Current financial planning leads to missed goals and undue stress for young professionals
Current financial planning approaches are not suited for young professionals for 2 primary reasons:
- There is no easy way to create an actionable and seamless financial "big picture." While you can aggregate your online accounts using third-party sites, the picture remains fragmented under the fancy user interfaces. For instance, there is no way to model how putting an extra $50 a month towards your student debt would impact your ability to save for retirement or how much home you could afford in 5 years.
- Current financial planning ignores the most valuable type of assets for young professionals: Human Capital assets. Not only is the traditional "big picture" fragmented, it is also incomplete.
Relying on a fragmented and incomplete picture can have disastrous consequences for young professionals:
- The average net worth of individuals age 18-35 has decreased 34% since 1996 per The Washington Post.
- In a recent article, CNBC outlined that "over a third of millennials believe they’ll never be able to stop working".
- Worse yet, a 2020 study published in The American Journal of Epidemiology showed financial hardship can make people up to 20x more likely to make (or take) an attempt on their lives.