When entrepreneur Stephen Chen’s mother started approaching retirement age, she was pressured to borrow cash from Chen — and Chen’s brother — to make ends meet. They needed to assist, however the siblings additionally needed to determine a extra sustainable, long-term resolution that’d assist their mother retire with out having to fret about funds.
Chen tried to get steering from a monetary adviser, however nobody would take his mom as a shopper as a result of her internet price wasn’t thought-about excessive sufficient. So Chen began constructing spreadsheets and monetary fashions himself, doing his greatest to determine how his mother might stay the retirement way of life that she needed.
“Folks like my mother lack the instruments to take a look at their cash holistically and strategically to allow them to make knowledgeable selections, monitor their monetary state of affairs, perceive which levers to tug and when and make the connection between the alternatives they make at this time and the long-term ramifications to their plan,” Chen informed TechCrunch. “There’s a confluence of things which will alter the way forward for monetary planning and advising.”
It was after Chen helped his mother decrease her bills, work out when to assert Social Safety, determine when to downsize and take different steps to turn into financially impartial that Chen realized plenty of different older People have been dealing with the identical challenges.
So Chen based NewRetirement, a Mill Valley-based firm constructing software program to assist individuals create monetary retirement plans. At the moment, NewRetirement’s direct-to-consumer merchandise energy monetary planning for 70,000 customers managing near $100 billion in their very own monetary plans, in line with Chen.
“Our fashions transcend financial savings and investments, bearing in mind all the different elements in an individual’s life, from house fairness, healthcare prices and taxes to Medicare and Social Safety,” Chen mentioned. “Each time a person makes a change, we run 1000’s of simulations as a way to assist them optimize their plan … We account for 1000’s of various eventualities, enabling customers to confidently map out accumulation and decumulation projections with digital steering.”
NewRetirement is Chen’s second startup after Embark, a web based faculty search and admissions device he launched in 1995. And, like Embark, Chen sees NewRetirement as a digital resolution to a transition confronted by thousands and thousands of People.
“120 million People over age 50 maintain 80% of the wealth on this nation,” Chen mentioned, “However operating out of cash stays a prime 10 concern, with practically half of People saying they’re anxious about it.”
NewRetirement’s platform makes use of predictive modeling and knowledge analytics to assist customers suss out the best financial savings approaches. Picture Credit: NewRetirement
Certainly, nearly all of People — as many as 65%, per Charles Schwab’s Trendy Wealth Survey 2023 — haven’t any formal monetary plan. And whereas 37% of respondents say that they work with a monetary adviser, two-thirds of People imagine that their monetary planning wants enchancment, in line with Northwestern Mutual’s Planning and Progress Examine 2023.
NewRetirement, which started as a shopper providing and in 2021 expanded to the enterprise, costs $120 per yr for entry to a collection of instruments, calculators, suggestions and state of affairs comparisons and ~$1,500 per yr for check-ins with a licensed monetary planner. As well as, NewRetirement sells a subscription-based personal label model of its instruments geared toward monetary advisers.
Now, you may marvel, what makes NewRetirement completely different from startups like Retirable, which equally supplies an array of retirement planning instruments and entry to asset managers? Chen asserts that NewRetirement is likely one of the few — and maybe solely — monetary planning platform that serves shoppers in addition to advisers and workplaces.
“Our core innovation is permitting anybody to create a plan with industrial-strength instruments, enabling advisers to collaborate with the tip person and making this accessible at scale by means of enterprise companions who carry it to their prospects,” Chen mentioned. “As extra monetary companies firms see their choices like funding administration turn into commoditized, there’s large worth in serving to purchasers and prospects take into consideration their cash holistically. By providing self-directed digital planning to purchasers versus beginning with a human adviser, they’ll scale and serve any variety of customers, study them, assist them make good selections and place their services extra successfully.”
Chen says that about 70% of NewRetirement’s income is enterprise presently, with the remaining 30% coming from shopper prospects. The platform has 20,000 particular person subscribers and “a number of” wealth administration purchasers in addition to “a number of” enterprise prospects together with Nationwide, which lately expanded an current partnership with NewRetirement.
That momentum little question helped NewRetirement to cinch its Sequence A funding spherical this month.
The corporate raised $20 million in a tranche that brings its whole raised to $20.8 million, led by Allegis Capital with participation from Nationwide Ventures, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Motley Idiot Ventures and others. Chen says that the money infusion can be used to increase 50-employee NewRetirement’s enterprise merchandise, scale up onboarding, speed up R&D efforts and construct capability to satisfy future demand.
“With this new capital, we can have three to 4 years of runway,” Chen mentioned. “That provides us time to proceed to scale our enterprise partnerships and improve our product. What’s extra, the present downturn is enabling us to herald unbelievable expertise. We’ve a powerful group in place and can increase headcount additional this yr.”
