier than having to go to Target.
I'm telling you, Wesley, I'm telling you, I'll go into Target, end up buying myself something before
I want to buy a kid something. And I have four of them. So I know what it feels like. So I'm just
like, yeah, and I'm with you. I see the passion, but I first see the knowledge that you have behind
it and then the passion in it. And I tell you, I have a whole discussion for my own husband when
I get off like, hey, babe, this is what's going to happen. So I'm like, hey, babe, this is what's
going to happen. So I do want to be aware of your time. If you wouldn't mind leaving me with just
two tips for someone who will begin their financial journey.
Absolute number one paramount is just begin, get started, start learning about things, you know,
listen to some podcasts, educate, start playing around with things, start taking action. You can
do it in a small way to see how you feel about it, how to be comfortable. But really, you just
got to get started. And I promise you, this is really, really simple stuff. There's a lot of
vocabulary that's going to make it seem like it isn't. These are all basic concepts. I think
everybody can get a handle on their finances. And, you know, maybe it's a little boring, but
we can all do this. And it's an important thing, you know, just get started, make sure that, you
know, you're working hard as you're working to make that money. You're spending a little bit of time
figuring out how to make that money work for you. Absolutely. And I thank you so much, Wesley, for
choosing to be with me today. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to
Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move
forward. This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll
invite people to participate in the show. And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.