A Gen Xer moved to Portugal for a better shot at a comfortable retirement: 'I pulled myself up from the bootstraps, and I'm still woefully short'
Jack Stone, 60, sold her belongings and moved from Maryland to Portugal with her cat Olive last year — with no plans to return.
It might not be her last relocation, but the US isn't in her future either because of retirement concerns.
Stone was worried about what aging would look like in the US. She estimated she would need at least $2 million to comfortably live as a retiree in her Maryland home with healthcare and aging care.
"I realized that even if I had Social Security, I would not be able to survive in the United States," Stone told Business Insider. "The math was not there."
After visiting Portugal in 2023 and starting the visa process shortly after, she moved abroad this past August. Stone said she wanted to make the change while she was still relatively young. She moved to Portugal on a long-stay visa and has a US remote job as a clinical analyst in a tech services company. While she's still with the same employer and earns six figures a year, she said she's in a contractor role now, so she doesn't have paid time off or a 401(k) through her employer. She has also started a coaching business to help people plan a move abroad.
Stone, who now has her residence permit, said that she doesn't have a lot of retirement savings because she started saving up in her 50s. She said it wouldn't have mattered if she had saved earlier because she dropped out of high school and didn't get her first "real paycheck" until late in her life.
"I went back to school as a 38-year-old with a GED and a third-grade math level," Stone said. "I graduated at 43, and that was the first time I ever made more than $7 an hour."
There isn't a perfect number for retirement savings because some people may work longer, live longer, move in with family, or have varying levels of lifestyle and healthcare needs. An AARP article said people need about 80% of their pre-retirement income to keep up their lifestyle, and Northwestern Mutual has found year after year, US adults think they will need over $1 million to retire comfortably. Fidelity Investments found the average 401(k) balance for 60- to 64-year-olds was $246,500.
"I wish that our country was keeping its promise to its people and not favoring the billionaires," Stone said, adding, "I pulled myself up from the bootstraps, and I'm still woefully short. And 40 years ago, that's not what it would've been."
Moving to Portugal reduced Stone's medical and transportation costs
Stone said in a TikTok video that she decided to move abroad because she thought that if she removed transportation and healthcare expenses, she would have a better chance of living comfortably as she ages.
Please help BI improve our Business, Tech, and Innovation coverage by sharing a bit about your role — it will help us tailor content that matters most to people like you.
What is your job title? (1 of 2)
Entry level position
Project manager
Management
Senior management
Executive management
Student
Self-employed
Retired
Other
Continue
By providing this information, you agree that Business Insider may use this data to improve your site experience and for targeted advertising. By continuing you agree that you accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy .
"And it's true. I have to tell you that removing those two things from the equation has made a huge difference," Stone said in the video.
Stone told BI she's saving more money than when she was in the US. She sold her car because she doesn't "want a car lifestyle." She pays for a metro pass of 40 euros a month. In the TikTok video, she said she wanted to make sure she was living somewhere with good transportation as she ages, so she doesn't "become a shut-in."
While electricity costs are similar, she's spending less on prescriptions, groceries, internet, and her phone. She pays 89 euros a month for private health insurance with no deductible to reach or out-of-pocket costs. She said she's renting her Maryland home, which she has had for just over a handful of years and bought on a Veterans Affairs loan, but is hoping to sell it.
She said there is a standard Value Added Tax of 23% in Portugal. "Even with that, my grocery bill is 30% less than what it was," Stone said, adding that the rate is already folded into the price shown to consumers, so she doesn't really think about it as she shops.
Stone does miss some things about the US, but isn't looking back
It's not the first time Stone has been outside the US. Stone, who used to be in the military, lived overseas after 9/11. She also lived in different US states.
"So I'm very comfortable with change," Stone said. With that comfort, she found the assimilation to Portugal easy, but she does miss snowy winters in the US and thinks the US has so much beauty. If she ended up leaving Portugal, she thinks it would be to move somewhere besides the US.
"I lived a very full, lucky life, and I got to play in all of the most amazing states in the mountains and everywhere there," she said. "I do sometimes pine away just for that, which was my life as a child and growing up."
But Stone is happy with her move. She enjoys traveling around Portugal and balances her work, including taking coaching calls for her new business, with social activities. "I love just walking out my door, getting on the metro, crossing the river, and going to meet a group for a local meetup," Stone said.
In her TikTok video, Stone wanted to send a message to other Americans who are worried they won't have enough for retirement. "Most of us played the game and followed all the rules, and we're coming up short," she said, adding, "It's never too late. You have options, you're not alone, and you didn't do anything wrong."
She recommends people interested in trying a new country to talk to their employer about whether that's feasible, like she did. She added that people don't have to take everything they own to their new home.
Stone also suggests Americans who are considering a move abroad visit beforehand, especially if they haven't traveled out of the country before, and not to expect the country to be like the US.
"The whole point of moving somewhere else is to experience their way of living," Stone said.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
42 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Alexa von Tobel has high hopes for ‘fintech 3.0'
It's been 10 years since Alexa von Tobel sold her financial planning startup Learnvest to Northwestern Mutual for $250 million. Since then, von Tobel became Northwestern Mutual's first chief digital officer, then chief innovation officer, before launching an early-stage venture firm of her own, Inspired Capital, with former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. She's also a New York Times bestelling author, and she's about to launch a new interview podcast, 'Inspired with Alexa von Tobel.' In a conversation with TechCrunch, von Tobel recalled the hectic period around the acquisition, which closed literally days before the birth of her first child, and when she knew it was time to start her own firm. Von Tobel explained that she created Inspired to be the investor she'd dreamed of — one with a 'cultish commitment to entrepreneurship' — when she was a founder herself. And while Inspired is a generalist firm, she said she feels both 'urgent and optimistic' about fintech, the sector where she launched her career. (One of her pre-Inspired fintech investments, Chime, just went public.) 'We think of this wave as fintech 3.0,' von Tobel said. 'The next wave of innovation won't come from superficial tweaks but from fundamental deep product reinvention — tools that meet the needs of a changing economy and a more diverse, digitally native population.' The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Congratulations on the 10-year anniversary of the acquisition. Looking back, what do you feel proudest of? First, Northwestern Mutual is an incredible company, and our software became an incredibly important part of the customer experience. And I am so proud that so many of the LearnVest team stayed at Northwestern Mutual for so long, and it really was just a merger of actual values. It's just amazing how simple some things are, it comes down to the values of two companies and the missions of two companies. I sold on a Wednesday and went into labor with my first child that weekend. All jokes aside, I always say it took me about a year to mentally just recover from being, like, all systems were go, my brain was being pushed to manage so many things. Literally, I was having my first child. It was like the world threw a bus at me and I caught it. So when you were closing the deal, was there a ticking clock in your mind, that you had to finish everything before this whole other thing happens? Of course. If you think about it, we literally signed on, I think, 11am on March 25 and then we did a press tour with the CEO, and then the next day, we did a stand up with the entire team, and then I went to sleep and literally woke up in labor. Having your first child is priceless. There's nothing in the world that is more valuable to me than having my children, nothing. And so I kept being like, 'We have to get this done, because I'm not leaving the hospital to come back and close a deal. I actually need to focus on this human being that I'm bringing into the world.' I always joke that the lawyers took me very seriously. When people on the outside talk about an acquisition, obviously, the first thing they talk about is usually the financials, and then one of the signs of success is the product. LearnVest as a product doesn't exist anymore, but it sounds like it was less about having LearnVest as a standalone product and more about transforming Northwestern Mutual. It was so much bigger than a product. [Northwestern Mutual's] John Schlifske, he's no longer CEO, but he is one of the people I look up to most in the world, just a formidable human being. And he kept being like, 'We're gonna merge the companies.' And I would laugh — one is a $40-billion-a-year company, and [the other is] little tiny LearnVest. But he really meant it. He was like, 'We're gonna use this as a catalyst.' It was a catalyst for an entire digital transformation. I became the company's first ever chief digital officer, and then chief innovation officer, and it was really about taking everything and merging it into the broader parent company. My CTO of LearnVest became the CTO of the parent company. You stayed for four years? Yeah, [my last day] was basically end of January 2019, and that day we launched Inspired. How did you know it was time to leave, and where did the idea for Inspired come from? I'm always at my best when I'm building something that I wish existed for me. And I've said many times that the idea for Inspired actually happened when I dropped out of business school, and I was a really all-in entrepreneur in every way — I dropped out basically December 18 of 2008, at the bottom of the worst recession in 81 years, not necessarily the the the most inviting time to start a company. And I really was looking for a capital partner that didn't exist. I had this vision of what it should look and feel like, this sort of rigor and camaraderie and in-the-trenches-ness of what an early stage capital partner could be, and I didn't see it in the market. That was New York in 2008, 2009, and I had this long-term plan of one day, I want to come back and build that. Fast forward to 2018, 2019 I'd started really actively dreaming about what that could look like. And one day I was like, it has to happen, it's now. We're now almost seven years in. We're a dedicated early stage venture fund, generalist, headquartered in New York, but investing everywhere. And I feel like I've been here for one minute. It literally is the best job I've ever had. You mentioned having this idea of a capital partner that you wished you'd had. How do you put that into practice? What was I looking for in that capital? What were you looking for, and how did you get everyone at the on-board with that vision? So, when I talk to entrepreneurs, I always say Inspired is different for four key reasons. The first reason is that we are extremely long duration capital. It means when we back a founder, we truly put blinders on for 20 years. When you're building a company, there's choices you have to make as a CEO, which is, 'Do I do the thing for next month so that things look good, or do the harder thing that won't look good next month, maybe it pays off in three years, or not?' And what we always say is, 'Do the harder thing, do the thing that's creating far more long-term value and worry less about synthetic results.' The second thing is, our team's pretty unique in that we've built and scaled more than 10 businesses that have touched hundreds of millions of users around the world. That mentality is so different when you're sitting in the seat working with an entrepreneur, because we haven't necessarily lived every experience, but we've lived a lot, and we appreciate the contours. It's almost like seeing 3D versus 2D. The third thing is that our team operates like one unit. So when we back a company, you actually get the entire team. At many firms, you get one partner, that's the person they know, they know you, and if, God forbid, that partner leaves, it's like you've evaporated your social equity that you built up with that partner. We operate like a swarm, where you get all of us and we actively do weekly stand ups on the entire portfolio, so that everybody's up to speed. And then the final thing, because of [Inspired co-founder Penny Pritzker], she's on the board of Microsoft, was U.S. Secretary of Commerce. So we like to say that, there are many, many, many, many ways that we can help companies get access to things that are really hard to get as just a sole founder in your 20s or 30s, where we can actually be a tremendous business accelerant to our companies in a pretty unique way, with access to tech and government and many other vectors. So in short, that was the firm I wanted. I wanted a deeply cultish commitment to entrepreneurship. We always talk about this Inspired future — one of the things I love so much about entrepreneurship is, no great entrepreneur shows up and is like, 'Let's make the world worse,' right? They show up and they're like, 'Here's a big problem that's facing a billion people. Let's go fix it.' I think some of the biggest founders in the world, their companies poured out of their DNA. I started LearnVest because my father had passed away, and my mom overnight had to manage our finances. And I was like, I never want a family to feel financially destabilized, and I wanted to go build the solution. When we look back at the broader ecosystem over the last 10 years, one of the big transitions is leaving behind that period of zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) for VC and startups. Have you seen a change in the venture ecosystem in the last few years, and has that affected the way you approach investing at Inspired? So just a helpful framework — Inspired is a full generalist fund. We will touch everything from deep tech to health tech to consumer, looking for the biggest, most important ideas of the next 15 years. Every day, when I come to work, I literally mentally walk into this office in 2035. And that's how we're thinking about where the world is going and the problems be solved And I think when ZIRP existed, many things that I would say weren't venture bets, would get backed. And I almost think it would be confusing, because you'd be like: What categories are not venture categories? Lots of categories are not venture categories by nature — if you think about power law, everything that we back ideally has a real chance to be worth $10 billion. There's not a lot of those. I built LearnVest at the bottom of the worst recession in 81 years, and actually LearnVest was not an easy business. It was regulated, there were so many other things that were really hard about what we were doing. I really like hard businesses, because they have defensibility. They have reasons to exist. They have less copycats. I think a lot of things got funded over the last period of, like, 2014 to 2021, that should've been getting a different source of capital. How are you feeling about the state of fintech in 2025? Where are there still opportunities for startups? I'm feeling both urgent and optimistic about the state of fintech today. Financial services remain foundational to a functioning society, but they haven't kept pace with the rapid technological, demographic, and social shifts we're experiencing. The growing federal debt, rising income inequality, and increasing poverty — especially among older Americans — underscore the need for more adaptive and inclusive financial tools. Not to mention the rapid job loss due to AI. This moment presents a major opportunity for startups to reimagine financial products from the ground up. We think of this wave as fintech 3.0. The next wave of innovation won't come from superficial tweaks but from fundamental deep product reinvention — tools that meet the needs of a changing economy and a more diverse, digitally native population. We're excited by founders who see this challenge clearly and are building bold solutions to address it. You launched LearnVest on-stage at the TechCrunch 50 conference in 2009. If you were a judge at our Startup Battlefield in 2025, what would you be looking for in the winning team? I would be looking for a founder who, based on who they are and their lived experience, has a powerful, unique insight to a problem that touches hundreds of millions of people, if not more. Two, I would be looking for something that is non-obvious. You know, I think some of the biggest and best ideas are non-consensus, people don't think they're interesting. Third, I would look for an entrepreneur who's living and breathing a decade out. They see this very powerful future. And the final thing I would look for is the founder who has — there's a spikiness, there's a grit and resilience, but also a command, that you can sit with them and you can like it's palpable, that they will figure out a way to succeed. Those are the key ingredients that you look for. Errore nel recupero dei dati Effettua l'accesso per consultare il tuo portafoglio Errore nel recupero dei dati Errore nel recupero dei dati Errore nel recupero dei dati Errore nel recupero dei dati
USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
This is the average Social Security benefit for age 65
This is the average Social Security benefit for age 65 Show Caption Hide Caption Social Security uncertainty and policy changes are driving more people to file With a significant rise in Social Security applications, retirees face financial decisions influenced by legislation and economic concerns in today's climate. Scripps News If you haven't yet, at what age do you think you'll retire? Most people say the magic number is 65. The actual average retirement age for people living in the United States, however, is a modestly lower 63. That's shortly after they're able to begin collecting respectable but reduced retirement benefits from Social Security. Just for the sake of acknowledging the current cost of living, though, let's say you're going to continue working until you reach your goal of 65 years of age. How much are your monthly Social Security payments likely to be then? Keep reading for the answer, and some important perspective on the matter. What is the average Social Security check at age 65? The Social Security Administration reports that as of the end of last year, the average 65-year-old was enjoying a monthly benefit of $1,611. Applying this year's cost-of-living adjustment of 2.5% would put the figure closer to $1,651 per month now. Just bear in mind that that's an average based on a wide range of inputs. Some of this crowd may be banking on the order of $4,000 per month. Other people are seeing monthly payments of less than $1,000. Still, the average is the average. This relatively small figure begs a big question: Is there a way to make the number any bigger? There is. How can I get my Social Security benefits increased? First, understand that any 65-year-old currently collecting any non-disability-related Social Security has already opted for a slightly smaller payment by virtue of filing for benefits before reaching their intended full retirement age, or FRA. (For people born in or after 1960 your FRA is 67, while for people born in or before 1959 it's a few months less, gradually scaling back to the previous FRA of 66.) The difference isn't insignificant, either. Even claiming just two years early reduces your monthly payment to the tune of 13% -- give or take -- depending on when you were born. Putting that in more tangible terms, for the average recipient, the difference in waiting until reaching your full retirement age of 67 would mean a little over $200 more per month. Not bad. For what it's worth, waiting another three years to claim benefits when you turn 70 would make your monthly benefit about 25% bigger than it would be if filing at your official full retirement age. That would mean roughly an additional $500 more per month in today's dollars for today's retirees. Is it worth working past 65? There's an additional incentive for sticking with your job for at least another couple of years after you turn 65, if not five more years. It's got everything to do with how the Social Security Administration calculates what it owes you in retirement. Most people understand that the more money you earn at a job, the more you pay in FICA taxes, and the bigger your future Social Security benefits get. There's more to the matter, though. For the purposes of determining your monthly payment, the program only considers your 35 highest-earning (inflation-adjusted) years, even if you're going to work more years than that. But you already know you're going to be working less than 35 years? That's OK. That won't disqualify you from claiming and getting something. The Social Security Administration will simply assign you zero earned dollars for the number of years less than 35 that you didn't actually earn any work-based wages. You might want to make a point of toughing it out for just a little bit longer, if at all possible. See, if you're in your 60s and still working, there's a good chance you're earning more now (again, even adjusting for inflation) than you were when you were first starting out in your 20s. A couple more higher-earning years could displace a couple of your lower-earning ones if you've seen consistent income growth over the course of your career, perhaps adding an additional couple-hundred bucks to your future monthly payment. This means even more for anyone who earned below-average wages early on in their work life but is an above-average earner now. Some other key considerations Two related ideas also need to be passed along here. First, while money is important in that it can make life more comfortable and less stressful, it's not everything. Health matters too. So does spending time with friends and family. You may have good reason for claiming Social Security benefits at the age of 65 rather than waiting until you reach your full retirement age. If you've given the matter enough careful thought and still believe that's what's best for you, by all means start collecting benefits when you're 65. While this won't be your exact same number, again, for most people this age their monthly payment is in the ballpark of $1,600. The other important point to add? Remember that Social Security was never intended to be your sole source of retirement income in the first place. The program estimates that its benefits payments only replace about 40% of beneficiaries' pre-retirement income. The rest of your retirement income will come from you. That means you're going to need to invest at least some of your after-tax income on your own, in vehicles like individual retirement accounts. Of course, working a few extra years will allow you to tuck away more money in an IRA, while also raising your eventual Social Security payment. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. The Motley Fool is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news, analysis and commentary designed to help people take control of their financial lives. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY. The $23,760 Social Security bonus most retirees completely overlook Offer from the Motley Fool: If you're like most Americans, you're a few years (or more) behind on your retirement savings. But a handful of little-known "Social Security secrets"could help ensure a boost in your retirement income. One easy trick could pay you as much as $23,760 more... each year! Once you learn how to maximize your Social Security benefits, we think you could retire confidently with the peace of mind we're all after. JoinStock Advisorto learn more about these strategies. View the "Social Security secrets" »
TechCrunch
2 hours ago
- TechCrunch
Alexa von Tobel has high hopes for ‘fintech 3.0'
It's been 10 years since Alexa von Tobel sold her financial planning startup Learnvest to Northwestern Mutual for $250 million. Since then, von Tobel became Northwestern Mutual's first chief digital officer, then chief innovation officer, before launching an early-stage venture firm of her own, Inspired Capital, with former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. She's also a New York Times bestelling author, and she's about to launch a new interview podcast, 'Inspired with Alexa von Tobel.' In a conversation with TechCrunch, von Tobel recalled the hectic period around the acquisition, which closed literally days before the birth of her first child, and when she knew it was time to start her own firm. Von Tobel explained that she created Inspired to be the investor she'd dreamed of — one with a 'cultish commitment to entrepreneurship' — when she was a founder herself. And while Inspired is a generalist firm, she said she feels both 'urgent and optimistic' about fintech, the sector where she launched her career. (One of her pre-Inspired fintech investments, Chime, just went public.) 'We think of this wave as fintech 3.0,' von Tobel said. 'The next wave of innovation won't come from superficial tweaks but from fundamental deep product reinvention — tools that meet the needs of a changing economy and a more diverse, digitally native population.' The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Congratulations on the 10-year anniversary of the acquisition. Looking back, what do you feel proudest of? Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW First, Northwestern Mutual is an incredible company, and our software became an incredibly important part of the customer experience. And I am so proud that so many of the LearnVest team stayed at Northwestern Mutual for so long, and it really was just a merger of actual values. It's just amazing how simple some things are, it comes down to the values of two companies and the missions of two companies. I sold on a Wednesday and went into labor with my first child that weekend. All jokes aside, I always say it took me about a year to mentally just recover from being, like, all systems were go, my brain was being pushed to manage so many things. Literally, I was having my first child. It was like the world threw a bus at me and I caught it. So when you were closing the deal, was there a ticking clock in your mind, that you had to finish everything before this whole other thing happens? Of course. If you think about it, we literally signed on, I think, 11am on March 25 and then we did a press tour with the CEO, and then the next day, we did a stand up with the entire team, and then I went to sleep and literally woke up in labor. Having your first child is priceless. There's nothing in the world that is more valuable to me than having my children, nothing. And so I kept being like, 'We have to get this done, because I'm not leaving the hospital to come back and close a deal. I actually need to focus on this human being that I'm bringing into the world.' I always joke that the lawyers took me very seriously. When people on the outside talk about an acquisition, obviously, the first thing they talk about is usually the financials, and then one of the signs of success is the product. LearnVest as a product doesn't exist anymore, but it sounds like it was less about having LearnVest as a standalone product and more about transforming Northwestern Mutual. It was so much bigger than a product. [Northwestern Mutual's] John Schlifske, he's no longer CEO, but he is one of the people I look up to most in the world, just a formidable human being. And he kept being like, 'We're gonna merge the companies.' And I would laugh — one is a $40-billion-a-year company, and [the other is] little tiny LearnVest. But he really meant it. He was like, 'We're gonna use this as a catalyst.' It was a catalyst for an entire digital transformation. I became the company's first ever chief digital officer, and then chief innovation officer, and it was really about taking everything and merging it into the broader parent company. My CTO of LearnVest became the CTO of the parent company. You stayed for four years? Yeah, [my last day] was basically end of January 2019, and that day we launched Inspired. How did you know it was time to leave, and where did the idea for Inspired come from? I'm always at my best when I'm building something that I wish existed for me. And I've said many times that the idea for Inspired actually happened when I dropped out of business school, and I was a really all-in entrepreneur in every way — I dropped out basically December 18 of 2008, at the bottom of the worst recession in 81 years, not necessarily the the the most inviting time to start a company. And I really was looking for a capital partner that didn't exist. I had this vision of what it should look and feel like, this sort of rigor and camaraderie and in-the-trenches-ness of what an early stage capital partner could be, and I didn't see it in the market. That was New York in 2008, 2009, and I had this long-term plan of one day, I want to come back and build that. Fast forward to 2018, 2019 I'd started really actively dreaming about what that could look like. And one day I was like, it has to happen, it's now. We're now almost seven years in. We're a dedicated early stage venture fund, generalist, headquartered in New York, but investing everywhere. And I feel like I've been here for one minute. It literally is the best job I've ever had. You mentioned having this idea of a capital partner that you wished you'd had. How do you put that into practice? What was I looking for in that capital? What were you looking for, and how did you get everyone at the on-board with that vision? So, when I talk to entrepreneurs, I always say Inspired is different for four key reasons. The first reason is that we are extremely long duration capital. It means when we back a founder, we truly put blinders on for 20 years. When you're building a company, there's choices you have to make as a CEO, which is, 'Do I do the thing for next month so that things look good, or do the harder thing that won't look good next month, maybe it pays off in three years, or not?' And what we always say is, 'Do the harder thing, do the thing that's creating far more long-term value and worry less about synthetic results.' The second thing is, our team's pretty unique in that we've built and scaled more than 10 businesses that have touched hundreds of millions of users around the world. That mentality is so different when you're sitting in the seat working with an entrepreneur, because we haven't necessarily lived every experience, but we've lived a lot, and we appreciate the contours. It's almost like seeing 3D versus 2D. The third thing is that our team operates like one unit. So when we back a company, you actually get the entire team. At many firms, you get one partner, that's the person they know, they know you, and if, God forbid, that partner leaves, it's like you've evaporated your social equity that you built up with that partner. We operate like a swarm, where you get all of us and we actively do weekly stand ups on the entire portfolio, so that everybody's up to speed. And then the final thing, because of [Inspired co-founder Penny Pritzker], she's on the board of Microsoft, was U.S. Secretary of Commerce. So we like to say that, there are many, many, many, many ways that we can help companies get access to things that are really hard to get as just a sole founder in your 20s or 30s, where we can actually be a tremendous business accelerant to our companies in a pretty unique way, with access to tech and government and many other vectors. So in short, that was the firm I wanted. I wanted a deeply cultish commitment to entrepreneurship. We always talk about this Inspired future — one of the things I love so much about entrepreneurship is, no great entrepreneur shows up and is like, 'Let's make the world worse,' right? They show up and they're like, 'Here's a big problem that's facing a billion people. Let's go fix it.' I think some of the biggest founders in the world, their companies poured out of their DNA. I started LearnVest because my father had passed away, and my mom overnight had to manage our finances. And I was like, I never want a family to feel financially destabilized, and I wanted to go build the solution. When we look back at the broader ecosystem over the last 10 years, one of the big transitions is leaving behind that period of zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) for VC and startups. Have you seen a change in the venture ecosystem in the last few years, and has that affected the way you approach investing at Inspired? So just a helpful framework — Inspired is a full generalist fund. We will touch everything from deep tech to health tech to consumer, looking for the biggest, most important ideas of the next 15 years. Every day, when I come to work, I literally mentally walk into this office in 2035. And that's how we're thinking about where the world is going and the problems be solved And I think when ZIRP existed, many things that I would say weren't venture bets, would get backed. And I almost think it would be confusing, because you'd be like: What categories are not venture categories? Lots of categories are not venture categories by nature — if you think about power law, everything that we back ideally has a real chance to be worth $10 billion. There's not a lot of those. I built LearnVest at the bottom of the worst recession in 81 years, and actually LearnVest was not an easy business. It was regulated, there were so many other things that were really hard about what we were doing. I really like hard businesses, because they have defensibility. They have reasons to exist. They have less copycats. I think a lot of things got funded over the last period of, like, 2014 to 2021, that should've been getting a different source of capital. How are you feeling about the state of fintech in 2025? Where are there still opportunities for startups? I'm feeling both urgent and optimistic about the state of fintech today. Financial services remain foundational to a functioning society, but they haven't kept pace with the rapid technological, demographic, and social shifts we're experiencing. The growing federal debt, rising income inequality, and increasing poverty — especially among older Americans — underscore the need for more adaptive and inclusive financial tools. Not to mention the rapid job loss due to AI. This moment presents a major opportunity for startups to reimagine financial products from the ground up. We think of this wave as fintech 3.0. The next wave of innovation won't come from superficial tweaks but from fundamental deep product reinvention — tools that meet the needs of a changing economy and a more diverse, digitally native population. We're excited by founders who see this challenge clearly and are building bold solutions to address it. You launched LearnVest on-stage at the TechCrunch 50 conference in 2009. If you were a judge at our Startup Battlefield in 2025, what would you be looking for in the winning team? I would be looking for a founder who, based on who they are and their lived experience, has a powerful, unique insight to a problem that touches hundreds of millions of people, if not more. Two, I would be looking for something that is non-obvious. You know, I think some of the biggest and best ideas are non-consensus, people don't think they're interesting. Third, I would look for an entrepreneur who's living and breathing a decade out. They see this very powerful future. And the final thing I would look for is the founder who has — there's a spikiness, there's a grit and resilience, but also a command, that you can sit with them and you can like it's palpable, that they will figure out a way to succeed. Those are the key ingredients that you look for.
