We believe all Americans should retire with enough money for a life of dignity.
In a society of significant wealth, too many people spend their post-retirement lives in financial insecurity or near-poverty. While some of this is driven by low incomes and a weak safety net, we believe a huge contributor is that people are asked to make complex financial decisions on their own. We envision a world where people don’t have to think about their retirement finances because we’ve handled it for them.
Saving for retirement is hard because our current system was not well-designed.
Companies which once provided generous pensions to their long-tenured employees no longer do so and the Federal government never designed a system to fill the void. Instead, we evolved a fragmented model where people might be offered an employer-sponsored account like a 401k. Since these accounts are not portable, individuals are forced to change them when they change jobs — on average, every 3-4 years. This creates significant friction for the saver and plenty of opportunities to do the wrong thing. It also creates a burden on employers. We believe there’s a long-term role for us in fixing (or replacing) the employer- sponsored system over time.
People can get taken advantage of by unscrupulous intermediaries.
We believe there are plenty of good financial institutions and advisors and we work with many of them. But there are unfortunately still many intermediaries who extract high fees that erode our collective savings over time. This makes it even harder for people to accumulate enough money for a dignified retirement. We intend to help savers use those intermediaries who put their customers’ interests above their own and encourage more institutions to do the same.
We reject false trade offs.
We believe we can help our users and make profits, rather than profiting at their expense. But if there’s ever a conflict, then we choose helping them — every time. Life’s too short to make a buck at the expense of people who trust you. We do this both because it’s the right thing to do and because over the long-term we believe customers will reward us with their trust.
We want to build a great company — not just an average one.
We’re driven by the desire to create a high-performing institution where people feel proud to work and challenged to excel. We believe we can do this while having great relationships with our colleagues — and having fun.