How to invest, What to invest or even Why invest are questions that seem to require a B-school degree to make sense to most! Long term financial planning requires such important questions be taken into consideration lest you risk losing more than you will gain.
There are 118 million households in the US with investable assets. However, almost 100 million don’t have enough to justify the expensive process of hiring a financial advisor who can help them make wise investments and prevent losses. The result is that there is a huge percentage of the population with no real place to turn for help.
Wealthminder is heralding an easier and cheaper way of finding advisors to suit all your financial planning needs.
About the Startup
Rich Ellinger, founder of Wealthminder, is a serial entrepreneur. A Computer Science graduate from Stanford, he started his career as a developer at Oracle before moving onto the startup world. He co-founded Saba Software in 1997 and helped grow the company to a 500 person, $100 million, publicly traded company in 3 years. Most recently, he was the COO of Webs.com which was acquired for $117.5 million in late 2011.
“I was one of those teenagers who read the business section and the stock pages and I’ve always had an interest in personal finance and investing”, says Rich. After selling his last company he decided to dive into the financial sector and create solutions using technology. “Studies show 70% of Americans are currently off-track with respect to their financial goals. Our fundamental mission is to help solve that problem by connecting people to advisors and empowering them to solve it for themselves.”
Wealthminder is basically a slick SaaS package geared towards simplifying financial planing. It is a marketplace where individuals can find financial advisors according to their needs and budget (advisors can also sign up to offer their services). The service partners with fee-only financial advisors and offers transparent pricing, bypassing costly brokers and middlemen.
About their Plans
There aren’t many companies with the same offerings as Wealthminder but Wealthfront, Betterment, PersonalCapital and LearnVest are some of the players in the financial planning field.
Wealthminder is geared towards US customers and anyone with investable assets is a potential customer. As of late 2011, there were $27 trillion in investable asset in the US. It’s a huge market. “We believe the opportunity for what we are doing is north of $10 billion in potential revenue. Capturing 1% market share would make us a $100 million company”, says Rich, confident in his company’s success.
There are plans for charging a transaction fee on each project consummated in the marketplace and a monthly/annual fee per client for advisors who use the software. For now, the software is free for use.
Visit their website for more details.
