# data[].attributes.headline
stc sie exam prep reviews - Google Search

# data[].attributes.subject
stc sie exam prep reviews - Google Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
stc sie exam prep reviews - Google Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn about our independent review process and partners in our advertiser ... The SIE exam prep course through STC has three packages to choose from, ...

# data[].attributes.headline
different the Series 6 & 63 and SIE - Google Search

# data[].attributes.subject
different the Series 6 & 63 and SIE - Google Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
different the Series 6 & 63 and SIE - Google Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
FINRA Licensing Breakdown · NASAA Licensing Breakdown ·

# data[].attributes.headline
different the Series 6 & 63 and SIE - Google Search

# data[].attributes.subject
different the Series 6 & 63 and SIE - Google Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
different the Series 6 & 63 and SIE - Google Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
FINRA Licensing Breakdown · NASAA Licensing Breakdown ·

# data[].attributes.body
FYC
20 percentage
renewal
opportunities
annual reviews
Group Term
They are your clients.
Employers
Session plans
protect the business
partners
key employee
excutes
key men
$50000 thousand from the employee, enough?
Prospecting
day time

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Search SIC Codes by Industry | NAICS Association

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Data Appends & Targeted Marketing Lists * Current Number of US Businesses within that Primary SIC Code. Data Appends &

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Grief Support for Children, Teens, Families and Adults

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Peer Group Support

Adult family members can participate in specific peer support or drop-in groups. On-going grief support groups are also offered for children ages 5 to 11, middle schoolers, and teens. These bi-monthly meetings include concurrent facilitated support groups for the accompanying parents or caregivers and allow an opportunity to discuss and share experiences with grief. Parents or caregivers of younger children (1 - 4) are also welcome to participate. Learn More

1:1 Peer Support

In addition to participating in specific or drop-in groups, parents or family caregivers can receive individual support from a trained volunteer peer counselor. Learn More

Grief Therapy

Some individuals have circumstances that complicate their grief work. These individuals may benefit from therapy rather than or in addition to Kara's peer services. If necessary, the therapy services can also accommodate couples and families together. Learn More

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Adult family members can participate in specific peer support or drop-in groups. On-going grief support groups are also offered for children ages 5 to 11, middle schoolers, and teens. These bi-monthly meetings include concurrent facilitated support groups for the accompanying parents or caregivers and allow an opportunity to discuss and share experiences with grief.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Grief Support for Children, Teens, Families & Adults

# data[].attributes.body
You can also mail or deliver a check to Kara's main office at 457 Kingsley Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301.

Our federal identification number is 94-2431483.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Did you know that you can make a charitable contribution through your Roth IRA or traditional IRA? That's right, and if you're 70.5 or older, there are some added tax benefits to making your "Qualified Charitable Distribution" in this way.

Specifically, current tax law allows you to fulfill your required minimum distribution while bypassing your gross income. That's even better than the benefits of making a standard charitable contribution. There are some other advantages too:

It allows you to support Kara's continued service to the bereaved in our community.

It minimizes your tax obligation at the federal and state level

It may keep you in a lower tax bracket.

How To Make A Contribution Through Your IRA

Contact your financial adviser today and request that a "Qualified Charitable Distribution be made directly to Kara.

Make sure that your gift is identified with your name, address, and intention to use it as an IRA Qualified Charitable Distribution.

Make sure to list our name as "Kara," our address as 457 Kingsley Avenue, Palo Alto, California 94301, and our EIN number as 94-2431483

If you have questions please give us a call at 650-321-5272.
Give through your will or estate to benefit Kara. Legacy Giving helps provide you with a unique tax advantage that may ease the tax burden on your loved ones.

Some benefits to you when you plan a charitable gift to Kara:

Potential to reduce your taxes, now or later

Easy to do, and easy to have a big impact, with no expense to you during your lifetime

Helps to ensure that grief support will be available for our community's children and adults

When including Kara in your will or trust our legal name is "Kara".
What is a donor-advised fund?
A donor-advised fund (DAF) provides donors with a centralized charitable giving vehicle. It allows philanthropically inclined individuals, families, and corporations to make an irrevocable charitable gift to a public charity that sponsors a DAF program and take an immediate tax deduction. Most sponsoring organizations of DAFs accept cash equivalents, securities, and certain other assets.
How does it work?

Establish your DAF by making an irrevocable, tax-deductible donation to a public charity that sponsors a DAF program.

Advise the investment allocation of the donated assets (any investment growth is tax-free).

Recommend grants to qualified public charities of your choice.

Use this DAF Direct link to make a gift through your donor advised fund today!

Check with your financial advisor about making a charitable contribution to Kara using your stock portfolio. There are terrific benefits to the donor when you give appreciated stock. Please call our office for specific transfer instructions.

Thinking of selling or trading in that old car, boat or RV? Why not donate it instead? We have partnered with Automotive Recovery Services to make it easy for you. Automotive Recovery Services arranges a free vehicle pickup, handles all the DMV requirements, and distributes the net proceeds to Kara. Avoid the headache of selling your used vehicle and instead, receive a receipt entitling you to a tax deduction. Call 888-205-3420 or Click Here

Call our office at 650-321-5272 to inquire about our specific needs regarding in-kind donations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Did you know that you can make a charitable contribution through your Roth IRA or traditional IRA? That's right, and if you're 70.5 or older, there are some added tax benefits to making your "Qualified Charitable Distribution" in this way. Specifically, current tax law allows you to fulfill your required minimum distribution while bypassing your gross income.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Kara is a Self-Referral organization. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to connect you to the services that meet your unique needs.

Professional Referrals are welcome. Please review our Professional Referral Guidelines

COVID-19 SERVICE IMPACT NOTICE: With the goal of serving the grieving in our community while prioritizing the health and safety of clients, volunteers, and staff, Kara currently offers telehealth grief support services (phone or video meetings). Inquiries from individuals, families, and organizations should be submitted through this contact form or by calling us at 650-321-5272

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kara is a Self-Referral organization. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to connect you to the services that meet your unique needs. Professional Referrals are welcome.

# data[].attributes.body
3/4/21
Employer Applications

a Section 125 Plan
Cafeteria Plan
4/1/2022
30 hours

Employee Enrollment
Questionnaires
Electronic Signature

# data[].attributes.body
Church

General Agency
Fightfiter
non-profit organization
only employee not volunteers

Group Benefit Forms
businessSolutions@newyorklife.com eSign
Manta Employers
I work with business owners.
Do you want to put something

Manta - The Place for Small Business

SIC Code5812, Restaurants

career one stop

CareerOneStop: Careers and Career Information

Agent Commision Corm and CHecklist

# data[].attributes.body
Guidance

Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is a one to two paragraph statement that speaks to your target market and articulates what differentiates you and why they should work with you. Your UVP is a declaration of what you are passionate about and the value you promise to deliver.

Address Your Nest

Do not make general statements such as, “I offer excellent customer service.” Instead, explain how you help Clients prepare for their financial future and communicate why you are passionate about the group of individuals in your Nest.

Know Your Nest

Who are you trying to serve and where are you focusing your energy? Nests are typically comprised of multiple target markets. For instance, law enforcement officers (the Nest) could be comprised of young and mature families, those approaching retirement and retired officers, and people of every generation. Knowing your Nest will help you determine your UVP.

Highlight Differentiators

Clearly communicate what makes you unique to this group of people and why they should do business with you. Be sure to include personal details that are relevant to the group.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Your business's value proposition is arguably the most important element of your overall marketing messaging. A value proposition tells prospects why they should do business with you rather than your competitors, and makes the benefits of your products or services crystal clear from the outset.

Unfortunately, many businesses either bury their value proposition in buzzwords or trite, meaningless slogans, or don't bother highlighting it on their site and in their marketing campaigns - or they don't figure out what it is at all!

Today, we'll be looking at seven of the best unique value proposition examples we've come across. We'll go over what makes them so compelling, some ideas for developing or refining your own value proposition, and things you should bear in mind when incorporating your value proposition into your website and marketing materials. There's a fair bit to cover, so let's dive right in.

1. Uber - The Smartest Way to Get Around

Few tech companies are as polarizing or widely criticized as Uber. As one of the most vocal proponents of the empowerment offered by the so-called "gig economy," Uber has deservedly taken a lot of heat for denying its drivers the basic protections afforded to legal employees, been subject to national and even governmental scrutiny for its decision to incorporate in Bermuda to avoid its corporate tax obligations, and is generally the poster child for why everyone hates Silicon Valley's unique brand of "disruption."

One thing Uber most definitely does right, however, is its unique value proposition.
Uber's value proposition, offering uber convenience
Without explicitly saying so, Uber expertly highlights everything that sucks about taking a traditional taxi and points out how its service is superior. The simple (yet highly effective) copy above, taken from the Uber homepage, excellently conveys the simplicity and ease that lies at the heart of what makes it such a tempting service:

One tap and a car comes directly to you

Your driver knows exactly where to go

Payment is completely cashless

Everything about this directly contrasts the typical experience of getting a taxi - no phone calls to disinterested dispatchers, no painful conversations trying to explain to a stressed-out cabbie about where you need to be, and no fumbling for change or worrying you've got enough bills in your wallet. Just a fast, efficient way to get where you're going. This is reinforced by the aspirational messaging toward the top of the Uber homepage, which states that "Your day belongs to you."

Related: 13 (Really) Good Elevator Pitch Examples & Templates

At this point, it's worth comparing Uber's value proposition with that of rival company Lyft. The two companies' offerings are virtually identical, which is what makes a direct comparison of the two so interesting. Take a look at this information from the Lyft homepage:
Lyft's step-by-step value proposition
Structurally and thematically, Lyft's homepage is very similar to Uber's. However, there's some key differences here that highlight how Uber's value proposition is more clearly positioned.

Firstly, Lyft does score some points for including several step-by-step images of the Lyft experience, helping visitors visualize what taking a ride with Lyft is like. However, look at the copy for the first step of the process. It lists the three tiers of Lyft service - Lyft, Lyft Line, and Lyft Plus - but doesn't explain the difference between these service tiers, or tell the prospect why they should choose between them.

Also, while clearly explaining the final stage of the process - paying and rating the driver - this information implies that there is a final definitive action required by the user, something Uber does not. Personally, I almost always try to rate my Uber drivers (bearing in mind the oft-speculated "secret" rating of around 4.6 out of 5 that many believe serves as the performance benchmark for Uber drivers), but I don't have to. Sometimes I'll forget about it and just get on with my day - it certainly isn't required, and nor is manually paying my driver. For a service built on the notion of efficiency and convenience, this is a big deal.

Now, one could argue that Lyft does a better job of being transparent about what users can expect, an argument that definitely has merit, especially if you've ever been stung by Uber's unexpected "surge" pricing. However, for two such similar services, I'd argue that Uber's value proposition is more clearly positioned, and certainly more persuasive than that of Lyft - an important distinction if you're operating in a crowded market with several similar competitors.
Free download: Master Google Ads with our free PPC 101 guide.
2. Apple iPhone - The Experience IS the Product

Even in today's oversaturated consumer electronics marketplace, it's hard to imagine a more iconic product than the Apple iPhone. It's also difficult to imagine a product with as much competition as Apple's flagship mobile device, so what sets the iPhone apart from the (literally) hundreds of competing devices on the market?
Apple's iPhone value proposition, offering unique experience
As you'd probably expect from Apple, a firm renowned as much for its commitment to sleek, elegant product design as its actual products, Apple firmly reiterates its value proposition in the copy about its iPhone range of products - specifically, the design of the device itself, the ease of use that has been a cornerstone of Apple's design aesthetic since the launch of OS X, and the aspirational qualities that an iPhone supposedly offers the user.

This aspirational messaging is Apple's value proposition.

Take a look at the copy. Apple states that it believes a phone "should be more than a collection of features" - yet this is precisely what a smartphone is. We could sit here and poke fun at Apple's lofty design aesthetic for days (the #freejonyive hashtag on Twitter, which jokes that Apple's lead designer has been trapped in a white room for several years, is a prime example), but it's a remarkably effective approach that has helped Apple remain at the forefront of a brutally competitive market for almost a decade.
Jony Ive (#freejonyive)
Apple knows how crowded and competitive the smart device market is, so rather than focus on a specific feature - virtually none of which are unique to the iPhone or iOS - the company instead opts to focus on the experience of using an iPhone. Most companies couldn't pull off using words such as "magical" to describe using a smartphone, but Apple can.

Of course, Apple doesn't just sit on its proverbial laurels and rely on aspirational messaging to sell you on its value proposition. The official iPhone site also touches on several of the genuinely unique features of iPhone and iOS to make its case, including security:

Apple iPhone value proposition, focusing on security

Not only is this a very clever move on Apple's part (especially in the wake of the disastrous FBI San Bernardino iPhone unlocking lawsuit), but the copy matches the rest of Apple's messaging perfectly and manages to simplify an incredibly complex topic - encryption - into easily understandable language that most users can grasp and feel good about.

Apple understands that even focusing on the unique features of iPhone wouldn't be enough to distinguish the device in such a crowded market. By emphasizing the overall experience of using the device, however, Apple's value proposition is as unique as its approach to product design and aesthetics.

You can find more great Apple marketing campaigns in our epic product marketing examples post.

3. Unbounce - A/B Testing Without Tech Headaches

Moving away from the world of consumer-facing electronics and apps and veering into B2B territory, our fifth value proposition example comes from our friends at landing page optimization platform Unbounce.
Unbounce's value proposition, offering ease of use
As you might expect from a company specializing in conversion rate optimization, Unbounce's value proposition is abundantly clear from the moment you arrive on the homepage, namely the ability to build, publish, and test landing pages without any I.T. support. For many small businesses (and even larger companies), the perceived technical overhead of A/B testing is a major barrier to entry, making Unbounce's value proposition particularly appealing.

This homepage also boasts a number of other features that make the overall experience very compelling, such as a strong, unmissable CTA, and a simple three-step visual representation of how Unbounce's solution works. The copy also clearly states that Unbounce is primarily aimed at marketers (a clear indication of understanding and appealing to a highly specific target audience), as well as the fact that users can create mobile-responsive landing pages, which itself addresses a very specific need or concern for some marketers.

Great stuff all around.

4. Slack - Be More Productive at Work with Less Effort

The world seems to be divided into two types of people; those who love Slack, and those who haven't tried it yet. For the uninitiated, Slack is a workplace productivity and messaging app. It's deceptively simple to use, yet robust enough for large teams working on complex projects (as evidenced by Slack's very clever inclusion of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab example on the homepage), so what sets Slack apart from the thousands of other messaging and productivity apps?
Slack's value proposition, focusing on credibility and productivity
Essentially, Slack distills its value proposition in the example above - it makes users' "working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive." The NASA JPL example is also very clever in that it subtly implies that if it's good enough for large teams of scientists at NASA - the kind of people who put robots on other planets - then it's good enough for anyone.

However, while this might seem like the value prop of virtually every productivity app on the market, Slack has several advantages that support its core value prop of making collaboration simpler.

For one, few (if any) other productivity apps boast as many integrations as Slack does. This means that its almost guaranteed to fit into just about any company's existing communications workflow. It's this diversity of supported apps that has helped Slack almost singlehandedly dominate the workplace productivity space.
"Slack: All your tools in one place."
Simplicity is also a core theme at the heart of Slack's value proposition. After all, it's hard to get more done if the app that promises to help you do that is a pain in the ass to use. The premise of "find anything, anywhere, anytime, from any device" is another selling point Slack users routinely evangelize about, and for good reason.
"Slack: Search your entire archive."
I won't dissect every aspect of Slack, but suffice to say that the messaging and positioning of Slack essentially addresses every common pain point you can think of about collaborating with others at work, then simplifies it in an almost irresistible way. To newcomers, it may even seem too good to be true, which is arguably why Slack has become so insanely popular (and helped the company achieve a breathtaking $3.8 billion valuation). Reading over Slack's website, you can almost feel the sighs of relief that Slack promises.

Slack's mantra of "Be Less Busy" isn't just a catchy slogan - it's the company's value proposition neatly summarized into three beautifully simple words.

5. Digit - Save Money Without Thinking About It

The world of personal finance is another ruthlessly competitive space, and there are tens of thousands of apps designed to help people manage their money more effectively. However, few have as good a value proposition as Digit, a relatively new service that helps users "save money, without thinking about it."
Digit's value proposition, offering hands-off savings
Digit allows users to securely connect their bank accounts to the Digit service, which then algorithmically examines users' spending habits and regular expenses. It then begins to "optimize" users' accounts to squirrel a little money away here and there into an FDIC-guaranteed savings account, from which users can withdraw their savings at any time.

The key differentiator of Digit from other savings apps is that the process is entirely automated. Users literally don't have to do a thing for Digit to start putting money into a saving account; a few bucks here, a few bucks there, and before you know it, you've got a decent amount put away for a rainy day, all the while maintaining sufficient funds for regular outgoing expenses to be taken care of. It's actually kind of amazing.

Saving can be a major financial hurdle for many people, especially those on reduced or limited incomes. By automating the entire process, Digit offers users a completely hands-off solution to saving. It's not for everyone - but then again, no product, service, or app is - but it is unique, and its value proposition makes this clear.

6. LessAccounting - Bookkeeping, Without the Hassle

For most people (read: people who aren't CPAs or accounting professionals), bookkeeping is a pain in the ass. It's confusing, time-consuming, and generally an utterly miserable experience, even if your business' books are relatively simple ( more emotional words and phrases here). That's what makes LessAccounting's value proposition so compelling.
LessAccounting's value proposition, offering improved quality of life
LessAccounting's entire premise is built upon simplifying accounting and bookkeeping, and its value proposition is reinforced throughout the site. The homepage's tagline - "Make your life easier with our accounting software" - makes this immediately apparent, and as you navigate through the site, you're constantly reminded of the product's value proposition, namely that no other bookkeeping software makes accounting as simple and painless as LessAccounting.

Although LessAccounting is available for larger businesses, it's primarily aimed at small operations such as freelancers and small-business owners, and its messaging reflects this at every stage of the funnel. From blog posts that answer questions that newcomers to accounting are likely to have, to case studies featuring small-business owners praising the product's simplicity and ease of use, every aspect of LessAccounting's messaging focuses on how much easier and simpler your life will be by using LessAccounting.

7. CrazyEgg - Website Behavior Tracking at an Unbeatable Price

Figuring out precisely how people are using your website is a major challenge for many businesses. You might think you have a good idea about your users' behavior, but without hard, actionable data, you can't know for certain. That's where CrazyEgg comes in.
"CrazyEgg: Want to make your site better?"
CrazyEgg is an analytical tool that allows users to view heatmaps of how people are actually interacting with a website. Users can see cursor movements, scroll depth, and all sorts of other cool behavioral tracking features that let them really understand how people are interacting with their website.

However, CrazyEgg is far from the only player in the behavioral tracking space - so what's the value proposition? That no other service provides more functionality and insight for a better price, with as little hassle, as CrazyEgg does.
"CrazyEgg: Like a pair of x-ray glasses"
The smart folks at CrazyEgg realize that not everyone who visits their site will be familiar with the concept of heatmaps or behavioral tracking, so they provide visitors with a friendly, accessible overview of CrazyEgg's features to simplify what the product does. If you scroll beyond this overview, you get to the real meat of CrazyEgg's value proposition:
CrazyEgg's value proposition, answering intuitive FAQ's with active diction
The site lists all the things users can do with CrazyEgg, cleverly using active verbs to show visitors how much better their lives will be by using it. This list tempts would-be users with the prospects of making their budgets go farther, advocating for site changes using actionable data, making testing and analytics easier and more efficient, as well as the promise of more conversions and heightened engagement.

It then goes on to highlight the ease of use with which CrazyEgg can be implemented, emphasizing the fact that there is virtually zero technical overhead for using the product, before stating another core aspect of its value proposition, namely that it's the most fully featured product of its type in its price range.

When you consider the overall flow of this page, it's very clever indeed. It uses simple, accessible language and poses a question designed to pique users' interest, before providing a clear overview of what you can do with it, and then seals the deal by highlighting the central elements of the value proposition.

Nailing your own value prop

Hopefully these value proposition examples have given you some ideas of how you can improve or clarify your business' value proposition. You don't need an immense marketing or design budget to put what makes your business the best front-and-center in your messaging - just a little focus and a moment or two to consider your site from the perspective of your users.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
7 of the Best Value Proposition Examples We've Ever Seen

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Your value proposition is arguably the most important element of your overall marketing messaging. Check out seven of the best unique value proposition examples we've ever seen.

# data[].attributes.body
To: | Agent and Field Management
From: | Mark Madgett, EVP and Head of Agency, and Michael Lackey, VP, Field Development
Week of Date: | 03/01/2021
MDRT Code: |

Summary:We are excited to announce a major step forward in our agent development efforts designed to provide agents – both New Org and Established – with a clearly defined and better supported path to specialization. Over the next 18 months, we will be introducing five Practice Model development tracks created in partnership with The American College: Financial Guidance, Retirement Planning, Wealth Advisory, Business Solutions and Estate Planning. New York Life will cover 100% of the tuition for course work at The American College that agents and field leaders complete as part of these development tracks. The Financial Guidance Practice Model debuts March 1.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Location: Los Angeles, CA, US

A career at New York Life offers many opportunities. To be part of a growing and successful business. To reach your full potential, whatever your specialty. Above all, to make a difference in the world by helping people achieve financial security. It's a career journey you can be proud of, and you'll find plenty of support along the way. Our development programs range from skill-building to management training, and we value our diverse and inclusive workplace where all voices can be heard. Recognized as one of Fortune's World's Most Admired Companies, New York Life is committed to improving local communities through a culture of employee giving and service, supported by our Foundation. It all adds up to a rewarding career at a company where doing right by our customers is part of who we are, as a mutual company without outside shareholders. We invite you to bring your talents to New York Life, so we can continue to help families and businesses "Be Good At Life." To learn more, please visit LinkedIn, our Newsroom and the Careers page of www.NewYorkLife.com.

Reporting to a Managing Underwriter, the Senior Associate Underwriter is responsible for evaluating life insurance applications and determining whether applications should be approved, declined or if additional information is required. Senior Associate Underwriters are authorized to issue or decline all cases with 2-Year Total Amount at Risk of $2,500,000 or less. Senior Associate Underwriters are primarily responsible for reviewing cases with an Attending Physician Statement and are responsible for managing relationships with Agents and service personnel at their designated General Office.

Senior Associate Underwriters predominantly rely on Underwriting Guidelines to evaluate an applicants risk classification; however, due to the complexity associated with multiple conditions or the diversity of conditions identified within an Attending Physician Statement, Associate Underwriters are frequently required to make assessments of applicant risk absent specific direction from the Underwriting Guidelines. Whether synthesizing the mortality risk of medical labs and family history or discounting the mortality risks of highly correlated factors such as motor vehicle reports and avocations, Underwriting Senior Associates are expected to evaluate an applicant's overall risk profile, not simply summing the total from individual risk factors. Medical Directors and Managing Underwriters are available for consult as necessary; but Senior Associate Underwriters are expected to make a decision recommendation, not open-ended requests for insight.

As the majority of applications reviewed by this role include Attending Physician Statements, a Senior Associate Underwriter must have a working knowledge of medical terminology and awareness of how various medical impairments interact and effect individual mortality risk. Senior Associate Underwriters also work closely with General Office personnel and may, at times, speak directly with agents. Consequently, Senior Associate Underwriters must have strong communication and customer service skills.

Accurately and efficiently classify the mortality risk for proposed insureds as above average (Preferred/Select Preferred), average (Standard), or below average (varying Substandard risks and Decline) based on both medical and nonmedical information on cases with 2-Year TAAR (Total Amount At Risk-Dollar amount requiring underwriting) of $2.5 million or less generally including an Attending Physician Statement. The increased amount of risk to the company and the complexity associated with the potential financial requirements needed as well as the increased medical knowledge and understanding needed to accurately assess an Attending Physician Statement require a broader knowledge base and experience level from the underwriter.

If you have difficulty using or interacting with any portions of this Web site due to incompatibility with an Assistive Technology, if you need the information in an alternative format, or if you have suggestions on how we can make this site more accessible, please contact us at: (212) 576-5811.

Job Segment: Underwriter, Social Media, Insurance, Marketing Nearest Major Market: Los Angeles

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Location: Los Angeles, CA, US A career at New York Life offers many opportunities. To be part of a growing and successful business. To reach your full potential, whatever your specialty. Above all, to make a difference in the world by helping people achieve financial security.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A career at New York Life offers many opportunities. To be part of a growing and successful business. To reach your full potential, whatever your specialty. Above all, to make a difference in the world by helping people achieve financial security. It's a career journey you can be proud of, and you'll find plenty of support along the way. Our development programs range from skill-building to management training, and we value our diverse and inclusive workplace where all voices can be heard. Recognized as one of Fortune's World's Most Admired Companies, New York Life is committed to improving local communities through a culture of employee giving and service, supported by our Foundation. It all adds up to a rewarding career at a company where doing right by our customers is part of who we are, as a mutual company without outside shareholders. We invite you to bring your talents to New York Life, so we can continue to help families and businesses "Be Good At Life." To learn more, please visit LinkedIn, our Newsroom and the Careers page of www.NewYorkLife.com.

Develops and implements Group Insurance (Life, Accident, Disability, Absence Management, Accidental Injury, Critical Illness, etc.) sales strategies for targeted brokers in a territory, or a specified geographic area. Primarily focuses on seeking out new clients.

Obtain new accounts by leveraging Broker relationships

Meet or exceed annual business plan as measured by new business premium and case count

Maintain prescribed monthly activity levels including broker calls and quote activity

Manage the sales process for Life, Accident, Disability, Absence Management, Accidental Injury, Critical Illness

2+ years of relevant experience

Highly motivated with excellent organizational skills

Self-starter with ability to work independently or as a team to achieve goals and objectives

Excellent presentation skills, verbal and written communication skills

60% travel required (predominantly around the "metro" area-mostly "day" trips with occasional out of town/out of region travel)

Ability to obtain necessary licenses within 60 days

Acceptable driving record

If you have difficulty using or interacting with any portions of this Web site due to incompatibility with an Assistive Technology, if you need the information in an alternative format, or if you have suggestions on how we can make this site more accessible, please contact us at: (212) 576-5811.

Job Segment: Social Media, Outside Sales, Sales Rep, Sales, Marketing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
remote senior associate -  sales representative

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Senior Associate - Sales Representative, Walnut Creek, CA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A career at New York Life offers many opportunities. To be part of a growing and successful business. To reach your full potential, whatever your specialty. Above all, to make a difference in the world by helping people achieve financial security. It's a career journey you can be proud of, and you'll find plenty of support along the way.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
administrative and office management jobs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Apply online for jobs at New York Life Insurance - Actuarial Jobs, Administrative Jobs, Office Management Jobs, Technology Jobs, Sales Jobs, Marketing Jobs, Product Management Jobs, Management Jobs, Investment Jobs, Finance Jobs, Accounting Jobs, and more

# data[].attributes.headline
A Parent's Guide to Buying Life Insurance for Your College Student

# data[].attributes.subject
A Parent's Guide to Buying Life Insurance for Your College Student

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thinking about life insurance means planning for the inevitable. While it makes sense to purchase life insurance as an adult, it rarely makes sense to buy life insurance for children, so thinking about that particular worst-case scenario is usually avoidable.

The big exception: If you have a college-aged child and cosigned a private student loan with them, you need to consider buying them a life insurance policy. Otherwise, if your child dies, you'll be stuck paying off the loans. A life insurance policy can help make an unimaginably difficult situation better and mitigate added financial stress.

If you cosigned a private student loan with your child, you should consider life insurance so you are financially protected if something unexpected happens to them

Most federal student loans, with the exception of Parent PLUS loans, are discharged upon the death of the borrower

When shopping for life insurance, consider other debts you share with your child - such as credit cards, mortgages or car loans

Who should buy life insurance for their college student

Just because your child has student loan debt doesn't mean you automatically need to buy life insurance for them. If you're not a cosigner, then you don't need to worry about that.

But if you have cosigned loans with them, it's important to understand the two types of college loans:

Federal student loans are issued and guaranteed by the Department of Education, rarely require cosigners, and are discharged upon the death of the borrower. One type of federal loan that may result in needing coverage is the Parent PLUS loans. These loans are also discharged if either you or your child die, but the canceled debt will be treated as taxable income, which can mean a big tax bill.

Private or nonfederal student loans are issued by banks, credit unions, and other lenders. These loans are not guaranteed by the government and are not automatically discharged if a cosigner dies. If you cosigned a private loan and your child dies before the balance is paid off, you could be on the hook for the remaining balance. Some lenders even go into "automatic default" after the death of a cosigner, which means the loan's balance would be due immediately.

(Automatic default can also be triggered if you die before the loan is paid off; ask your lender about repayment terms and consider purchasing additional life insurance for yourself to allow for this possibility.)

According to the most recent study published in 2019 by the Institute for College Access and Success, 69% of college students from four-year universities graduate with an average of $29,650 in student loans. The student debt level among graduating seniors has increased by at least 1% each year since 1996 (and it doesn't look like it will be going down anytime soon). Of those loans, about 14% were private loans.

If you've cosigned a private student loan or have a Parent PLUS loan

You need life insurance if you and your child cosigned a private loan together or if you've taken out a Parent PLUS loan and are worried about a possible tax bill. Thinking about it isn't fun, but doing it now can save you from dealing with massive debt on top of massive grief, should the worst happen.

How to buy life insurance for your college student

Don't wait until graduation - if you've cosigned a private loan to fund your college-aged child's education, you should look into life insurance as soon as the loan papers are signed.

Researching life insurance for someone else - especially your child - can feel really weird. But as long as you can prove insurable interest, you've got a legitimate reason to take out a life insurance policy on someone else, and a cosigned loan qualifies as insurable interest.

You can't do it in secret, though: you need your child's permission and participation to take out the policy. One small silver lining: buying a life insurance policy for your college student gives you an opportunity to demonstrate good financial planning and talk about the importance of planning for the worst.

Buying a life insurance policy for your college student involves the same steps as buying a life insurance policy for yourself, with a few variations:

1. Determine your coverage needs

2. Comparison shop and get quotes

3. Choose an insurance company and submit an application (you'll need your child's assistance for this, as there will be health and hobby questions for them to answer)

4. Provide proof of insurable interest (your cosigned loan counts)

5. Arrange for your child to undergo a free insurance medical exam

6. Wait for underwriting approval

7. Sign your policy, set up automatic payment for your premiums

Calculating your college student's life insurance need

When considering buying a life insurance policy to cover cosigned student loan debts, you just need to ask two questions:

1. What is the loan balance plus interest?

2. How long will it take to pay off?

While federal loans have set interest rates, private loans have the choice between fixed or variable interest rates, so they can potentially be much higher. For variable-rate private student loans, the interest rate often starts around 4.5% to 4.9%, but it can increase to as high as 11% to 12.5%. Fixed-rate private student loans typically have interest rates between 6% and 13.5%.

So, for example, if your interest rate for a private student loan is 7.99%, a $13,600 loan with a term length of 10 years will end up costing nearly $19,800 with interest. It's worth accounting for the full amount when you shop for coverage.

Your policy should cover the full amount of the loan plus interest and should last as long as the loan will still have a balance.

What is the cost of life insurance for your college student?

The cost of a life insurance policy for your college student is dependent on several factors, including:

Though ballooning student loan debt is leading to an increase in policies that cover cosigners, life insurance policies under $50,000 are still relatively rare (though special short-term policies do exist to help older people cover end-of-life expenses). You may have to call an insurance agent or broker to get an accurate quote for your situation.

Based on policies offered by Policygenius in 2020, a healthy 19-year-old male with no family history of disease can get a 20-year $25,000 policy for just $8 to $10 a month. Those premiums are a small price to pay for security.

How to choose a life insurance company for your college student

There are two main kinds of life insurance: whole life and term life. Whole life is a type of permanent life insurance that has a cash value and never expires - it also costs five to 15 times as much as term life insurance. Term life insurance is more straightforward: you purchase a policy for a set term, and if the policyholder dies during that term, the beneficiary receives a death benefit.

Term life is the right kind of life insurance for most people, and it's the kind of policy you'll want to buy to cover a debt like student loans.

So, we recommend starting your search with insurance companies that offer term life insurance.

Other factors to consider:

Is the company a good match for your child's health? Some carriers offer better rates than others for certain health histories - for example, one carrier might be more competitive if your child has diabetes; another might be more favorable to a history of depression.

What types of policies or riders do they offer? You already know you want term life insurance, but there are other policy features you may be considering, like an accelerated death benefit or a return of premium policy. If so, it's important to choose a carrier that offers those features!

What can you do electronically? Some life insurance companies are still living in a paper and fax machine world (really). If it's important to you to deal with your policy online, go with a more web-savvy carrier.

Is the company highly rated? Life insurance companies are regulated and rated. The [best life insurance companies( https://www.policygenius.com/life-insurance/best-life-insurance-companies/) are financially stable and rated highly by both financial and consumer protection agencies.

Other reasons to buy life insurance for your college student

Many families support their college-age kids in other ways that could also make them vulnerable. These include:

Mortgages

If you've cosigned a mortgage with your child, the home itself has value, and selling it or even giving it back to the bank could eliminate the debt. However, if you don't have your own savings or enough cash to make mortgage payments until you can sell the house - or if you and your child live in the home you've purchased together - it might make sense to buy a life insurance policy for your child to cover the remainder of the mortgage should they die.

Another consideration: if you're on the mortgage and you give the house back to the bank, your credit can take a massive hit. A 30-year policy life insurance term policy lines up with a 30-year mortgage and may make sense for you.

Car loans

If you've cosigned a car loan with your child and they die before the loan is paid off, then you as a cosigner can be on the hook for the balance of the loan. Giving the car back is an option, but it will count as a loan you didn't pay off and can hurt your credit. It generally takes three to six years to pay off the average car loan; it may be worth taking out a 10-year term policy to cover it.

Credit cards

Many parents cosign for their adult children's first credit cards, which can mean they're joint cardholders on their account and responsible for the bill. While initial credit limits are generally low, if for some reason your child has a large balance on a cosigned credit card, it may be worth considering a term life insurance policy.

The bottom line

You won't find "buying life insurance" on a college dorm checklist or course syllabus, but it should be top of mind if you've cosigned certain types of student loans with your child. Private student loans and Parent PLUS loans mean you could be stuck with major debt if the unthinkable happens while they are in school.

If your child has a loan that you did not cosign, or if they have a federal student loan other than Parent PLUS, you don't need to worry about buying life insurance because their loans would be discharged upon death. If, however, you share other types of debt (like a mortgage or car loan) with your child, you should still consider life insurance for them.

A term life insurance policy that covers both the balance (plus interest) and the duration of the loan is what you should look for when shopping for a policy for your child.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Parent's Guide to Buying Life Insurance for Your College Student

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Thinking about life insurance means planning for the inevitable. While it makes sense to purchase life insurance as an adult, it rarely makes sense to buy life insurance for children, so thinking about that particular worst-case scenario is usually avoidable.

# data[].attributes.headline
Does Your College Student Need Life Insurance? - Nationwide

# data[].attributes.subject
Does Your College Student Need Life Insurance? - Nationwide

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
College students are usually focused on getting to class, maintaining good grades and graduating on time. Student life insurance policies are an issue that they're unlikely to contemplate.

But there are some circumstances when a college student should weigh buying life insurance. It can provide an extra layer of financial protection for a surviving family. Consider the situations below.

1. Student loans

Many college students pay at least part of their education with student loans. For federal student loans, the amount owed is canceled in the event the student dies before paying off the debt. That doesn't happen with private student loans, which are more like traditional loans and still must be paid off. These types of loans also typically require a co-signer, who becomes liable for paying off the loan if the student dies.

In some cases, the loan's repayment schedule is accelerated after a death or can even require immediate repayment in full. This may put the co-signer in a serious financial bind as they struggle to pay off the loan or damage their finances and credit rating in the process. A student life insurance policy will pay off the remainder of the loan in the event of a student's death and protect the co-signer financially.

2. Covering dependents

It may not be the norm, but it's certainly not uncommon for an undergraduate to get married or have children while in school. There are also many cases of older, married students who have delayed the start of their education or are returning to college after time off.

Here, too, life insurance offers financial protection to a spouse and dependents by paying off student loans and other debts as well as funeral expenses if the student dies. Depending on the policy, it can also provide financial support for the student's children.

3. Protecting parents

Student loans aren't the only way to pay for a college education. Parents of students can finance their child's education through various methods, including home equity credit and 401(k) loans. If the student dies prematurely, these debts still need to be paid off, which can take a heavy financial toll on a family. A term life insurance policy on the total amount of their expected college debt will help cover these expenses.

College is expensive. To cover family members in the event of a student's untimely death, a life insurance policy provides financial protection from unpaid loans and other debts. Explore our affordable life insurance for students today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Does Your College Student Need Life Insurance? - Nationwide

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
College students are usually focused on getting to class, maintaining good grades and graduating on time. Student life insurance policies are an issue that they're unlikely to contemplate. But there are some circumstances when a college student should weigh buying life insurance. It can provide an extra layer of financial protection for a surviving family.

# data[].attributes.headline
best life insurance for college students - Google Search

# data[].attributes.subject
best life insurance for college students - Google Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
best life insurance for college students - Google Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Do You NEED Life Insurance? · · Types Of Life Insurance

# data[].attributes.headline
College Life Insurance of America Company Profile | Kansas City, MO | Competitors, Financials & Contacts - Dun & Bradstreet

# data[].attributes.subject
College Life Insurance of America Company Profile | Kansas City, MO | Competitors, Financials & Contacts - Dun & Bradstreet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Low Deductibles

Attractive Pricing

Worldwide Coverage

Policy Features & Benefits

We offer a comprehensive Personal Property Insurance Plan available to college/university students, faculty and staff for the protection of personal and university property. Our plan protects against theft and accidental damage to electronic devices & personal property that may occur while at school, home or when studying abroad.

Should I Add Liability Coverage?

Personal Liability is available as an add-on to those who want it.

ID Theft Expense

ID Theft Expense coverage comes free with student property policies.

Fast & Friendly Claim Processing

Filing a claim is quick and easy with our 24/7 online claims service available from a mobile device or computer. Our dedicated in-house Gallagher claims team is also available by phone during normal business hours.
Hear what our customers are saying.
How We Compare to Homeowners or Renters Policies

Want to Know More? Let's Talk.

If you have any questions regarding insurance policies or claims, we're just a phone call or email away.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Low Deductibles Attractive Pricing Worldwide Coverage We offer a comprehensive Personal Property Insurance Plan available to college/university students, faculty and staff for the protection of personal and university property. Our plan protects against theft and accidental damage to electronic devices & personal property that may occur while at school, home or when studying abroad.

# data[].attributes.headline
Continuing Education and CPE Course Catalog | WebCE

# data[].attributes.subject
Continuing Education and CPE Course Catalog | WebCE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Continuing Education and CPE Course Catalog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Online continuing education and CPE course catalog for insurance professionals, CFP, CPA, Enrolled Agents, and Tax Preparers.

# data[].attributes.headline
Save on Continuing Education for Your License Renewal! - maolaoshihao@gmail.com - Gmail

# data[].attributes.subject
Save on Continuing Education for Your License Renewal! - maolaoshihao@gmail.com - Gmail

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Gmail is email that's intuitive, efficient, and useful. 15 GB of storage, less spam, and mobile access.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Marketers see today's consumers as web-savvy, mobile-enabled data sifters who pounce on whichever brand or store offers the best deal. Brand loyalty, the thinking goes, is vanishing. In response, companies have ramped up their messaging, expecting that the more interaction and information they provide, the better the chances of holding on to these increasingly distracted and disloyal customers. But for many consumers, the rising volume of marketing messages isn't empowering-it's overwhelming. Rather than pulling customers into the fold, marketers are pushing them away with relentless and ill-conceived efforts to engage.

Learn how simple-or complex-the decision journey is for your customers with an audit found at
www.executiveboard.com/simplicity
.

That's a key finding of Corporate Executive Board's multiple surveys of more than 7,000 consumers and interviews with hundreds of marketing executives and other experts around the world (for more detail, see the sidebar "About the Research"). Our study bored in on what makes consumers "sticky"-that is, likely to follow through on an intended purchase, buy the product repeatedly, and recommend it to others. We looked at the impact on stickiness of more than 40 variables, including price, customers' perceptions of a brand, and how often consumers interacted with the brand. The single biggest driver of stickiness, by far, was "decision simplicity"-the ease with which consumers can gather trustworthy information about a product and confidently and efficiently weigh their purchase options. What consumers want from marketers is, simply, simplicity.

Over a three-month period, Corporate Executive Board conducted pre- and postpurchase surveys of more than 7,000 consumers in the U.S., the UK, and Australia, covering a wide range of ages, income levels, and ethnicities.

Respondents were asked dozens of questions about their attitudes and purchase experiences across a variety of price points and channels in categories including apparel, cars, luxury goods, onetime items (such as airline tickets), and ongoing services (such as cell phone service).

Questions explored shopping duration, effort required, purchase-related research, the consumer's state of mind, his relationship with the brand, the frequency of his interactions with the brand, and the likelihood of repurchasing and recommending.

In addition, we interviewed 200 CMOs, brand managers, and other marketing executives representing 125 consumer brands in 12 industries globally, asking about their strategies and beliefs concerning drivers of stickiness.

Consider the marketing activities of two digital camera brands. Brand A's search engine strategy is to pick up any consumers who are searching common digital camera terms and direct them to the company website. There they find extensive technical and feature information and 360-degree rotatable product photos, all organized and sortable by model. In stores, shelf labels list key technical attributes, such as megapixel rating and memory, and provide a QR code that takes consumers to a mobile version of the brand's website, where they can dig more deeply into product specifications.

Brand B's search engine strategy is to first understand the consumer's intent and where in the search process she is likely to be. Why does she want a camera? Is she just starting to look, or is she ready to buy? The company guides those in the early stages of investigation to third-party review sites (where its cameras get good marks) and directs consumers who are actively shopping to its own website. User reviews and ratings are front and center there, and a navigation tool lets consumers quickly find reviews that are relevant to their intended use of the camera (family and vacation photography, nature photography, sports photography, and so on). In stores, Brand B frames technical features in nontechnical terms. Instead of emphasizing megapixels and memory, for example, it says how many high-resolution photos fit on its memory card. The QR code on shelf displays leads to a simple app that simulates one of the camera's key differentiators, a photo-editing feature.

The highly detailed information Brand A provides at every step on the purchase path may instruct the consumer about a given camera's capabilities, but it does little to facilitate an easy decision. Brand B simplifies decision making by offering trustworthy information tailored to the consumer's individual needs, thus helping her traverse the purchase path quickly and confidently. Our research shows that customers considering both brands are likely to be dramatically more "sticky" toward Brand B.

Making Decisions Simple

For a marketing organization, what does it take to acquire sticky consumers?

Our study found that the best tool for measuring consumer-engagement efforts is the "decision simplicity index," a gauge of how easy it is for consumers to gather and understand (or navigate) information about a brand, how much they can trust the information they find, and how readily they can weigh their options. The easier a brand makes the purchase-decision journey, the higher its decision-simplicity score. Brands that scored in the top quarter in our study were 86% more likely than those in the bottom quarter to be purchased by the consumers considering them. They were 9% more likely to be repurchased and 115% more likely to be recommended to others.

Shifting the orientation toward decision simplicity and helping consumers confidently complete the purchase journey is a profound change, one that typically requires marketers to flex new muscles and rethink how they craft their communications. Some practical lessons can be drawn from brands that are leading the way. The processes of aiding navigation, building trust, and making it easier to weigh options often happen simultaneously, or at least aren't strictly linear, but for clarity we'll discuss them separately below.

Businesses broadly misjudge what consumers want from them online. In particular, marketers often believe that consumers interact with them on social media to join a community and feel connected to the brand. But consumers have little interest in having a relationship beyond the merely transactional.

Their top reasons for connecting online: to get information and discounts, and to buy things.

Aiding navigation.

In demanding ever more attention from overloaded consumers, brands ultimately lead them down unnecessarily confusing purchase paths. Creating a more efficient path means minimizing the number of information sources consumers must touch while moving confidently toward a purchase. The savviest brands achieve this by personalizing the route.

This approach is especially foreign to marketers because in many cases the simplest, most confidence-inspiring learning path involves touchpoints that are outside a brand's direct control. Often what a consumer needs is not a flashy interactive experience on a branded microsite but a detailed exchange with users about the pros and cons of the product and how it would fit into the consumer's life.

Marketers face two practical challenges here. First, how can they detect where a given consumer is on the purchase path and what information she most needs? Second, how can they ensure that consumers they direct to third-party information sources will come back?

To answer the first question, frontier marketers are using big data and sophisticated analytics to map consumers' purchase paths. One electronics company has gathered data from four major sources-social media monitoring, ad-effectiveness and campaign-tracking information, clickstream analysis, and individual consumer surveys-to identify common purchase paths. It studies the resulting maps to determine the volume of traffic on various paths, which paths inspire the most confidence, which touchpoints are best suited to conveying which types of messages, and at what points consumers lose confidence or defect.

Over the past two decades, a wide range of experiments have shed light on how an excess of information and choice impairs decision making.

One of the most common consumer responses to the excess is to forgo a purchase altogether. In a classic experiment, Sheena Iyengar, then a doctoral student and now a professor at Columbia Business School, set out pots of jam on supermarket tables in groups of either six or 24. About 30% of those who were given six choices bought some jam; only 3% of those confronted with 24 choices did. As the psychologist Barry Schwartz demonstrates in The Paradox of Choice, an excess of input leads to angst, indecision, regret, and ultimately lowered satisfaction with both the purchase process and the products themselves. Dozens of related lines of research confirm what now seems like common sense: Too much choice or too much information can be paralyzing.

Consumers themselves say they're overwhelmed. A 2004 survey conducted by the market research firm Yankelovich found that two-thirds of respondents felt "constantly bombarded with too much marketing and advertising." (And it's safe to say that eight years later, the bombardment has only increased.) The implication for marketers is clear: Aggressive engagement that overloads consumers' already-saturated brains may backfire. But the hundreds of marketing executives we interviewed told us that their engagement strategies were designed expressly to achieve more-frequent interaction and deepened relationships.

Compounding the overload problem is the human penchant for overthinking trivial decisions and second-guessing. The explosion of messages and product data feeds this tendency, one consequence of which is a "spiral of discontent." Research by the University of Florida's Aner Sela and Wharton's Jonah Berger shows that the more challenging a decision is to make, the more important people imagine it to be. Think about consumers trying to choose among an array of poorly differentiated products, such as digital cameras: The difficulty of wading through the choices increases the perceived importance of the decision. This in turn causes people to spend even more time and effort on the decision, which further increases its apparent importance. A trivial purchase decision can thus spiral into a disproportionately complicated and time-consuming one-and the process creates consumers who are less happy, not more. Indeed, 41% of those we surveyed expressed anxiety about the purchases they'd made, and 20% conducted research after the purchase, still looking to validate their decisions.

Brands pursuing decision-simplicity strategies make full use of such information to assess where consumers are on the path and to direct them to the best touchpoints. Certain auto manufacturers, retailers, and travel brands have been sifting through consumer search data to learn how search terms and the type of search platform (say, mobile versus desktop) indicate consumer intent and position on the path. They've found, for example, that 70% of those using a mobile device to search are within a few hours of making a purchase, whereas 70% of those using a desktop are roughly a week away.

Moreover, by analyzing search terms, companies can discern what information the consumer most needs next. Someone who searches a general term like "luxury sedans" is at an early stage compared with someone who searches a specific phrase like "BMW vs Audi." Decision-simplicity marketers would guide the former to the latest auto reviews for their sedans and the latter to an enthusiastic owner community. If the late-phase consumer was using a mobile device (indicating that he was probably out and about), the search engine would serve up a paid link to a dealer locator with a click-to-call feature that enabled him to easily set up a test drive.

Building trust.

In the context of decision simplicity, "trust" isn't about trusting the brand; it's about trusting the information gathered. Marketers often miss this point and put their efforts into activating brand recommenders who simply focus on product features and benefits. Consumers also need information about an adviser's decision criteria and brand usage.

What does trusted advice look like? Consider the current "haul video" phenomenon among teenage girls. After shopping at a mall, many girls upload YouTube videos of themselves talking about their haul (purchases). In the videos, they discuss not just what they bought but also why, and how they plan to mix their new items with the rest of their wardrobe. This takes the complicated world of teen clothing and accessories-a world fraught with danger from shifting trends and overwhelming choice-and simplifies it, by showcasing fashionable peers who offer trustworthy guidance. In essence, the "hauler" cuts through the seemingly infinite options and provides decision-making criteria. J.C. Penney and American Eagle have capitalized on the phenomenon by hosting unbiased haulers on their sites and in their digital communications. Neither retailer requires that the haulers show only brands purchased at its store, and the haulers are transparent about their links to the companies (Penney, for instance, gives its star haulers gift cards).

Information about the adviser also helps build trust. Disney has done an outstanding job in this regard with its Walt Disney World Moms Panel. A selected group of Disney World veteran moms answer questions from consumers who are planning Disney vacations. In one recent case, a consumer asked about good viewing places for the parade; she had two children who wouldn't be able to stand the whole time. She got perfectly tailored advice from Jackie S. With 25 Disney World trips under her belt, Jackie has the experience to make her information credible. Consumers can get a further sense of her reliability by reviewing her profile on the Disney World website and reading about her family, her hometown, and even how she met her husband. Such details matter: They help consumers assess the trustworthiness of the advice they're getting and allow them to judge how well that advice applies to their own situations.

The lesson for marketers: Build cadres of trustworthy advisers rather than simply developing recommenders who will push the brand. Then aggregate their advice and make it easy for consumers to discover and use it, as J.C. Penney-whose haul videos get hundreds of thousands of views-so successfully does.

Making it easier to weigh options.

To help consumers evaluate choices, most brands describe their differentiating features and benefits. Some go a step further, offering buying guides containing side-by-side brand or product comparisons. For example, a bank might compile a catalog of its checking account options that lists the features of each one. Both approaches provide lots of information, but neither offers much guidance, leaving the consumer as confused as ever about the "best" choice.

Brands need to take a different tack. Except in cases of low-value products, consumers increasingly expend most of their effort learning about and weighing their choices. For items costing more than $50, a quarter of customers report that most of their effort is spent on product research. About 20% say that most of their effort is spent on comparison shopping.

The marketer's goal is to help customers feel confident about their choice. Just providing more information often doesn't help. Instead, marketers need to provide tools that allow customers to identify and weigh the features that are most relevant to them. A classic example is De Beers's use of the "4 Cs" (cut, color, clarity, and carat) to frame the complex and often vexing comparison of diamonds. The 4 Cs simplify the buying decision by giving consumers confidence that they are weighing the essential features of the diamonds they're considering and making an informed choice.

However, many brands have made the weighing process harder by introducing a dizzying array of SKUs. Crest's website, for example, details 35 types of toothpaste. Although a consumer can sort them according to a few characteristics-"flavor experience," "dentist inspired," "fresh breath," "classic"-there's little to help her figure out which features are most important to her and which paste is her best choice. Are "dentist-inspired" pastes better in her case than "classic" pastes? Buying guides of this sort make the mistake of appearing to offer guidance while actually complicating the decision process.

Marketers, especially those with an abundance of SKUs, need to help customers control the weighing process. Herbal Essences does a good job with an online decision guide to its shampoos. The guide provides substantial detail but also makes narrowing and tailoring one's choice an easy, transparent, step-by-step process. One-click questions about hair type, length, and texture (straight, short, fine, thick) and other needs (color treatment, volume) allow the visitor to rapidly sort through more than three dozen offerings to find the ideal one.

Technology can also address consumers' weighing woes by allowing them to sidestep the process altogether. Consumers are likely to feel confident about recommendations that are based on their own purchasing data or other past behavior, because those things are typically accurate gauges of preference. ShoeDazzle.com and JustFab.com-clubs for shoe lovers-collect "personality" information on each member, such as favorite fashion icons and general shoe preferences (heel size, color, and so on) and tailor suggestions accordingly. The Spanish bank BBVA makes personalized recommendations for financial products after assessing individual consumers' spending behavior-as reflected in credit card histories and questionnaires-and comparing that behavior with the spending of peers. In each case, the company eliminates much if not all of the hassle of weighing choices by providing a likely best choice at the outset.

Putting It Together

No company that we know of has fully integrated the three components of a decision-simplicity strategy-but Intuit is among those out in front. Consider its software product TurboTax. Tax prep is complex, and consumers have a range of options, from accountants to software programs to pencil and paper. Within software itself, there's a potentially bewildering array of choices. Intuit has made a concerted effort to simplify those choices by helping consumers navigate, trust, and weigh information along the path to purchase, as we'll describe below. Christine Morrison, the head of social media at TurboTax, says, "We've seen dozens of areas where simplifying decisions for consumers pays big dividends."

Navigation.

TurboTax created a customer forum, called TurboTax Live Community, where visitors can ask product, tax, and support questions and share information. It contains a database of answers provided by customers and experts. To ensure relevance, an algorithm serves up the five most common answers to a given question. For example, a user on the mortgage-deductions screen will find answers to questions about deduction limits and how to calculate deductions for the purchase of a house. TurboTax users don't pay for the software until they file their taxes; Live Community helps drive conversion by shepherding consumers through the tax-prep process to completion, providing the right information at the moment it's needed. To date more than 12 million users have engaged with the community.

Trust.

Intuit provides more than 160,000 unfiltered user reviews and ratings on the TurboTax website and helps consumers find the most relevant ones. The ratings range from one star to five; the inclusion of low ratings boosts consumers' confidence, showing them that Intuit isn't cherry-picking its reviews. Consumers can use the "folks like you" tool to sort evaluations according to reviewers' marital status, life situations, and major tax events. They can find reviews written by friends or family by connecting to Facebook or Twitter-TurboTax encourages customers to post on either site when they've completed their taxes, and the postings constitute what are in effect consumer-generated, highly trusted banner ads. The conversion rate of those ads is 30% higher than that of TurboTax's regular banner advertising.

Weighing options.

The TurboTax home page shows basic product choices arrayed side by side for easy comparison. It includes a "help me choose" function that allows consumers to go through a 30-second "check the boxes that apply" exercise. This not only guides them to the product most suited to them but also shows why that product is their best choice.

In addition, Intuit lets consumers filter user reviews by prior tax-prep method so that they can read what reviewers with similar tax-prep histories have said about switching to TurboTax. This helps them answer the question "What would it be like to change to TurboTax from what I use now?"

Given the rapid expansion of social and mobile technologies, marketers will have ever-increasing opportunities to bombard consumers. And if history is any guide, that's exactly what they'll do. But in their aggressive efforts to engage with their customers, they'll only make the decision journey more complex and confusing. Marketers who focus on simplifying consumers' decision making will rise above the din, and their customers will stick by them as a result.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Marketers see today's consumers as web-savvy, mobile-enabled data sifters who pounce on whichever brand or store offers the best deal. Brand loyalty, the thinking goes, is vanishing. In response, companies have ramped up their messaging, expecting that the more interaction and information they provide, the better the chances of holding on to these increasingly distracted and disloyal customers.

# data[].attributes.headline
5 Online Personal Finance Communities to Help You with Money

# data[].attributes.subject
5 Online Personal Finance Communities to Help You with Money

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Select's editorial team works independently to review financial products and write articles we think our readers will find useful. We may receive a commission when you click on links for products from our affiliate partners.
In moments of financial volatility, like the current economic downturn, it's natural to start thinking more carefully about how you manage your money. Where once you may have felt financially secure, now you could be having second thoughts about how you're planning for the future and saving money for unexpected events.

Whether you're just learning how to budget, starting to save for an emergency fund or trying to make a plan to pay down your debt, sometimes it's helpful to get support so you can meet your goals. Luckily, there are free online platforms and communities designed for people in every kind of financial situation. These groups and pages can be easily found, followed and/or joined via social media platforms and on the web.

To help you get started, CNBC Select rounded up five free online communities where you can connect with others who are facing similar challenges and/or goals. We included groups to help you improve your credit score, meet a savings goal, stick to a budget or build wealth through investing.

These resources are not meant to serve as a substitute for professional financial help. It's a good idea to consult a certified financial professional with any major questions before making any big money decisions.

Whether you are looking for general personal finance advice or want to chat with fellow investors, Reddit has a subreddit (forum) for just about any money topic. Here are just a few:

If you want to unlock the mysteries of credit scoring and credit cards, this 82,000-member group provides all the support and knowledge you need. Perfect for those who want to improve their credit scores, get out of debt and get on track to start saving, the Financial Common Cents Facebook group is an encouraging environment to help you achieve your goals.

Organized by fitness coach Shanté Nicole Harris, the group began as a small group of friends looking for a way to hold one another accountable while paying off credit card debt. From 2015 to 2019, Harris paid off nearly $60,000 of credit card debt after battling cancer, navigating unexpected job loss and raising a son with special needs.

Today, the group still maintains its close-knit feel, and Harris is now a certified credit consultant. Harris believes in teaching a person the credit skills they need so they can avoid getting stuck again in the future. She facilitates conversations on topics like debt negotiation, how to read your credit card statement, understanding your credit score and side hustles.

Bravely is a community that gives self-identified women the financial tools to bridge the gap between their dreams and their realities. Founder and financial feminist Kara Perez often hosts free money chats on the company's Instagram stories that reach far beyond what the average student learns in Econ 101. Perez breaks down what she calls "feminist economics" and makes personal finance inclusive, connecting topics like the racial and gender wealth gap to what individuals can do to negotiate their salary or begin building wealth. The Bravely website has an array of free resources, including a budgeting guide to teach you how to align your spending with your values.

Named after Vanguard founder and investor, John Bogle, the term "Bogleheads" is the title adopted by many investing enthusiasts, and particularly those who post and comment on the Bogleheads forum. Similar to Reddit, this forum features a wide selection of topics, the primary focus being investing. If you're looking to be a fly on the wall among long-time investors or to find others at your experience level, this is a one-stop shop to make you excited about the stock market.

You can also read the book, " The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing."

The Your Money and Your Life Facebook group is NPR's online community for anyone who wants to start saving or make better informed money decisions. This group compliments NPR's "Your Money And Your Life" series and provides readers a place to discuss how finances intermingle with current events, politics, daily news and everyday life. Members discuss a range of money topics such as car buying, retirement planning, family planning and career moves with nearly 54,000 other money enthusiasts.

Editorial Note: Opinions, analyses, reviews or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the Select editorial staff's alone, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any third party.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
5 online personal finance communities that will help you get better with money

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Select's editorial team works independently to review financial products and write articles we think our readers will find useful. We may receive a commission when you click on links for products from our affiliate partners. In moments of financial volatility, like the current economic downturn, it's natural to start thinking more carefully about how you manage your money.

# data[].attributes.headline
I would like to share with you some great financial products that you can share with your clients to protect them with important live events. - Google Search

# data[].attributes.subject
I would like to share with you some great financial products that you can share with your clients to protect them with important live events. - Google Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
I would like to share with you some great financial products that you can share with your clients to protect them with important live events. - Google Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
CNBC Select rounds up five free online personal finance groups to help you get better ... We may receive a commission when you click on links for products from our ... Luckily, there are free online platforms and communities designed for people in ...

# data[].attributes.headline
We Analyzed 18 Of The Fastest-Growing Personal Finance Apps | CB Insights

# data[].attributes.subject
We Analyzed 18 Of The Fastest-Growing Personal Finance Apps | CB Insights

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Millennials will inherit the largest amount of personal wealth of any generation - and personal finance apps are emerging to seize on this opportunity. Here are the core strategies that these companies are using to build, convert, engage, and monetize their audience.

An explosion of new consumer finance brands is transforming how people save, spend, and manage their money.

More than 90M millennials will soon be in what Goldman Sachs calls their "prime spending years." Millennials have overtaken the baby boomers to become the largest generational cohort in America. In aggregate, they command $1.4T in annual spending. They have a deep antipathy to traditional financial institutions, and financial security has never been more top of mind to so many people, due in part to the economic challenges driven by the Covid-19 pandemic.

A host of startups have emerged to capitalize on these trends. These companies are making it easier to make a budget, invest, and buy stocks, as well as to get loans and credit cards.

The secrets of user growth

To build a successful personal finance management tool, it's important to understand the dynamics of user acquisition and growth.

Building a product that people want is hard. It's even harder when your target market would rather never think about what you're trying to sell them - retirement, for example. Bankrate found 83% of millennials don't think they'll ever retire: they simply "don't think they'll have the money" to do so. In 2020 alone, approximately one-third of millennials withdrew funds from their retirement accounts or took out loans, or thought to do so, to cope with the financial impact of Covid-19.

The result of getting your product right, however, can be exponential growth so fast it's hard to wrap your mind around.

We studied 18 of the fastest-growing personal finance startups of all time and dove into what they did to achieve their massive results.

Below, we'll show you:

1. How to use pre-launch marketing to build trust and hype

How blog posts helped Mint get 20,000+ customers pre-launch

How Robinhood used an ingenious referral program to build a 1M+ customer waitlist

How Monzo gamified its waitlist to create pre-launch buzz

2. How to show value during the first-run experience

How Credit Karma uses free tools to drive a sticky experience

How TransferWise stood out by tackling common pain points

How Mint returned 100+ lost hours to its users' lives right away

How Trim uses automation to go after low-hanging fruit

How Level Money asked users 3 questions to simplify onboarding

3. How to design for the specific user you want

How Robinhood's clutter-free user interface design is flypaper for millennial audiences

How narrowing its feature roadmap helped Check get acquired for $360M

How Mobills simplified financial management with interactive dashboards

How the color green helped Mint convert more potential users

How SmartAsset encourages users to share data by only asking for what's easy to access

Why Yolt leaned into fintech app overload

How Level Money designed a millennial-friendly, mobile-first experience

4. How to monetize your users' financial betterment

How Mint found a $2B opportunity in preferred pricing

How Digit helped its users save $1B+ without doing anything

How Credit Karma built a $7.1B business by helping people

Why Qapital is building an all-in-one PFM suite

Why Albert cast a wide net to find an audience for its financial advice

How Robinhood launched crypto and got 1M new users in days

5. How to productize personal responsibility

How recurring micro-transactions let Acorns do 17x the trading volume of Fidelity

How Stash's strategy around choice helped it add 25,000 users a week

Why Robinhood offered confident users more flexibility

How Qapital used behavioral science behind its trigger-based investing

How YNAB turned responsible budgeting into a brand identity

6. How to turn sharing into a flywheel effect

How Robinhood drives growth with its addictive referral program

How Stash teaches its users how to invest

How Acorns used non-viral referral to lower its customer acquisition costs

Why Meemo built social media and sharing into its core product

In each instance, we tore apart the UX and UI of each tool, looked at their growth and revenue numbers, pored through interviews with founders and early employees, researched their public reception, and did our own math.

What follows are the results of our analysis - 6 secrets to success in the world of personal finance management (PFM).

1. How to use pre-launch marketing to build trust and hype

In personal finance, building trust over time is essential. Whenever you're dealing with personal financial information and decisions, "moving fast and breaking things" isn't advisable for any product.

The best personal finance startups take time to lay the groundwork for their product. They create content that helps them make a name as an authority in a space, giving them the credibility they need to convince people to trust them with their data.

They build up hype and excitement, building up their public reputation and the all-important factor of social proof.

For personal finance tools, pre-launch marketing is where you lay the foundation of your product.

Mint - How to use blog posts to get 20,000 customers pre-launch

Mint has a classic success story. Many fintech companies have been trying to become the next Mint.com for years.

Mint was acquired by Intuit for $170M after just two years.

Behind that fast growth was an ingenious pre-launch marketing campaign. By creating tons of content around its mission to help people get their finances in order, Mint was able to build the top personal finance blog on the internet before it ever launched its product. Mint still drives thousands of visits every month from people looking for budgeting templates and budgeting spreadsheets.

According to Business Insider, the traffic Mint got from its blog when it launchedwas already greater than the traffic Wesabe, Buxfer, and Geezeo were getting combined.

While Mint was still getting ready to launch, founder Aaron Patzer's team started seeding interest in the product through the then-emergent practice of content marketing.
Google Trends data shows that both inbound and content marketing, at the time of Mint's launch, had hardly been studied.
Mint's team called it a "content network" at the time. They wrote blog posts, conducted interviews with well-known personal finance speakers, designed infographics, and generally created whatever kinds of content they thought would succeed with their target audience of mainly young professionals looking to better manage their finances.

Then, they spent an equal amount of time working on distributing that content both through social media (Reddit, personal finance forums) and through search engine optimization (SEO) (which wound up driving about 20% of Mint's overall traffic during that formative period).
Reddit is notoriously intolerant of anything that smells like content marketing, so Mint's ability to consistently get highly upvoted content on high-volume subreddits like /r/todayilearned is especially impressive.
The content Mint created for SEO was made based on various keywords the team had identified as high traffic: "budgeting," "spending plan," "financial management," "save for college," "how do credit cards work."

The content Mint made for social was painstakingly designed around getting attention on specific websites. Founder Aaron Patzer told journalist and entrepreneur Shane Snow that his team spent large amounts of time on sites like Reddit and content aggregator Digg, looking at the kinds of content getting the most upvotes and trying to simply emulate the most successful pieces at that time.

Every time someone hit a piece of Mint.com content, whether from Google or Reddit, they saw a box where they could sign up to get on Mint's waiting list. This call to action was on every single page of this "content network." And it worked. 20,000+ people signed up to try this "free personal finance solution."
The value prop of Mint's signup list was simple - you can tell that we're trustworthy and that you know what we're doing. Wouldn't you like to use a product that we build?
Not only did all this content get people visiting Mint and signing up for its newsletter, it got them thinking about Mint as a trusted source of financial information.

Like NerdWallet is today, Mint became an authority in the space - a reputation that allowed it to overcome some of the inherent difficulties in being a personal fintech company that relies on people sharing their financial information which, at that time, was a significant obstacle.

Mint's ability to get signups using viral, high-value content was one great strategy for acquiring customers pre- and post-launch.

Robinhood took it to another level, getting to 1M interested users pre-launch with a remarkably effective referral program.

Robinhood - Building a waitlist of 1M+ people with a referral priority program

It's been a while since a personal finance tool has grown as quickly as Robinhood. The app, known for free mobile stock trading, hit 1M active users in a year - and today Robinhood is at over 13M, with approximately 3M users joining during the first 4 months of 2020 alone.

By comparison, E-Trade had just 5M active accounts in 2020.

Part of Robinhood's success was the fact that it had 1M users waiting to use its service before it even launched.

At the core of Robinhood's extreme growth - besides the central value prop, free trades, which we discuss in a later section - was its referral priority program.

A referral priority program, when properly set up, can spark a much higher than usual amount of sharing.

It worked like this: you joined Robinhood's waitlist. Like in any other line, you started off at the end. But you were offered a deal - invite a friend to join the waitlist behind you, and you will move up in line a few spots.

The more people users referred, the faster they moved up.

Allowing users to "cut" by referring other users was an innovative idea, and it worked.

The psychological power of the referral priority program is that people's desire to move up (and thereby share) has no inherent limit. As long as people want to get to the front of the line and the line is long enough, they will continue to share until they run out of friends to send the link to.

By allowing their users to essentially act as sales agents, Robinhood was able to dramatically expand the reach of its referral program.

This marketing campaign seeded Robinhood's subsequent growth.

Monzo - Using gamification to create pre-launch buzz

Before the official release of its mobile app, UK-based neobank Monzo (which was still known as Mondo at that time) wanted to create pre-launch hype to raise awareness and generate demand. It did so by adopting the strategy which Robinhood had used to great effect: creating a gamified waitlist that encouraged users to engage with it to gain earlier access.

But the neobank took this concept a step further.

By clicking a prominent "bump me up the queue" button, users were taken to a dedicated landing page featuring a unique referring URL. For every person a wait-listed user referred, Monzo advanced that user at least 4,000 places in the virtual queue.

This gamified approach - users could see how many people were behind them in line as well as in front - created an engaging, virtuous cycle, in which impatient users could make significant headway on the waitlist and drive a steady stream of referral traffic to the Monzo app. Users were also rewarded with a congratulatory message when they finally reached the front of the queue.

The strategy was so successful that Monzo could barely keep up with the demand and the momentum generated a wave of pre-launch hype on social media - something Monzo has leveraged to drive growth since.

Acquiring users is a considerable challenge, but securing signups alone isn't enough - apps have to retain those users as well. To do so, many focus on demonstrating value quickly, aiming to make that first experience magical.

2. How to show value during the first-run experience

Keeping users around is hard: according to Localytics, the average mobile app loses 80% of its users within just 3 days of download.

Financial app retention drops off similarly quickly. After one day, retention hovers around 23%. After one week, this drops by more than half. At 30 days, financial apps retain just under 6% of users.

This tells you that not only is making your value clear to users paramount, doing it quickly is even more important. Get them engaged quickly, or you will not have another chance.

In other words, mobile products are under the gun to almost immediately show value to their users.

This is particularly important for personal financial management tools, which need to overcome a user's natural reluctance to allow an app to tap into their financial data.

They need to show their users how helpful they can be during the first-run experience while asking for a bigger commitment in the form of:

Trust

Bank accounts

Debit & credit cards

Income information

Social Security number (for tools like Robinhood and Credit Karma)

That's tough to overcome, and it's why building a smooth first-run experience is such a challenge (and opportunity) for personal finance apps.

Credit Karma - How to use free tools to bring 5.1M visitors from Google every month
On a monthly basis around 2017, Ahrefs data showed that Credit Karma drove 5M visits worth a total of $10.9M in impressions.
More than 30% of Credit Karma 's 5M monthly site visitors around 2017 didn't come to Credit Karma for the main product, which was aggregated access to short-term loans - they came for the free tools.
The #1 landing page for Credit Karma at that time was its homepage, with 69.2% of all entrances, according to Ahrefs data. But most of the other top pages were for free Credit Karma tools and content.
They came to the Debt Repayment Calculator to calculate the amount of interest left on their debt. They came to the Credit Score Simulator to see how their credit score might change with a hard inquiry.

These free tools became a significant driver of both traffic and user acquisition for Credit Karma. "It took us 5 years to dispel the baggage that came with our business model," founder and CEO Kenneth Lin told First Round Review. "We had to invest in tools explicitly to turn this around."

The success of Credit Karma's free tools has a lot to do with the way information is generally structured and searched on the web.

When people have a problem, they Google it. Tools that help people fix those problems or answer their questions will drift up to the top of the search results.

If that problem is prevalent enough, this can mean a tool gets found in thousands or tens of thousands of searches every month.
Being at the top of the search results for a term builds credibility. People trust Google's algorithms, so it follows that you wouldn't be at #1 unless you knew what you were doing.
Over time, these tools build up credibility (even more so when they become the first, second, or third result in Google), and this can lead to upsells.

Credit Karma has a variety of free tools on its site, all designed to provide a very specific type of value quickly:

Credit Score Simulator

Debt Repayment Calculator

Simple Loan Calculator

Amortization Calculator

These simulation tools and calculators have a layer of value that is accessible to anyone coming to Credit Karma for the first time, but Credit Karma also offers another, deeper, data-driven layer of value that's only accessible if you become a Credit Karma user.

The Credit Score Simulator, for example, lets you run through a wide variety of situations and how they might change your credit score.

Only with an actual Credit Karma account, however, can you analyze your historical credit report and see, for example, how your score might be different if you hadn't made all those late payments:

These tools simultaneously serve two purposes:

They answer simple questions that millions of people have about their finances

They show the value that Credit Karma's full product line can offer

Their success is tied to how well they perform in search, and historical SEO rankings tell us that relatively soon after these tools were built (2012), Credit Karma was ranking near the middle-top of the first page of search results for some huge related keywords at that time, including:

"Loan calculator": 823,000 monthly searches

"Debt calculator": 9,900 monthly searches

"Car loan calculator": 550,000 monthly searches

It's clear that 2012 is also when we start to see the beginnings of serious user growth at Credit Karma:

Each one of these tools showed prospective Credit Karma users (and financial product customers) a small slice of the value the service could offer them.

"It can seem counterintuitive that features that don't generate revenue could be your greatest competitive advantage later on," founder and CEO Kenneth Lin said. "We've built credit simulators and tools to dispute credit report errors even if it didn't bring in money because we wanted to drive habitual engagement with the site."

When you get users coming back to your product on a regular basis, you get more opportunities to show them what you can do.

For Credit Karma, an app that has no natural retention "hook" or sticky moment, the free tool is a powerful way to make stickiness happen.

TransferWise - How to differentiate a product by tackling common pain points

Few aspects of finance are as opaque as that of currency exchange and international money transfers - something that TransferWise set out to solve.

The vast majority of international wire transfers are handled via the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system. An estimated $10T is sent around the world every year by consumers and small- to medium-sized businesses, who pay roughly $200B in fees to banks in order to do so, making it an extremely lucrative sector of the financial services market.

TransferWise, founded by Taavet Hinrikus and Kristo Käärmann in 2010, aimed to offer an alternative for consumers irked by the high costs and slow pace of sending money abroad.

The company maintains "pooled" bank accounts in more than 60 countries around the world to form the backbone of a "peer-to-peer" currency exchange network. Users wanting to transfer money between these countries are "matched" with other users wanting to do a trade in the opposite direction, allowing TransferWise to just pay customers out of its local bank accounts in the respective destination countries and pocket a service fee - sidestepping conventional cross-border payments infrastructure like SWIFT.

This approach eliminated common user pain points - steep international payments fees and long waits for funds to arrive - making it straightforward for TransferWise to demonstrate its immediate value, even to customers trying it out for the first time.

Mint - How it returned 100+ lost hours to users on their first open

Much of Mint's early success can be tied to a very simple product innovation. The first time you logged into Mint, you could pull all of your financial transactions from your bank, including your credit and debit cards - and you wouldn't need to spend an hour meticulously tagging each one to see your spending habits. They would be automatically categorized.

The app eliminated those 100+ hours of work and thereby offered a far better first-run experience than Quicken or Microsoft Money could.

Mint is a great example of making an impression on your new users by automating a series of steps they would normally go through manually.

Trim - Automate low-hanging fruit to quickly impress users

Trim is an automated personal finance app that parses through users' bank account activity to identify waste and save money on recurring payments that may no longer be relevant to the user.

With so many services using a subscription model, many consumers find themselves spending considerably more than they realize on monthly subscription fees. A study conducted in 2018 found that the average consumer actually spent roughly 3x what they thought they did on subscriptions every month. Over time, these silent fees can result in hundreds of dollars being spent on services that consumers aren't taking much advantage of - or using at all.

Trim's automated approach is compelling to some users because it doesn't just highlight opportunities to save money but actually does the legwork too.

During its first-run experience, Trim asks users to connect the app to their primary bank accounts to identify expenses that they may have overlooked. The app notifies the user and requests permission to cancel services - all the user has to do is approve or deny Trim's request, and the app does the rest.

Trim's automation is what helps the app's initial experience demonstrate value. The company is betting that most of its users will find conducting a line-item audit of monthly expenses pretty tedious, which makes its automated algorithmic approach appealing. The app takes this a step further by submitting cancellation requests to unwanted subscriptions, saving the user even more time and effort. Trim then looks to hammer home its value proposition with clean dashboards that show users exactly how much they've spent on specific services and how much the app has saved them.

The app isn't focused solely on subscription services; Trim can also haggle with utility providers to lower users' bills, for example. But by targeting the low-hanging fruit of forgotten subscriptions first, Trim can demonstrate its worth quickly.

Level Money - A 3-question onboarding flow can produce instant valuable feedback

Level Money, a budgeting app for millennials and Business Insider's "best app for managing your money," was one of the most popular financial management apps before it was acquired by Capital One in 2015 and eventually shut down in 2017. At the time of its acquisition, the company had 700,000 users and had processed about $12B in transactions since its launch in 2013.

The key to Level Money's user experience was that it got people to offer actionable information about their personal finances their first time using the product.

Often, loading up a new personal finance app means dealing with tons of permissions and passwords, followed by being dumped into an unfamiliar dashboard that can take days or weeks to feel fully comfortable using. It can take a while to begin really getting value out of it. Level Money's first-run experience was designed to show you that value right away.

It worked in 3 parts:

1. After you connected your bank account, the Level Money app went through deposits to your bank account and figured out which represented your recurring income.

2. The app then went through different withdrawals from your bank account and figured out which represented your bills and other recurring expenses.

3. Finally, the app asked you how much you wanted to save each month.

When that finished, you were sent to the main dashboard of the app.

The main dashboard of Level Money then used income vs. expenses to show you 3 bubbles representing the amount of money you could still spend today, this week, and this month if you wanted to accomplish the goal you set out in #3.

That kind of specific utility, matched to a precise idea of the product's intended audience, is critical to success.

After users download an app and get through their first-run experience with it, the effectiveness of its design and how well it works for them personally is what comes into consideration.

The best personal finance tools are designed very intentionally for a specific use case or kind of user. Let's dig into some examples.

3. How to design for the specific user you want

When the Stanford psychologist BJ Fogg gauged people's reactions to various websites and asked them what factors played the biggest part in their assessments, design was unanimously the most commonly cited reason for trusting or not trusting a particular site.

Perhaps more surprising, when he went industry by industry, it was finance that brought up the most design-related comments.

Design matters in fintech because design is central to a website's credibility. Design can build up trust or break it down very quickly. It can burden users with excessive information and friction that ruins the user experience.

Personal finance in particular presents some difficulties that make design all the more important. When you use a banking app or budgeting app normally, you need to authenticate yourself, sync up with your bank account and various credit cards, enter personal information (including SSNs and DOBs), and otherwise input quite a lot of data.

Turning that into an easy consumer experience is both the PFM design challenge and a massive PFM design opportunity, as the best tools in the space prove.

Robinhood - Getting millions of millennial customers by using white space

In 2015, Robinhood became the first fintech product to be awarded the prestigious Apple Design Award. The mobile app is clean, uncluttered, and features one of the smoothest stock portfolio views out there. But most importantly, Robinhood's app design mirrors the needs of its specific market.

The Robinhood app engineering teams value user experience above all else.

Simplifying the trading interface and revamping the user experience of buying and selling stock has allowed Robinhood to connect with its millennial market (the average age of a Robinhood user, according to The New York Times, is just 31) and turn novices into traders. That's due in large part to design mistakes made by Robinhood's competition.

Despite estimates that 58% of young people (ages 18 to 29) and adults (ages 30 to 49) in the US use smartphones as their primary means of accessing the internet, many stock trading apps on iOS and Android look like they've been ported there as an afterthought - not designed specifically for the mobile form factor.

These interfaces are packed with information - enough to easily overwhelm the user. Real-time streaming quotes and in-depth technical indicators are important for day traders, but they're not necessary for casual trading.

In fact, while these features add value for those who need them, they make the apps harder to navigate and use for those who don't. Robinhood's goal was not to build an app for day traders or portfolio managers; it was to build an app for the first-time retail investor.

"We're making investing accessible to young people. Most stock brokerages out there have been around for 30 years, their interfaces are clumsy, and they're targeting older professionals and active traders," co-founder Vlad Tenev told TechCrunch. "They're no place for first-time investors and that's one of the things we focus on. Making it accessible. Having it be mobile friendly."

To make stock trading accessible and mobile friendly, the Robinhood team stripped information away and built a dashboard that would give just the right amount of information:

Rather than a long list of technical indicators, Robinhood's app shows you:

The current value of your account

The amount your account's value has changed by

One piece of news regarding your account (above, an order confirmation)

Swiping to the right allows you to see your account's value on weekly, monthly, and longer timescales. Scrolling down allows you to check out the value of your various holdings, and dig deeper into their historical performance. For those used to Snapchat and Instagram, it's a familiar mechanism.

But the most prominent difference between Robinhood and finance apps like Stocks Tracker is the reliance on white space:
Martin Krzywinski's Image Color Summarizer shows us that 90% of Robinhood's app is solid white, while Stocks Tracker's palette contains relatively high percentages of several different shades of gray.
White space improves reading comprehension by up to 20%, helps users understand the relationships between different UI elements, and directs users' attention.

It's in short supply in trading apps packed with information. Robinhood uses 1.8x more white space than Stocks Tracker to focus its users' attention on their account balance and its rate of change over time.

By clearing away all the information a user doesn't need, Robinhood makes its app legible and makes trading easier for its users to understand. That's especially important when trying to capture a market like millennials - who often haven't traded before, don't understand why they should, and don't know how to start.

Visual design is crucial, but heavy use of white space isn't the only way to enforce minimalism in product. For Check (formerly Pageonce), creating the best product possible meant chiseling away features that had outlived their usefulness and crafting a leaner, nimbler app.

Check - How narrowing its features made Check worth $360M

When Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger realized that people were mostly using their Foursquare-clone app Burbn to take filtered photos, they spun that feature off into its own product and called it Instagram.

Similarly, when Pageonce realized that many of its features were being beaten by other products, it honed in on one that wasn't: mobile bill pay. And as Check worked its way up to a $360M acquisition, what started out as an aggregator for various web services - from social to shopping - became a mobile app dedicated solely to paying your bills online.

Mobile bill pay usage volume spiked, hitting well over $1M a day by the time Check was acquired by Intuit in June 2014.
Daily payments volume on Check's platform at the time of acquisition was well over $1,000,000.
The original Pageonce was a prototypical Web 2.0 account aggregator.

You could use it to check your Myspace feed (yes, Myspace), monitor your stock portfolio, get emails, check whether your flight was on time, and see what bills were due and when. The idea was that people wanted one place to do all of these things.

That made sense on the web, where you have a lot of screen real estate and could easily navigate between different sites. On mobile, however, you trade real estate for focus.

Apps started to emerge that were rapidly unbundling the services Pageonce offered:
Many of Pageonce's services couldn't compete when more specialized apps started entering the marketplace.
As these specialized apps started to siphon off Pageonce's users, the team tried to narrow their focus. They looked at how their users were actually using Pageonce and found that most of their active users were using Pageonce primarily to pay their bills and track their spending. They rebuilt their app around financial management, releasing Pageonce Personal Assistant on an early version of the iOS App Store.

In 2009, the app hit 1M users and was one of the top 20 apps in the App Store that year.

A few years later, in 2012, user growth plateaued again. Mint was dominating the mobile financial management space at that time, with a stronger brand and new resources from the Intuit acquisition. Once again, Pageonce was existentially threatened by its competition and had to do something.

The answer came in zeroing in on the one feature that Pageonce had that Mint didn't: bill pay.

The Pageonce team once again rebuilt their app around the one feature where usage was growing steadily - this time, bill pay - and eliminated everything else. The theory was simple: people could use Mint to manage their budgets. If Pageonce's bill pay was the best out there, people would continue to use it.

Shortly after the team once again cut their app's features, Pageonce broke out of its growth plateau and hit 10M registered users:

Mobills - Why doing less can make financial management more appealing

Mobills is an expense tracker and budgeting tool that helps users to gain insight into their spending habits by visualizing their bank account activity.

The app is designed to appeal to users who may be struggling to get their finances under control or who experience difficulty using traditional budgeting methods, such as spreadsheets, by representing users' account activity with categorized graphs and charts. Mobills uses simple, familiar UI conventions to provide at-a-glance insights into users' account activity; positive balances are displayed in green, and negative balances are displayed in red.

The app's use of pie charts is an example of how Mobills appeals to its target user. Pie charts are often easier for people to understand at a glance, making them an ideal tool for users who may be struggling to get their finances under control and for those who may have little previous experience with expense tracking applications.

Mobills prioritizes simplicity as opposed to information-heavy, comprehensive dashboards. As such, Mobills omits data that other personal finance apps might put front and center, such as month-by-month spending comparisons. That information is available, but Mobills is reckoning that its users care more about the headline takeaways.

Mint - Using the color green to convert more potential users

When it comes to sensitive personal information and the internet, people don't necessarily behave rationally. They follow the cues in their environment. If your sign-in page features broken/missing elements or shoddy, '90s-style web design, people will be less likely to trust you.

As we mentioned, Stanford's BJ Fogg asked 2,684 people to write about how they assessed the credibility of various websites - design look was mentioned in nearly half of all the comments, significantly more than any other factor.
The importance of design is also clear in terms of "information design" (how a site is structured) and "information focus" (scope).
Mint's founding team was well aware of this phenomenon when the app launched. It was 2007, and people were much less willing to hand sensitive banking information to a new internet startup than they are now.

At the time, Lifehacker wrote an entire piece breaking down Mint's security, noting how hard it was to overcome people's paranoia about sharing financial information online: "As soon as any web-based financial software like Mint is mentioned, the security watchdogs among us pounce on the comments to let the rest of us know that we should never, ever trust anyone with our financial data, especially our aggregated financial data."

The New York Times wrote a piece promoting Mint in 2009 and reader reactions were so incredulous that they had to issue a follow-up, with comments from CEO Aaron Patzer himself, to reassure people that Mint wasn't planning to steal their identities.

Analyzing the language used in angry reader comments revealed a general preoccupation with security threats and whether Mint could keep personal information safe:

Design emerged as the most important lever Mint could use to create trust. Everything was painstakingly constructed from day one and user-tested to build trust and credibility. As lead designer Jason Putorti told First Round Review:

"You can't just sort of throw something together in a month, launch it, and expect that it's going to work. A big part of it was just, does it look credible. Does it feel credible? A lot of it's visual. A lot of it's being a good copywriter, writing friendly copy, making people feel comfortable as they go through the process ... It's our job really to figure out what makes it trustworthy."

To see the other side, just look at Mint's biggest (startup) competitor at the time, Wesabe. Its site was designed according to Web 2.0 aesthetics:

As one Wesabe user wrote, the aesthetic choices didn't seem to line up with the "Average Joe" market that Wesabe was courting:

"Our first impression from using Wesabe's site is that it looks as though it was designed by programmers. The tabs, subject headings and tags are all there and functional, but it does not feel as though there was as much thought given to the design, layout or usability. In such a competitive market, with strong entrants like Mint and PNC's Virtual Wallet, this simply won't cut it for long."

Yodlee, one of Mint's data providers, had its own front-end personal finance tool too, but its design was less consumer friendly. It was complex, gave a lot of information upfront, and didn't have any easy-to-understand graphs or charts:

The team at Mint realized that they needed to buck the Web 2.0 trend, which was seen as fun and social but not - the all-important factor, in this case - credible. They also realized that people hated using products from Intuit and Microsoft because they were so complicated that you needed a "For Dummies" guide just to get started.

Several progressive UI moves turned Mint into a service that people felt they could trust. Despite the popularity of 2D design at the time, Mint went all-in on 3D tabs, buttons, and box shadows to make divisions clear and keep users from clicking in the wrong place by accident.

The gradients and airbrushing were all tailored specifically to appeal to people's sense of visual credibility, as were the colors - green, with orange highlights.

Green and orange are complementary colors. They provide a strong sense of contrast when put side by side, which was crucial for Mint's team. Creating sufficient contrast between values and inputs and making the site easy to navigate and understand visually was very important for creating user trust.

Whether your users know it or not, the color of your website is going to have an effect on how they perceive its credibility and authoritativeness.

If you want to build a product for people who don't necessarily trust you innately, then you need to use every tool in your toolbox to create that feeling of authoritativeness and trust.

SmartAsset - Encourage users to share data by only asking for what's easy to access

One of the biggest challenges faced by many fintech apps and services is getting sufficient personal information from users to provide useful advice while avoiding burdening them. This is especially true of tools designed to assist people in making major financial decisions, such as buying a home or saving for retirement. The more information a financial service has about someone's circumstances, the more accurate the advice is likely to be, but actually asking users for this information is a delicate balance.

As the needs and motivations of users often vary widely, SmartAsset uses quizzes and calculators to connect those users with financial advisors with experience in relevant fields.

SmartAsset's interactive calculators make this process easier by using familiar UI elements, such as sliders and drop-down menus, to simplify otherwise complex tasks like calculating Social Security payments. SmartAsset also makes use of progress bars to indicate how close users are to finishing the survey, which is a gamification tactic intended to increase the odds that prospective customers will actually complete the process.

The service's calculators capture just enough information to narrow down the list of prospective advisors presented to the user but don't overwhelm them by asking for too much. The platform also avoids asking for information users probably don't have on hand, such as line items from previous tax returns, making it less likely that a user will abandon the process out of frustration.

Yolt - Why leaning into a crowded space helped it to stand out

With so many savings calculators, budgeting apps, and financial management tools available, differentiation is one of the biggest hurdles for burgeoning fintech apps to overcome. With this in mind, Yolt 's value proposition isn't to replace users' banking apps, it's to manage them.

Yolt is unusually forthcoming in its declaration that it doesn't want to "replace your bank," which gives users a better idea of what to expect from the app's experience.

Based primarily in London, Yolt integrates with major financial service providers in the UK, allowing users to connect credit cards, bank accounts, investment accounts, and other financial services to create a single financial management tool that draws upon data from a range of sources. Yolt also helps users to move funds between connected accounts, another attempt to reduce friction and encourage users to manage more of their finances via its app.

The app may not add a great deal of value for users who use just one or two fintech apps, but - by choosing not to be a direct rival - Yolt is betting that it can appeal to those with an ever-increasing number of finance apps on their phones.

Level Money - How the app designed for millennials by reducing choice

When you design any product, one of the biggest choices you make is the amount of information that you're going to expose to your users. Are you building a dashboard, or are you building a single view on a dataset?

This choice is more than an aesthetic one - it's about deciding who your product is for, what they want to do with it, and the amount of information that they need.

Level Money built a budgeting app that succeeded with millennial users by taking a minimalist stance on all of these questions, simplifying its UX to meet the real concerns of the people in their market.

With the Level Money app, you simply entered how much you made every month, how much you paid in bills, and how much you wanted to save each month. That was the end of setup - the next screen presented you with the main UI of the Level Money app.

Three bubbles - representing how much money you have left to spend today, this week, and this month - made up the main view of the app.

"I'm a big fan of Level - I use it to track how much I spend on ride-sharing services every month, among other things. And it fills a niche: most official bank apps are ugly, hard to use, and siloed - they don't give you a sense of your overall financial health," wrote Casey Newton at the Verge.

"I still use Mint to make sure I'm not eating out too much or having too many drinks at the bar, but Level has taken its place on my coveted home screen, and I refer to it daily. Level isn't for everyone, but for people with just a few bills to pay per month and a predictable cash flow, there's no better app for providing clarity on your finances. One thing well? This app does it," Newton added.

Although Capital One shut down Level Money in 2017 due to increasing competition from other budgeting apps, these reviews tell us that those 3 bubbles are all that some millennials need or want while their finances are relatively simple. Especially in contrast to products with fuller feature sets, like Mint:

"Like most budgeting systems, Mint splits things up into too many categories. I don't care about my clothing or entertainment budgets, because those are things I worry about only after monthly bills, gas, and food," one Level Money reviewer wrote. "Ultimately, I wanted something simple that would let me know how much I have to spend after the essentials are paid for."

Information-wise, an app like Mint does it all. It lets you track your investment portfolio next to your credit cards next to your personal loans next to your bank accounts next to your checking account. But an estimated 17% of millennials have no savings at all, and 27% could not afford an unexpected expense of $400.

For a very specific market of users with very specific questions, the bubble-centric look of Level Money - highly minimalistic for a PFM product - served its purpose. The team at Level Money saw an opportunity to take the standard PFM design and pare it down to its bare essentials in a way that resonated with its customers.

Let's look at how the best personal financial management tools monetize their users' progress so that they can succeed when they help others succeed.

4. How to monetize your users' financial betterment

Products with network effects get better the more users there are. For example, the telephone gains value as more people have phones. Facebook gains value as more of your friends get profiles.

The PFM space has no easy analogy for network effects because its focus is so intimate - you don't care about other people's money. You care about your own money, managing it better, and making it grow.
One of the posts on Reddit's /r/robinhood subreddit celebrates 100% lifetime returns.
Instead, PFM tools operate according to something more like what you might call "quality of life effects."

If you start using an app and it helps you improve your life - whether by diversifying your portfolio or helping you find a low-interest loan - then you're more likely to keep using it, tell your friends about it, and post on social media about it.

The best PFM tools don't just help their users succeed. They promote financial betterment and turn it into a flywheel of growth, benefiting from their users' enthusiasm for improving their finances and even sharing that improvement with others.

Mint - The $2B market opportunity in preferred pricing

Rather than put ads on Mint, founder and CEO Aaron Patzer monetized the service by recommending products to Mint users based on their financial histories.

This required more work than using banner ads, but in the long run it made for a stronger business.

While ads bring revenue at the expense of the user experience, the recommendations on Mint generated revenue and improved the user experience. The more on-point Mint's recommendations were, the more likely their users were to find value in using Mint. So incentives were aligned.
"Mint users have saved 38% more on interest compared to non-users" reinforces the value prop of this algorithm-generated Mint ad.
Mint's Patzer knew he didn't want to put conventional banner ads on the site. It wasn't going to bolster users' trust in the product to see ads everywhere. And it would be a constant challenge to keep them from hurting the customer experience.

As discussed above, Mint's defining feature at the time was its automatic categorization algorithm. It was in this algorithm that Patzer found the business model.

"We realized, well, if you can categorize transactions accurately, that's great, because the user knows where their money is going ... But that also means we know where their money's going," Patzer said in a speech at Princeton University. "We can see that you spend $180 on phone, TV, and internet ... and that you could get a bundle for $99 that would save you $1200 a year. And Comcast would pay us a sales fee for that lead. So all of a sudden ... we had our business model."
Rather than show conventional ads, Mint decided early on that it would use customer data to offer personalized product recommendations.
It was a business model that made a lot of sense. The product would be free to encourage as many people to use it as possible. Users would get special deals ("preferred pricing") when they bought into an offer.

Doing the math at the time on the different kinds of lead generation opportunities Mint could have with its users' data across different industries, you got about $30 per potential user per year, as seen on LinkedIn:

There were 65M people in America using online banking at the time, and about 20M using Quicken and Money - which cost between $30 and $70. This meant Mint's potential market size was between 20M and 65M. With a potential per user revenue of $30/year, Mint's market opportunity came out to somewhere between $0.6B and $1.8B. (Plus, the more users Mint got and the better it got at analyzing their data, the better the app would get at recommending products.)

A few years later, Patzer said that while some of the numbers had been off in one direction or another, the bigger picture had held.

Mint's example shows how you can build a business model by understanding your users and offering them product recommendations and valuable referrals. Offering a free product and putting ads in it is going to be a far more effective strategy when those ads are actually relevant and helpful to people.

Digit - How to save $1B+ without doing anything

For many people, saving is made more difficult by the need to actively re-engage with the process over time to gradually build up a decent pot of money. This is the problem that Digit set out to solve.

Digit pioneered the concept of automated, near-invisible saving by predicting users' upcoming spending needs and then transferring part of the projected leftover money to their Digit account on a daily basis.

Digit claims that its predictive algorithm is pretty accurate - the company is confident enough to offer overdraft prevention and reimbursement guarantees to insulate users from the potential fallout of its automated deductions. The average Digit user saves $2,200 per year, and Digit users have collectively saved more than $1B since the app was launched in 2015.

Looking to increase its appeal to users that find saving difficult, the company prioritizes frequently saving small amounts rather than transferring larger sums every so often. Digit also encourages users to save for specific goals, such as a down payment for a home or paying off student loan debt. This goal-oriented approach helps keep users focused on their goals rather than on how much money is being deducted from their accounts, which can help sustain motivation over prolonged periods.

Digit's algorithms are an asset for the app, but it's the frictionless approach to an often difficult financial chore that provides users with the greatest value. Even users who are diligent enough to transfer funds from a checking account to a savings account, for example, may face barriers such as minimum transfer amounts, maintenance fees, and other costs. Digit sidesteps these obstacles, making saving a more accessible financial habit, especially for those who have found it difficult to save effectively in the past.

Digit tapped into its popularity with financial consumers in 2018 by launching Digit Pay, a service intended to help users more easily pay off credit card debt. With approximately 75% of Digit users in at least some credit card debt, the app's first foray into additional products and services aligns with the financial situation of many of its users, providing a well-targeted additional revenue stream for the company.

Credit Karma - How to build a $7.1B business helping the disadvantaged

When Credit Karma first entered the market, the only options you had for getting more than one free credit report a year were sites like TrueCredit and FreeCreditReport.com.

With these sites, "free" was a misnomer. At one point, the FTC sued FreeCreditReport.com (and its owner, Experian) because when consumers signed up for their service, they were also surreptitiously signed up for $15 per month in credit monitoring with it.

Credit Karma gave credit scores away for free, and in doing so it acquired a user base larger than FreeCreditReport or TrueCredit ever could with their model.

A part of that user base is the vast number of Americans who have bad credit and are actively working to fix it. Consumer credit data from Experian indicates that almost one-third of Americans have credit scores below 670.

Much of Credit Karma's growth - it was acquired by Intuit last year for $7.1B - has been driven by people looking to not just learn their credit score, but improve it.

The American states with the worst overall credit in 2016 were, overwhelmingly, the most likely to be visiting Credit Karma:

The states with the worst credit scores in the country in 2016:

Georgia - #7 in Credit Karma searches

Mississippi - #1 in Credit Karma searches

Louisiana - #6 in Credit Karma searches

Nevada - #10 in Credit Karma searches

Texas - #13 in Credit Karma searches

Oklahoma - #12 in Credit Karma searches

South Carolina - #3 in Credit Karma searches

Alabama - #2 in Credit Karma searches

Tennessee - #8 in Credit Karma searches

New Mexico - #16 in Credit Karma searches

People with bad credit are more likely to visit Credit Karma than other sites because:

It's free and doesn't represent an additional financial burden

It allows them to see their credit score as it changes from week to week

Credit Karma can offer them financial products that are tailored to their situation

Its products are where Credit Karma really differentiates itself from the traditional credit monitoring sites.

Because Credit Karma has access to so much user data, connections with financial institutions, and exposure to Americans with bad credit, it can offer the kind of products that people in more restrictive financial situations can't get elsewhere.

"We talk about this sometimes - what about payday lending, what about some of these other lending instruments where the typical consumer would say, well that's bad," founder Kenneth Lin told Fast Company. "But what if you have really poor credit? You quickly realize, there is a group of people that are served by this. It's sort of Ivory Tower if you're saying, 'Don't do this.'"

This practice of serving underserved communities became a foundation of Credit Karma's business model: "There are a lot of families struggling to make ends meet," Lin says. "To the extent that we can help save $50 or $100 - a month, a week, a year - that's valuable. And we can make a business out of it, which is great."

Similar to Mint, the company was founded with the free model in mind - better to get users and use their data to make money than to limit your audience by charging a fee upfront.

A similar strategy has been used by the team behind the personal finance app Qapital, which aims to differentiate their product by helping users do more with the money that they save.

Qapital - Why the app is building an all-in-one PFM suite

The conventional wisdom of building apps is to do one thing and do it well. Users have more or less infinite room for apps, but little to no patience for those that don't do their jobs well - so it's best to pick a niche and own it.

In personal finance, however, this rule becomes more challenging to follow, because you're helping users with something that they don't necessarily want to share across many different apps: their money.

While Qapital is primarily an app for helping users save money, it's building a moat against competitors like Acorns and Stash by expanding its feature set beyond saving.

The core idea behind Qapital, as with many other tools, is to make saving a more frictionless process by deducting money automatically from a user's account upon certain actions or milestones. Since its 2015 debut, Qapital has grown to 2M users, largely on the power and flexibility of its different rule-based investing triggers.

Rather than simply rounding up the fees on transactions or depositing a set amount of money into your account every week or month, Qapital allows users to set up advanced rules with conditions for when money will be saved.

For example, you could deposit a certain amount of money every time you spend money on Starbucks or McDonald's, or every time you come in under a certain amount of spending on one of your guilty pleasures. You can reward yourself for walking a certain number of steps or logging a certain number of workouts with your Apple Health app, or create any variety of triggers yourself (powered by the platform IFTTT, or If This Then That), such as:

Save every time the temperature rises above 75 degrees

Save every time you post a picture to Instagram

Save every time you pin a new goal to a Pinterest board

This customizability around saving triggers is intended to help users set up psychologically motivating saving goals. It's the same kind of psychology as impulse buying - if you can make it more fun and spontaneous to save than spend, then it follows that people will save more.

To do that, Qapital is taking its flexible rules system and building on top of it with a collection of features designed to let users use the money they deposit into Qapital better. Options for allocating saved money include:

Investing (in different ETF portfolios)

Adding money on a Qapital debit card (using saved money as the funds)

Paying bills

"Payday Divvy" (a feature to earmark portions of your paycheck for different goals and expenses)

Setting aside taxes (for freelancers)

Now, not only can you save your rainy day fund in Qapital, you can get your paycheck directly deposited into your Qapital bank account so you can spend money on your Qapital debit card. And you can take a predetermined amount of that money out every month and deposit it into investments, allowing some to compress their entire financial life into one app.

While the conventional wisdom of mobile apps may be to unbundle, Qapital is growing fast by going in the opposite direction - and in doing so, offering users a more convenient experience and a platform for saving.

Albert - Why casting a wide net helped it find an audience for financial advice

Professional financial advice is beyond the reach of many consumers. Financial consultants are in high demand and often command considerable fees, making them impractical for people who want to improve their financial health but can't afford the outlay.

Albert set out to change that by making financial advice and guidance on money management more accessible.

Albert is a financial management app that combines automated savings, investment advice, and financial planning tools. The app brings together many of the most popular features of other fintech products. Its savings product is similar to automated savings apps like Digit. Its investment product resembles that of robo-advisors such as Betterment and Wealthfront. Its financial planning tools offer the cost savings and automated negotiation features of Trim. This broad functionality helps Albert appeal to users with lots of different financial goals - creating an ideal pool of potential customers for financial advisors.

While much of Albert's core functionality is free to use, the product's primary revenue stream is its Albert Genius subscription service, which connects users to financial advisors who provide recommendations to help them meet specific financial objectives. With an eye on accessibility - and reflecting its broad customer base - Albert's Genius service features a flexible payment structure; the minimum cost of Genius is $4 per month, but users are given the choice to pay more if they choose.

Robinhood - How it launched crypto and got 1M new users in days

The 2013 launch of Robinhood was a major internet event, with a waitlist of more than 1M people signed up to use the product before it was ever released.

The 2018 launch of Robinhood Crypto was no different.

At launch, the product had 1M users on its waitlist, and Robinhood's user base shot up from 3M to 4M people - even though the app was only released for use in California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, and New Hampshire.

It was a shot across the bows of companies like Coinbase (43M users worldwide) that have established themselves as early incumbents in the cryptocurrency space.

One factor that drove people to Robinhood Crypto - and away from other cryptocurrency products - was the same thing that's driven millennials to Robinhood's main stock trading product for years: no fees.

In comparison, Coinbase - the most popular cryptocurrency wallet on mobile at that time - charged a graded fee based on the size of your transaction:

$0.99: buying/selling at $10.99 or under

$1.49: buying/selling at $11.00 to $26.49

$1.99: buying/selling at $26.50 to $51.99

$2.99: buying/selling at $52.00 to $78.05

Many cryptocurrency exchanges charge a percentage fee, from something like 0.1% (Binance) to 3% (Cointree) to anywhere between 0.65% to 3.65% (Uphold).
Those exchanges (displayed in this 2018 chart from Bloomberg) typically need to draw some kind of profit from cryptocurrency trading - hence the fee - but Robinhood, because of its profitable stock trading business, opted not to.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev was upfront about the fact that he intended for Robinhood Crypto to be a break-even component of Robinhood's business at best:

"We don't intend to make very much money on it at all for the foreseeable future," he told Fortune. "We intend to operate it as a breakeven business ... The thinking behind that is what we're really doing is building an ecosystem. Right now the products are investing products, so crypto slots in very nicely alongside the 10,000 plus other instruments that people can trade."

The company did, however, expect that offering a no-fee crypto trading experience would bring a lot of new users to the Robinhood platform.

"We expect by the end of the year to be either the largest or one of the largest crypto platforms out there," Tenev's co-founder, Baiju Bhatt, said at that time. "We also really feel we'll have the absolute best experience for investing in crypto as well."

It's easy to assume that in PFM, it's always better to go after a higher net worth user base. But Robinhood has been able to tap into a much larger market by making products free and offering them to more people.

5. How to productize personal responsibility

The internet, as Twitter co-founder Evan Williams once said, is not a utopia: it's "a giant machine designed to give people what they want."

Opportunities are found where you can give people what they want better or faster than others. Uber got people from point A to point B faster. Google got them information faster.

The PFM space is one where there are a lot of wants not being met by providers. Many Americans want:

Better credit, but don't know how to get it

To start investing, but don't know how

To save more, but feel incapable

The central stumbling block, much of the time, is human psychology:

Present bias leads us to systematically overspend on short-term goods rather than put our money toward the future

Cognitive inertia stops us from doing obvious things like signing up for investment accounts when there's too much friction/forms involved in the process

Scarcity bias leads us to spend more when we decide that we're going to go on a budget

When more than 60% of all Americans can't afford a surprise $1,000 expense, it's clear that the existing solutions for solving this crisis have failed.

That's why PFM tools are so powerful - they can help people overcome these cognitive biases by changing how we think, automating and amplifying good spending habits. Most importantly, they can make it as easy as downloading an app.

Acorns - How the app got to 17x the trading volume of Fidelity

Acorns is a financial planning app that makes it easier to invest your money. You can invest lump sums or set up recurring deposits, but its primary differentiator is the "Round-Ups" feature.

When enabled, Acorns will take purchases on your linked credit cards and bank accounts and "round them up" to the nearest dollar, investing the remainder into a portfolio of your choosing.

Pay for a $3.69 coffee with your credit card, and Acorns will round it up to $4.00 and put that $0.31 into an investment portfolio.

Micro-transactions like these are a time-tested way to skirt the ordinary human reticence around saving. Apps like Candy Crush tap into this: once you've given Candy Crush 99 cents, what's another 99 cents, and another 99 cents, and so on?

But what Acorns taps into is the positive potential of this phenomenon. Rather than reward you for compulsive behavior, Acorns harnesses micro-payments (and the associated dopamine rush from making them) to help you save.

The classic advice that young people and those who have never invested before get about investing is that you don't need a lot of money to start. You can get started with "pocket change."

As soon as you start thinking about pocket change, you realize that we've been learning this lesson from very early on in our lives. We're encouraged to save in small increments, to be frugal, to put every coin we can into a piggy bank.

In a society no longer tethered to cash, the piggy bank is little more than a symbol. But it embodies a desire for simple financial discipline that Acorns is able to not just harness, but amplify.

When you're investing with Acorns, you can set each round up to multiply by 2x or 3x (so that $0.31 from before becomes $0.62 or $0.93).

So every time you do that pleasurable activity (spend money), your brain releases dopamine. At the same time, Acorns adds your money into your investments.

The two activities become associated, forming a potent feedback loop that lets you harness your natural inclinations toward beneficial long-term ends. Gradually, you begin to associate positive feelings with saving, rather than spending.

Acorns shows us how human tendencies can be bent towards responsible ends. Stash, on the other hand, shows us how a product can simply make it easier to fulfill the responsible desires we already have.

Stash - Add 25,000 users a week by constraining users' investment options

Stash has grown fast. Of its 5M accounts, it added approximately 1M between January 2020 and September 2020 alone.

Where Acorns productizes the piggy bank investment ethos, Stash productizes the ethos of portfolio diversification.

Unlike an app like Robinhood, where until early 2020 you had to have a significant amount of cash in your account to buy a share of companies like Facebook or Amazon, Stash lets you invest in buckets of related stocks with as little as $5.

That lets you build a portfolio much more easily than in an app where you must buy a discrete unit of stock like Amazon.

The returns on these funds are much higher and much more reliable (for most) than trying to build a portfolio manually, especially when accounting for retail investor psychology.

Researchers looking at 700,000 stock purchases found that people made systematically poor decisions in how they chose to repurchase previously held stocks, often making intuitive (but ultimately unwise) pickups of individual stock. Investors that trade more often also tend to lose more money, on average, than those who trade less.

Stash encourages you to think long term about the industries that you believe will make a difference and want to support without letting you stray too far outside the lines of what's actually fiscally responsible. It prompts users to think about advances in various fields:

Robotics, clean energy, and aerospace are seen by many as pretty safe bets as industries - though, as individual companies, perhaps not. You can lose a lot of money as a retail investor betting on a company in one of these sectors. But invest in an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that holds a variety of aerospace and defense assets, and you could be looking at better risk-adjusted returns.

With a social media-based ETF made up of stocks like Facebook and Snapchat, you might see a similar phenomenon. You're able to make decisions about what you want to invest in without being dependent on any one company to succeed, and you're most likely earning more than you would with 1% a year - or less - in your savings account.

"Don't put all your eggs in one basket" may be sensible, but it can turn investing into a chore for someone unacquainted with the markets. That's why Stash built different baskets into their product, allowing users to easily diversify their portfolios while still investing in areas they're passionate about.

Rather than investing in stocks, you invest in ETFs - exchange-traded funds, or securities that rise and fall with the value of their underlying asset or commodity.

If Acorns is the app that lets you invest without thinking, Stash is the app that helps you think more intelligently about where you want to invest and learn more about your different options. By opening up the way people think about investing, and yet constraining the options presented to relatively safe investments likely to produce good outcomes, Stash gives users the best of both worlds.

Robinhood - Why offering confident users more flexibility was good business

Investment app Robinhood transformed the landscape of the investment industry by offering zero-commission trading. Responding to the app's overwhelming popularity with first-time investors, legacy incumbents such as Charles Schwab, E-Trade, and TD Ameritrade eventually followed suit.

But with much of its revenue generated by payment for order flow (PFOF), a practice attracting some regulatory scrutiny, Robinhood's Gold premium subscription service offers a more stable, reliable source of revenue that also rewards responsible investors.

Robinhood Gold is a monthly subscription service that provides benefits that are not available to the app's free users. Priced at $5 per month, Gold gives investors access to additional research data, more flexible trading hours, and - most importantly to Robinhood itself - margin lending, Robinhood's secondary revenue center.

The Gold program offers users up to $1,000 of margin - funds borrowed from Robinhood for the purchase of securities on the Robinhood platform. Users who borrow more than $1,000 of margin are charged a flat rate of 2.5% on margin loans above the initial $1,000 limit included with the Gold plan.

Margin lending is a much more stable revenue stream than Robinhood's primary revenue center of PFOF because it is less of a potential liability from a regulatory and legal standpoint. Robinhood has already been subject to numerous SEC investigations into the company's relationships with market makers, and the company agreed to pay a fine of $65M in December 2020 related to allegations it intentionally misled customers.

While Robinhood Gold offers investors additional flexibility to make timely investments they may not be able to cover with their own funds, there are still risks to margin trading, and it's possible for Gold members to end up losing money on margin trades. Gold offers enough flexibility to make it an attractive option for confident or experienced investors, but the terms by which margin loans must be repaid encourages responsibility on the behalf of the investor.

Qapital - The behavioral science behind the app's trigger-based investing

Personal savings app Qapital hired a behavioral scientist to help the company make its app as effective as possible - long before such hires became commonplace at fintech startups.

Dan Ariely, chief behavioral economist at Qapital, is a Duke University scientist known for his work on choice and rationality. Ariely helped Qapital design several of its features, including the ability to save money every time you indulge in a guilty pleasure - the company's so-called "guilty pleasure rule."

Spend more than $20 (or $30, or $50, and so on) on your guilty pleasure of choice, and your Qapital account will automatically withdraw a set amount of money from your linked checking account and contribute it to your chosen savings fund.

On the flip side, you can also enable a rule that will reward you for indulging modestly, triggering a deposit to occur every time you come in under a certain spending target.

The attention to detail that Qapital has paid to the user-facing psychology of the app has paid off.

Qapital launched in 2013 as a personal financial dashboard - essentially as a simpler version of Mint. That first version of the app shut down.

Qapital re-launched in 2015, and Ariely came on to act as the team's chief behavioral economist shortly afterwards. Ariely introduced a collection of new features to the product, including the guilty pleasure rule and the concept of "anti-goals" (where money is deducted from one spending category's budget when you go over budget in another).

Qapital's behavioral science angle became the app's calling card, garnering it PR coverage and ultimately $30M in financing in early 2018. Google named it "Most Innovative App of the Year, 2017" and praised it as "a beautiful app for goal-oriented savings." Fast Company likewise deemed it a "best new app" of 2018. Today, Qapital has 2M users.

What's notable about Qapital from a behavioral economics point of view is how it helps users visualize and take steps toward the bigger picture goals that they're saving for.

For Ariely, one of the biggest issues with saving is that we lose track of what we want to save the money for. Saving money now to spend it later is a decision that's full of friction - but it becomes a lot easier when you can see the bigger picture in each micro-decision. That helps motivate you to keep save more and spend less.

"The most difficult problem is our lack of desire to think about it. You go to the supermarket and you buy and buy and buy. People always underestimate. Even the cashier underestimates. We don't add up all our costs," Ariely says. "...the reality is, we live in the moment and we make decisions in a myopic way without thinking about the big picture. [Saving for the future is] really, really hard. So we don't do it."

With Qapital, all saving takes place in the context of your goals - one of Ariely's core principles being constraining choice in the right directions. You're not allowed to just "save" money in the app; you must save toward a specific goal.
Qapital offers users a wide variety of different rules they can use to determine how and when they save money.
Another thing that sets Qapital apart are the methods of saving it offers. Many apps offer features like rounding up money, but what Qapital offers is a more powerful and flexible means of setting rules and triggers.

While Qapital's system of triggers and rules may appear indistinguishable from other apps like Acorns and Mint, the flexibility and goal orientation of its system is informed by behavioral science - and it's helping the app to grow despite fierce competition in the space.

YNAB - How honest messaging helped turn responsible budgeting into a brand identity

Many personal finance apps rely on automation and machine learning to reduce friction, encourage adoption, and make their users' lives easier. You Need A Budget (YNAB), which was launched in 2004, takes the opposite approach by focusing on improving users' financial literacy and cultivating better spending habits.

YNAB is one of the oldest financial planning web applications on the market. Founded by Jesse Mecham while he was still in college, YNAB is inspired by the analog "envelope method" of saving: allocating cash for specific expenses into separate, physical envelopes to ensure everything gets paid.

Initially, YNAB was a rudimentary spreadsheet-based tool that users downloaded and installed. The app was relaunched as a contemporary web and mobile app in 2015, bringing it in line with the rest of the fintech software market. Today, YNAB is available on virtually every format, including the Apple Watch, and as a service via Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant.

Mecham's money management experiences informed much of YNAB's development, most notably its prioritization of encouraging users to develop better financial habits.

This isn't just a positioning statement - it's central to YNAB's brand identity. YNAB aims to help its users better understand their financial situation; automated tools may work for some fintech products, but YNAB instead focuses on ongoing financial education to help users make more informed decisions about their spending and saving.

YNAB is also careful to avoid minimizing the discipline and commitment needed to improve someone's financial situation, particularly the notion that managing money more effectively is quick or easy. While this may put some off trying YNAB, those aren't the customers the brand wants to attract. This not only prepares users for what to expect while using the product but also builds trust in the YNAB brand. By being upfront about the commitment involved, YNAB is priming new users for a lasting relationship.

Helping users make better financial decisions can be enough to win over customers initially. But then getting them to recommend you to friends is critical to success.

The most popular PFM tools supercharge their referral programs by making them all about self-improvement - and apps are exploring this in new, creative ways.

6. How to turn sharing into a flywheel effect

Businesses built off referrals have a stronger foundation.

Referred customers convert 3-5x more often than your average user, they're 16% more likely to stick around for the long term, and they tend to have a 20% higher lifetime value.

Fintech is a space where it can be harder to make referrals happen, however. The progenitors of viral growth through referral, the Facebooks and Zyngas, succeeded largely because their products gained value as more of your friends got on them.

Your budgeting app doesn't have any such natural incentive. It doesn't get better at managing your money the more friends you have using the same budgeting app. And you're not likely to "share" your bank balance or post it to Twitter, either. Your personal finances are personal.

The most successful PFM tools don't fight these anti-network effects, and instead turn referrals into a means for self-improvement.

Whether your reward for bringing a friend on board is Apple stock or a bucket of American defense ETFs, referral bonuses in the PFM space can be a powerful way to demonstrate a product's value to new users and get them hooked.

Robinhood - How to drive addictive referrals

In a casino, the house always wins. Pull the lever on a slot machine over and over, and on a long enough timescale, you'll lose. But imagine if compulsive gambling was good for your financial health. Imagine if pulling it brought you assets that would appreciate over time and improve your well-being in the long run.

That's the model that Robinhood uses for its referral program.

Instead of giving you money when you refer a user, Robinhood gives you a share of stock selected at random from a pre-populated list of options.

For the price of one referral, you can receive a share of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, or others:

The program was popular on sites like Reddit, where Robinhood users got together to share thoughts on the stocks they received or were hoping to receive for their referrals.

Naturally, the users who got stock others were excited about floated to the top of these threads, confirming for others that valuable stocks were being given away in the program and stirring up a bit of envy.

Looking through these threads, you can see that plenty of the time, the stocks people get aren't Apple - they're Sirius, or Groupon, or Zynga.

Like a slot machine, Robinhood's referral program has you (most of the time) winning small, consistent amounts that are calibrated to be just enough to keep you referring.

If Robinhood is mostly giving away stock in the $2 to $4 range, and only giving away an Apple or a Facebook ($100+) every 80 or so referrals, that average reward stays low - about $5 a referral. That cost isn't incurred right away either, as new users have to wait 30 days to withdraw the money from their account.

Walking through the thought process of receiving a stock reward helps clarify why it would work for Robinhood:

If you receive a share of stock worth $2, you have to wait 30 days and go through the process of linking up your bank account just to get that $2 out; or, you can leave it in and let it appreciate (leaving the door open to further investment).

If you receive a share of Apple, or Facebook, or Microsoft, you can wait 30 days and withdraw the cash from your account, oryou can spend those 30 days and beyond letting it grow in value even more.

Receive a share of Apple stock today, and its value could double, triple, or quadruple within the next several years. And Robinhood's referral program makes you consider this before you choose to take your winnings and cash out.

While Robinhood wants to lure you into trying its product through the psychology of "skin in the game," Stash looks to surmount the main barrier that people feel when they think about investing: thinking they need a big sum of money to get started.

Stash - Seeding user accounts with $5 to demonstrate the power of exponential returns

Stash founders Brandon Krieg and Ed Robinson knew they had to lower the bar to investing if they wanted to get people to start using their product.

When they talked to potential users, they found that there were two reasons that people weren't currently investing:

They didn't know how to get started, or

They thought investing was only for the affluent

They built their referral program to address these hang-ups. Each new user that a current Stash investor refers gets $5 to invest in a bucket of ETFs of their choice.

Log in to the Stash app, and new users can play around with various models of investment to see what that $5 can become over the years.

With a $150 monthly deposit at 4.8% growth, for instance, that could become $10,000 after 5 years, or $23,000 after 10.

The $5 gets you into the app, where Stash tries to show you what can happen if you stick with investing for the long term.

This addresses another key pain point in getting people to start investing: lots of people don't understand exponential growth.

As part of a study into people's understanding of growth, the psychologists Craig McKenzie and Michael Liersch asked participants how much saving $400 per month with 5% return annually would turn into after 40 years.

The majority said $200,000. The real answer is over $600,000.

McKenzie and Liersch found that people systematically expect their savings to grow linearly, not exponentially. They have trouble wrapping their heads around the fact that compounding growth is the latter:

"People's failure to recognize the power of compound interest - especially over long periods of time - leads to gross underestimation of future account balances, and by consequence, the cost of waiting to save," they concluded.

When you get your Stash account seeded with those first $5, you don't just get the material, short-term benefit of $5. You get a glimpse into what your future could be if you use Stash to invest those $5 for the future.

Liersch and McKenzie found that simply pointing out the implications of exponential growth could encourage people to start saving more, and earlier - and Stash employs a similar strategy to help people understand why they should be investing.

Acorns, on the other hand, helps us see how even a modest, non-viral referral program - optimized with various UX best practices - can be a serious driver of growth.

Acorns - How non-viral referrals let Acorns lower its CAC by 50x

Acorns has raised $264M in disclosed funding from the likes of Bain Capital Ventures and PayPal Ventures, growing to 2M active accounts within the span of 3 years. As of February 2021, Acorns has nearly 9M accounts.

In 2017, Acorns payed just $4.50 for each new user account it acquired in Australia. That was far cheaper than your average PFM tool. According to Business Insider, fintech companies pay anywhere from $300 to $1,000, depending on the lifetime value of their customers.

Meanwhile, the average customer acquisition cost (CAC) for a UK-based robo-advisor startup, according to SCM Direct, was about $234 at that time. Even a well-known startup brand like Lending Club was spending about $200 per customer it acquired.

Acorns, at $4.50 per customer, reduced its CAC by 50x compared to many of its competitors.

Acorns has a low cost of acquiring customers largely because it has tapped into social sharing in a way that other financial services companies haven't.

Acorns provides strong incentives to share, optimizes the process to make sharing as likely as possible, and ensures that payouts correspond with actually active new users.

If you're paying $4.50 per customer, an extra 500,000 users from referral means you're paying a relatively modest $2.25M. If you pay $200 per customer like Lending Club, you're paying a far less modest $100M.

Acorns built its CAC-lowering referral program in two parts.

First, Acorns offers a solid incentive. You get $5 per new customer that you refer. That money gets deposited into your Acorns account and is available for you to start using immediately.

Second, it optimizes the UX around referral and makes it as easy as it can be. Too many companies just tack referral on, assuming that their incentives will do the work of motivating users to actually pull the trigger. But according to research conducted by referral marketing company Extole, eliminating the need to load a new page to refer increases the odds of referral by 4x.

When you arrive at the Acorns referral screen, you have several options for how you can send out your invite code. Each works completely inline - no separate landing pages, copying and pasting, or wonky referral code systems to figure out.

When you hit the Message option, the very next screen is an auto-filled text message that lets you send your link to your friends. If you hit the Twitter button, an auto-filled tweet pops up in-app.

Making it slightly easier for users to share may seem like a small optimization, but every little bit makes a difference when it comes to referral.

In addition, by only offering the referral incentive to those who actually begin depositing money rather than just sign up, Acorns can save significant costs while encouraging users to become active on the app.

Acorns currently has more than 8M users, a significant increase from the 6.2M it reported in late 2019. The company added almost 10,000 new users on March 18, 2020 alone - something Acorn analysts described as "the second-worst day in market history."

If Acorns spent $10 on each new customer it acquired rather than just those that deposit money, it would spend $6M on its next 600,000. If it only pays out to users who've converted to paying customers - assuming they do so at about a Dropbox-quality rate of 4% - then it only spends about $24,000 to acquire those 600,000.

Acorns isn't throwing away millions on its referral program just to grow its user base. It's counting on referred users seeing the value in the product and actually starting to use it.

Meemo - Why social media and sharing is built into its core product

Many fintech apps have successfully leveraged social media to generate pre-launch hype and create skyrocketing demand for new products. But while social media lends itself well to marketing, using social sharing to enhance the fintech experience itself has proved more difficult. But Meemo may have finally figured it out.

Meemo, launched in the summer of 2020, is a mobile app for Android and iOS that seeks to combine the account monitoring of a personal finance app, the engagement of a social media platform, and the rewards of a loyalty program.

Upon downloading Meemo, users are prompted to connect the app to the user's primary bank account to analyze account activity. Meemo's AI-driven algorithms then surface special offers, such as gift cards that pertain to the user's interests and spending activity. This activity is later summarized as an Instagram Stories-style summary of users' financial activity for a given week.

Users are encouraged to share gifts with friends and contacts based on their spending activity, adding a layer of social engagement to the experience. Meemo also allows users to send money to each other, similarly to Venmo and other products.

The app was founded by former Google employees Wisam Dakka, Ranveer Kunal, André Madeira, and Robson Araujo. The founders reckon that the tailored gifting aspect of Meemo will convince users to share their spending habits with the app. But while social validation can be a powerful motivator for users to share some of their personal data, asking for detailed financial histories in exchange for discounts is a big ask - making the initial adoption necessary to produce a flywheel effect for the app even more important.

The future of personal finance apps

The past two years have seen strong growth in interest and demand for financial apps. There were more than 4.3B downloads of financial apps between September 2019 and August 2020, indicating that many more people are taking proactive measures to improve their financial lives, from saving to spending.

But the next generation of high-growth PFM tools isn't going to be built according to a formula. The specific tactics that worked for the apps highlighted above aren't going to work for all the tools to come - tactics and user tastes change too often.

However, the core strategies that these companies used to drive traffic, convert users, keep them engaged, and monetize their audience are not flashes in the pan. They're fundamental to building products that people want to use.

This report was created with data from CB Insights' emerging technology insights platform, which offers clarity into emerging tech and new business strategies through tools like: If you aren't already a client, sign up for a free trial to learn more about our platform.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
We Analyzed 18 Of The Fastest-Growing Personal Finance Apps | CB Insights

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Millennials will inherit the largest amount of personal wealth of any generation - and personal finance apps are emerging to seize on this opportunity. Here are the core strategies that these companies are using to build, convert, engage, and monetize their audience.

# data[].attributes.headline
7 Life Events That Affect Your Life Insurance Needs | Coverage.com

# data[].attributes.subject
7 Life Events That Affect Your Life Insurance Needs | Coverage.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
September is Life Insurance Awareness Month, a perfect time to consider who benefits from life insurance, and when you should buy it. Life is unpredictable-we never know what happy or tragic events may be around the corner. That's why life insurance was created.

A life policy is a contract with an insurance company that gives a beneficiary a payment, known as a death benefit, when the insured person dies. Some policy types also accumulate a cash value through investments. Having life coverage gives you and your loved ones peace of mind that your finances won't suffer after an unexpected tragedy.

As your life changes, your insurance needs change too. Here are seven life events that should prompt you to reevaluate your life insurance coverage.

1. Getting married or becoming a couple.

When couples get married or become life partners, it's likely that both work and contribute an income to the household. If one person dies, the other could get saddled with many financial obligations.

Proceeds from a life insurance policy would help the survivor maintain their lifestyle by paying for bills and debts, such as a mortgage, car loan, student loans and credit cards. A policy death benefit can be spent any way the beneficiary likes.

2. Having or adopting a child.

Welcoming a new child into your family is a joyous occasion-but becoming a parent is also expensive. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the typical American family spends more than $233,000 raising a child from birth to age 18.

Every parent of a dependent child should have life insurance to protect them. If you died with a surviving spouse or partner, they could use the proceeds to pay for a child's education or other expenses. And if you're a single parent, life insurance would be an essential financial lifeline for a child after your death.

3. Becoming a stay-at-home parent.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that only primary breadwinners in a family need life insurance. Not only is being a stay-at-home parent one of the most demanding jobs in the world, but the cost of replacing that work is high.

According to Salary.com, outsourcing the work done by a typical stay-at-home mom would cost more than $162,000 per year. Be sure you have enough life insurance to pay for childcare and household help if a stay-at-home parent were no longer around.

4. Getting divorced or spitting up.

If you end a marriage or partnership, it can be an emotional time. You'll need to reevaluate your existing life insurance before a divorce gets finalized. Consider answers to the following questions:

Should I buy my own life insurance or have additional coverage?

Who will pay premiums for an existing life insurance policy?

Do I need to change my life insurance policy beneficiary?

If your life insurance lists an ex-spouse or previous partner as a beneficiary, they will receive the benefit when you die-even if you exclude them from your last will. So, don't forget to review your beneficiary choices after going through a breakup.

5. Starting a new job.

Many employers offer low-cost or free life insurance in their group benefits package. However, typical employer-sponsored life insurance is only one or two times your annual salary. That may not be enough if you support a family. Additionally, workplace policies are job dependent, so if you leave your job, coverage ends.

A good rule of thumb is to have life coverage at least five to ten times your annual income. However, this amount may vary depending on your financial situation and family needs.

You can purchase an additional life policy on your own, or you may have the option to buy supplemental life through your employer. Having an individual life policy makes sure you'd never have a coverage gap if you lost your job.

6. Becoming self-employed.

When you're self-employed, you must provide your own benefits package, so don't forget to purchase life insurance to protect those who depend on you.

If you have one or more business partners, you may also need "key man" coverage to protect your business from a partner's death. The proceeds could be used to replace lost income or pay business expenses, including debt and taxes.

7. Retiring.

As your retirement draws near, it's smart to reevaluate your life insurance and consult with a financial advisor. If you have a permanent life policy with a cash value, it may be a retirement income source that you're ready to tap.

Depending on your situation, having a life policy may help your heirs pay taxes and legal fees associated with your estate. Or if you have grown children and a surviving spouse or partner with enough of their own income, you may no longer need a life policy.

What factors determine life insurance rates?

The cost of a life policy depends on a variety of factors, including your:

Shopping for a policy when you're young and likely to be in good health can help you save money. Underwriting guidelines vary from insurer to insurer, so it's wise to get multiple quotes and compare rates for similar policies.

Thinking about death and what would happen to your family if you weren't alive is difficult. The takeaway is that if your surviving spouse, partner, children, parents, other dependents or business partners would be hurt financially after your death, you need life insurance to protect them. Your life insurance policy can be a crucial part of the legacy you want to leave.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
7 Life Events That Affect Your Life Insurance Needs | Coverage.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
September is Life Insurance Awareness Month, a perfect time to consider who benefits from life insurance, and when you should buy it. Life is unpredictable-we never know what happy or tragic events may be around the corner. That's why life insurance was created.

# data[].attributes.headline
7 Life Events Where Life Insurance Can Help | Mutual of Omaha

# data[].attributes.subject
7 Life Events Where Life Insurance Can Help | Mutual of Omaha

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As your life changes, so do your life insurance needs. To help protect your family, you'll need a plan that offers flexibility.

The first factor you'll want to consider is whether to choose a term or permanent life policy. Term life insurance offers an economical way to make sure your family has financial cover if you should pass away unexpectedly - but by definition, it comes with a time limit. Many people who choose term life are comfortable knowing they're covered for 20, 30 or 40 years, and don't really want more than that basic, bare bones safety net.

Permanent policies (which include Indexed Universal Life Insurance) work differently. This type of life insurance tends to cost a little more, but you may also get more from it. As long as you keep up with the premiums and keep your policy in force, you'll never lose the protection of your life insurance backup plan.

What's more, these policies typically accumulate "cash value," which you can access through policy loans or withdrawals - generally without paying any taxes or penalties.* That's a source of income that can come in handy during one of life's unexpected emergencies. And with a specialized policy such as Indexed Universal Life, you can accumulate cash value at a rate of return that's linked to a market index.

Most important, permanent policies can keep you covered for your whole life, at every step along the way, but especially during seven significant life events.

Life Event No. 1: Buying a Home
Chances are, when you bought your home you took out a mortgage. If you own that property jointly with someone else, or had someone co-sign for the loan, they would be responsible for 100 percent of the debt and the payments in the event of your death. That unexpected expense, coming at such a troubling time, could leave them in dire financial straits. In the worst cases, overwhelmed by carrying this extra load, the people you care most about could end up in default, and even lose their home.

Life insurance provides a straightforward solution to this potential disaster. In fact, paying off a mortgage is one of the top three reasons people buy life insurance.1 To help keep the people you love in the home they love, you can purchase enough life insurance to completely cover that debt.

Life Event No. 2: Getting Married
Married couples without children often skip life insurance - but that can be a costly mistake. In most households, both spouses work, often contributing equally to household expenses. Budgets for these just-starting-out families often include a lot of debt: student loans, car loans, credit card debt, and mortgages. Add to that regular household expenses, like food and utilities, and you can see how very necessary both salaries may be.

Losing half the available income in the event of an untimely death could leave the surviving spouse struggling to make ends meet. In fact, 7 in 10 households say they'd have trouble covering everyday living expenses within just months of losing their primary wage earner.1 Life insurance can provide the safety net to help cover all the debts and monthly expenses when one spouse suddenly must cover them all, alone.

Life Event No. 3: Having Children
For most people, this joyous life event is the one that sparks interest in life insurance, and for good reason. Your children depend on you completely to provide for them. And as you start having children, current and future expenses may skyrocket.

Whether your family has two incomes or one, your family should have a sufficient financial safety net to protect them in the case of a premature death. The surviving spouse in a dual-income household could be hard-pressed to meet all the monthly household expenses and pay for additional child care. Single-income households are wholly dependent on that one salary, and losing it could be catastrophic without a solid life insurance policy in place.

Equally devastating is the loss of the stay-at-home parent. Those loving household contributions would need to be replaced through full-time child care providers and housekeeping help.

Live Event No. 4: Caring for Aging Parents
People are living longer than ever before, giving you more precious time to spend with your loved ones. Unfortunately, many people fall prey to chronic and debilitating diseases that require intensive around-the-clock care.

If you're providing some or all the care for an aging parent or grandparent, having a backup plan in place can help protect their care continuity if you die unexpectedly.

Life Event No. 5: Starting a Business
When you own a business, you have a lot at stake. In addition to providing for your family, you have to keep your company solvent and your employees paid. Valued partners and star employees add an extra dimension of both possibility and risk; losing these key members of your business to death or disability can have an enormous impact on your business. To help survive such events, your business needs a stable source of funding, and a permanent life insurance policy could help your company weather that storm.

Sensible policy loans could also be part of a strategy to buy out a retiring partner without depleting business or personal cash reserves.

Life Event No. 6: Sending your Kids to College
College costs have skyrocketed, and they're only soaring higher. Combinations of 529 plans, scholarships, and grants can help ease that overwhelming financial burden, but most families - most students - rely on significant student loans to cover the difference. In fact, most students come out of college already saddled by more than $30,000 in debt.³ To avoid that burden, some families draw from their retirement savings, which can trigger taxes and penalties on top of the lost growth potential for the nest egg.

If you have a permanent life insurance policy in place, however, prudent policy loans could help cover college costs without incurring taxes, tax penalties, or crushing student loan debt.*

Life Event No. 7: Retirement
Stress-free retirement is the ideal goal, but for millions of Americans, the No. 1 worry is outliving retirement savings.4 If fears about dwindling or disappearing Social Security benefits coupled with anxiety about potential stock market downturns keep you up at night, you're not alone. Plus, with life expectancy on the rise, your retirement savings may be stretched even tighter.

This is where a permanent life insurance policy can help provide a welcome safety net. Instead of draining retirement accounts in down markets, you can help supplement your required distributions with judicious policy loans, giving your savings their best chance to bounce back. If you do run out of retirement savings, the cash value in your policy may be available to offset some of that lost income.

And if you pass away before your spouse, that life insurance is in place to provide much-needed financial resources after you're gone.
*Taking loans/withdrawals from your life insurance policy will decrease the benefit. All guarantees are based upon the financial strength and claims-paying ability of the issuing company.
Sources:
1 LIMRA (2016). Web page: Facts About Life. Retrieved January 2, 2018, from https://www.limra.com/uploadedFiles/limra.com/LIMRA_Root/Posts/PR/_Media/PDFs/Facts-of-Life-2016.pdf.
2 TICAS (2016) Web page: Student Debt and the Class of 2016. Retrieved January 2, 2018, from https://ticas.org/content/pub/student-debt-and-class-2016.
3 Journal of Accountancy (October 2016) Web page America's biggest retirement fear: Running out of money. Retrieved January 2, 2018, from https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2016/oct/americans-fear-running-out-of-retirement-money-201615242.htmlhttps://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2016/oct/americans-fear-running-out-of-retirement-money-201615242.html.
Item #241513_0820

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
7 Life Events Where Life Insurance Can Help | Mutual of Omaha

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As your life changes, so do your life insurance needs. To help protect your family, you'll need a plan that offers flexibility. The first factor you'll want to consider is whether to choose a term or permanent life policy.

# data[].attributes.headline
Universal Life Insurance, Indexed Universal Life, Variable Life Insurance

# data[].attributes.subject
Universal Life Insurance, Indexed Universal Life, Variable Life Insurance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Your web browser is not a supported version and may not be fully compatible with this website

Universal Life Insurance Underwritten by United of Omaha Life Insurance Company

Universal life is permanent, flexible insurance coverage. It includes the opportunity to adjust the premium and the death benefit, as well as accumulate cash value on a tax-deferred basis.

Universal life coverage may be right if you:

Need coverage to protect your loved ones from the financial consequences of your death

Value the opportunity to accumulate cash value that you can later access to pay for expenses such as college funding or emergencies

Want the flexibility to adjust your payments and death benefit amount*

Have maxed out your IRA or 401(k) and need additional options to save for retirement

Our Universal Life Insurance Products

Life Protection Advantage™

Indexed Universal Life

Offers permanent life insurance coverage with a death benefit that can be guaranteed through age 85***** - and, perhaps longer-as long as you pay the no-lapse premium or greater

Has the potential for greater cash value accumulation than traditional fixed-interest universal life insurance. Downside protection that guarantees you will recieve no less than 0 percent, even if the percentage change in the market index is negative.

Provides flexibility for the future through accessible cash value as well as included accelerated death benefit and guaranteed refund option riders

Income Advantage™

Indexed Universal Life

Permanent life insurance coverage

Can build cash value based on selected interest-crediting options tied to the performance of a market index - your money is never actually invested in the market

Emphasizes cash growth potential more than Life Protection Advantage, which may result in even greater future income potential

Downside protection that guarantees you will receive no less than 0 percent even if the percentage change in the market index is negative

AccumUL Answers

Universal Life

Offers permanent life insurance coverage

Accumulates cash value using a declared interest rate, guaranteed to earn at least 2 percent annually

Focuses on greater cash accumulation which leads to more future income potential

Whole life and universal life are both forms of permanent life insurance, so they are similar in many respects. They both offer a death benefit that lasts throughout your lifetime as well as cash value. However, whole life has a fixed coverage amount and a fixed premium payment that will never increase. Universal life has both more flexibility and more risk.

Term life and universal life are substantially different products. Universal life has a variable premium and death benefit amount, whereas term is fixed; universal life is a permanent life insurance product that accumulates cash value, whereas term life only lasts for a certain period of time and only includes a death benefit. In essence, while term life is focused on simple, temporary protection, universal life is intended to provide a lifetime of flexible protection with some investment potential.

As with any other life insurance product, the price of universal life is affected by the death benefit amount as well as your predicted life expectancy. Some factors that we take into account include your age, your gender (women have a longer life expectancy than men), tobacco use, and overall health. A universal life policy will include a minimum and maximum premium amount, and you have the flexibility to choose a payment amount within that range.

On average, we complete this process in less than one month. You simply need to contact an agent to help you complete your application for review. If a medical examination or more questions are required, we will contact you within a week. When all requirements are in, we evaluate your application; if approved, your insurance policy is then issued and delivered to you.

Because universal life is such a personalized product that needs to be tailored to your individual needs, we require that you work with an agent instead of offering an online universal life insurance quote. Your agent will ask you questions about your family, life situation, and financial needs to help you develop your goals, then clarify your options and help you choose the right policy to achieve your goals. Your agent will also answer your questions and help you implement your life insurance plan.

Understand How Life Insurance Works

Indexed Universal Life Insurance: Help Meet Your Goals

Read Article

Riding Out Market Fluctuations: How Does Indexed Universal Life Insurance Hold Up?

Read Article

Whole Life Insurance and Indexed Universal Life Insurance: Comparing the Features

Read Article

You may also be interested in:

Term Life Insurance

Straightforward, affordable protection for a specified period of time.

Learn more

Whole Life Insurance

Permanent life insurance to meet long-term needs.

Learn more

Close

5 Benefits of Working With an Agent

An agent can help you:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Universal Life Insurance, Indexed Universal Life, Variable Life Insurance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Your web browser is not a supported version and may not be fully compatible with this website Universal Life Insurance Underwritten by United of Omaha Life Insurance Company Universal life is permanent, flexible insurance coverage. It includes the opportunity to adjust the premium and the death benefit, as well as accumulate cash value on a tax-deferred basis.

# data[].attributes.headline
Long-Term Care Solutions Cultural Markets

# data[].attributes.subject
Long-Term Care Solutions Cultural Markets

# data[].attributes.headline
Learn About AARP's Virtual Volunteering Opportunities

# data[].attributes.subject
Learn About AARP's Virtual Volunteering Opportunities

# data[].attributes.headline
AARP Long-Term Care Options from New York Life

# data[].attributes.subject
AARP Long-Term Care Options from New York Life

# data[].attributes.headline
AARP Life Insurance from New York Life: Official Website

# data[].attributes.subject
AARP Life Insurance from New York Life: Official Website

# data[].attributes.headline
jason montgomery new york life - Google Search

# data[].attributes.subject
jason montgomery new york life - Google Search

# data[].attributes.body
Om Shankar Tripathi
777 S Mathilda Ave Apt 261 Sunnyvale CA 94087 1983 June 18 37
4087088149
omtripathi1983@gmail.com

Technical Lead at ServiceNow

# data[].attributes.headline
Free People Search & Reverse Phone Lookup - FastPeopleSearch.com

# data[].attributes.subject
Free People Search & Reverse Phone Lookup - FastPeopleSearch.com

# data[].attributes.body
Phone Numbers
for Vineet Tripathi in Sunnyvale, CA

(408) 731-6326 (Primary Phone)

Wireless

Broadwing Communications LLC - CA

First reported August 2009

# data[].attributes.body
2501 148th Ave SE, Unit A10
Bellevue WA 98007

King County
Since May 2020

# data[].attributes.headline
Vineet Tripathi(37) Sunnyvale, CA (408)731-6326 | Public Profile

# data[].attributes.subject
Vineet Tripathi(37) Sunnyvale, CA (408)731-6326 | Public Profile

# data[].attributes.headline
Raksha Tripathi(37) Bellevue, WA | Public Records Profile

# data[].attributes.subject
Raksha Tripathi(37) Bellevue, WA | Public Records Profile

# data[].attributes.headline
Om Shankar Tripathi in S Mathilda Ave Apt Sunnyvale Ca 94087,

# data[].attributes.subject
Om Shankar Tripathi in S Mathilda Ave Apt Sunnyvale Ca 94087,

# data[].attributes.headline
暖心马拉松 非洲姑娘为断臂小伙递水_微博

# data[].attributes.subject
暖心马拉松 非洲姑娘为断臂小伙递水_微博

# data[].attributes.body
Robert Vivas 4084834240
robertvivas@gmail.com
facebook
692 Salberg Ave, Santa Clara, CA 95051

833-5070564 ext. 92988 4/12/21 9am
692 Salberg Ave, Santa Clara, CA 95051 1980

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Robert Vivas - Sr. Program Manager - Customer Success - Exabeam | LinkedIn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
View Robert Vivas' profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. Robert has 5 jobs listed on their profile. See the complete profile on LinkedIn and discover Robert's connections and jobs at similar companies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Robert Vivas - Sr. Program Manager - Customer Success - Exabeam | LinkedIn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
View Robert Vivas' profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. Robert has 5 jobs listed on their profile. See the complete profile on LinkedIn and discover Robert's connections and jobs at similar companies.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.facebook.com/christinebagubemaldonado

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Institute on Reputation. Learn why we’re nationally recognized for being the very best at what we do in the eyes of clients, partners and coworkers.

# data[].attributes.headline
Advocate Health, LLC Agent Benefits & Services from NAPA

# data[].attributes.subject
Advocate Health, LLC Agent Benefits & Services from NAPA

# data[].attributes.headline
Advocate Health Advisors: We are guides. We are local. And we are on your side. - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Advocate Health Advisors: We are guides. We are local. And we are on your side. - YouTube

# data[].attributes.headline
(37) Advocate Health Advisors: Overview | LinkedIn

# data[].attributes.subject
(37) Advocate Health Advisors: Overview | LinkedIn

# data[].attributes.headline
When to enroll in Medicare: Tips from Advocate Health Advisors CEO Darwin Hale - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
When to enroll in Medicare: Tips from Advocate Health Advisors CEO Darwin Hale - YouTube

# data[].attributes.headline
Advocate Health, LLC Reviews, Ratings | Health & Medical near Unit B&C, 1845 S Tamiami Trail , North Port FL

# data[].attributes.subject
Advocate Health, LLC Reviews, Ratings | Health & Medical near Unit B&C, 1845 S Tamiami Trail , North Port FL

# data[].attributes.headline
Advocate Health Care | Complaints | Better Business Bureau® Profile

# data[].attributes.subject
Advocate Health Care | Complaints | Better Business Bureau® Profile

# data[].attributes.headline
Advocate Health Advisors Jobs and Careers | Indeed.com

# data[].attributes.subject
Advocate Health Advisors Jobs and Careers | Indeed.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
www.indeed.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.

# data[].attributes.headline
How Can I Apply for a Limited Lines Travel Insurance Agent License?

# data[].attributes.subject
How Can I Apply for a Limited Lines Travel Insurance Agent License?

# data[].attributes.headline
Limited Lines Travel Insurance Agent: Main Page

# data[].attributes.subject
Limited Lines Travel Insurance Agent: Main Page

# data[].attributes.headline
403bCompare - Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union High School District

# data[].attributes.subject
403bCompare - Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union High School District

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Contact Information

Use the following contact information for questions regarding your employer's 403(b) plan.

Plan Details

View the 403(b) Plan Document for information on loans, transfers distributions, contribution limits, and eligibility.

Approved Vendors

Below is a list of 403(b) vendors approved by your employer. You must contact a vendor from this list to open an account before initiating contributions. Select a Vendor Name to view details about the vendor and a list of available products.

Initiate or Change Contributions

After opening an account with an approved vendor, use the link below to start contributing or to make changes to your contributions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
403bCompare - Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union High School District

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Contact Information Use the following contact information for questions regarding your employer's 403(b) plan. Plan Details View the 403(b) Plan Document for information on loans, transfers distributions, contribution limits, and eligibility. Approved Vendors Below is a list of 403(b) vendors approved by your employer.

# data[].attributes.headline
Teacher Retirement | Annuities | 403(b) | Retirement Homeroom

# data[].attributes.subject
Teacher Retirement | Annuities | 403(b) | Retirement Homeroom

# data[].attributes.headline
Teacher Retirement | Annuities | 403(b) | Retirement Homeroom

# data[].attributes.subject
Teacher Retirement | Annuities | 403(b) | Retirement Homeroom

# data[].attributes.headline
SBLI Online Term Life Insurance Application

# data[].attributes.subject
SBLI Online Term Life Insurance Application

# data[].attributes.headline
30 years term life insurance - Google Search

# data[].attributes.subject
30 years term life insurance - Google Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
30 years term life insurance - Google Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Select Term Life Insurance · Term Life Insurance Renewal ... · Term Life: Permanent Life Initially, less expensive form of life insurance: Level premiums Provides a death benefit, but typically no cash value: Cash value accumulates over time and creates an asset which may be used ...