Ep 128: Wesley Belden ~ Risk, Curiosity & Financial Liberation

Transcript

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Truth and Transcendence brought to you by BeingSpace with Katherine Llewellyn.

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Truth and Transcendence, episode 128, with special guest Wesley Belden.

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Now, if you haven't come across Wesley, he is a former investment analyst turned FinTech entrepreneur.

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In 2018, he co-founded Raise Financial, a FinTech company whose family of products aimed to help millennials and Gen Z invest long term for their children and themselves.

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The company's first product, raise Education, formerly known as Scholar Raise, streamlines 529 college savings accounts set up and enables parents to easily ask friends and family members to contribute through shareable links, which I think is a lovely idea.

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Last year, wesley began building their second product, raise Investment, which aims to help millennials and Gen Z invest more effectively in the stock market.

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So why did I invite Wesley?

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Well, in these interesting times, to say the least, many of us are pivoting, zigging, zagging, whatever.

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Some of us are struggling In amongst the conversations about inner work and inner truth and various approaches to transcendence, I felt it would be highly relevant to include something quite pragmatic.

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So I think it's great how Wesley has used his curiosity and imagination to come up with structures that help people with some of their financial challenges, and this episode is coming out first thing in the new year, which is obviously a time when some of us are bemoaning the fact that we've spent far too much money and what do we do now?

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But a lot of us are saying let's look at a fresh start, let's look at what we want to do in the new year.

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So I thought this would be a great conversation to ease us into 2024.

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So, wesley, thank you so much for coming on the show.

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Catherine, thank you so much for that intro.

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That was beautiful and I'm so happy to be here.

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Fantastic.

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So in the prequel we talked about, I asked Wesley what's been a kind of major theme for you that's helped you to do what you're now doing and that's really motivated you?

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And he said curiosity, which I thought was which I became curious immediately about that.

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So that's really our theme for today, curiosity, and it's going to weave back into some of what I've just said in the introduction, and I think it's.

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I think curiosity is something that's always very important for all of us, but particularly at the moment when we are, if you like, in a state of recovery after a few very difficult years for most of us.

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And curiosity is a highly creative superpower that human beings have, and when we're not curious, we can get stuck in preconceptions and self-limiting beliefs and all sorts of things like that.

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So I just felt it be refreshing and interesting to explore curiosity today.

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So, wesley, let me kick off by going to the root of things and saying can you remember when you first recognized that curiosity was something really important and interesting to you?

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Oh, that is a really, really good question.

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I think specific in it always kind of felt like this driving force when I was young to kind of move me out of this room, move me out of the house, move me out of where I was, to see what was next, to see what was out there.

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I think the crystallization moment I think it was my aunt, geneva, I remember was reading me a bedtime story.

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I must have been super young, probably pre-kindergarten and something like that, and she read me this story and it was a story about an astronaut.

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And I remember looking at the picture and I'd never thought or understood that you had to be something when you grew up.

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But in that moment neither of I wanted to grow up to be something.

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I wanted to be an astronaut.

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And it was because of this drawing in the book and they had the astronaut.

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I think he was in a spacewalk, but there was like this big black expanse behind the astronaut.

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And I remember looking at that and thinking to myself what is out there, what is in that black expanse, what is beyond this drawing of this astronaut?

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I want to find out.

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And so that was kind of this common thread or theme of always wanting to find out what was out there, find out why things were, the nature of things, why they look and feel and behave this way.

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I mean every kid always asks you know, can I do this?

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And their mom says no and they say, well, why not, you know?

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And I feel like that's such a common thing for young people.

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I think we kind of lose connection with that as we grow and we begin to accept more and more things from a functional perspective.

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I mean, I can't question the nature of everything, like why my coffee cup works today.

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Sometimes I was going to put coffee in it and go to work.

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But I think, kind of keeping in touch with that to always have, you know, I think, curiosity stitched over at least the very important things in life.

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So you're really kind of looking at your decisions on a regular basis and understanding what the nature of them are and how they serve you.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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And yeah, I know what you mean about.

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Children are naturally curious, but some children are more curious than others or more sort of overtly curious.

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Were you kind of unusually curious or were you just the same sort of curiousness as all the other kids?

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I don't know.

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My guess is I was probably more curious.

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I know I was.

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My parents had trouble keeping me in the house from a very early age, so I had a tendency to kind of wander off a lot.

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So maybe that was that curiosity.

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I'm from a big family, I'm seven of nine and that was, I think, something that stood out about me compared to my siblings, perhaps at least anecdotally from my parents I don't have a lot of data from my childhood, but my inclination is that probably Well, maybe because you were curious.

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you were constantly moving forward.

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Sometimes people who are very curious don't necessarily have a lot of memories of earlier life because, as you say, they're out the house, they're off exploring.

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I have a lot of memories from childhood, but not necessarily like comparative memories.

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A lot of things were done solo, I think at an early age.

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But yeah, I don't know what other kids are like.

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I have two kids.

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I have a daughter who's six and a son who's four, and they're both curious.

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My daughter is definitely, I think, more curious and you try and figure out which component of that is age-based versus personality-based, but she seems like it's amazing.

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She has so many questions and I love it, so it's cool to stay connected and see that.

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But just looking at my two children, there definitely is a variability, I think, in the curiosity.

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That's really interesting, because a lot of parents are frightened of curiosity.

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They're frightened of the child asking a question they can't answer or asking a question they don't want to answer or whatever.

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I was encouraged to be curious when I was a child myself, and my father and mother actually were both extremely curious people, which some people found annoying and irritating because they were always asking questions and sort of going outside the norm, whereas other people wanted to just settle down and do the same thing we did last Friday all the time.

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So how did that transpire then, as you went through life, and what were you curious about?

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Can you give us a bit of a flavour of what it was like for you, being somebody who was really very curious and interested in following that and getting out the house and finding out about what's really going on?

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I think it made learning a lot easier because you are interested.

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Whenever you're interested in something, I think you tend to pick it up faster and quicker.

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There's that Japanese idea of ikegi, which is find what you're interested in, find what you're good at, find what somebody will pay you for.

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That gives you this intersection of fulfilling life.

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So everything.

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My dad was a horse veterinarian, so I grew up going to work with him a lot, so I got to really spend a lot of time thinking about the science and even the three-dimensional imagery of looking at x-rays of horses.

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An x-ray is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object and it's ordered, the information is encoded in shading, essentially.

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So from a young age I remember developing these x-rays and then also trying to learn how to read them.

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That was an interesting thing to really look at.

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That ignited and I am asking all of these questions specifically about the natural world being outside as much.

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It really ignited this passion for science, biology, physics, all of these things that I really went down like a rabbit hole for most of my childhood and early adulthood.

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It was just this idea of really trying to understand the nature of the world, to understand the nature of how things worked and fit.

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It was in college when I think I started realizing, towards the end of my college career, my undergraduate career, that it was time to start really applying these ideas of academia, the approaches to problem solving and understanding things, to something that would actually move the needle, something that would actually have an impact and would be like getting back to that Ikegi idea that would be something that the world would want and that would pay for, essentially.

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And so, looking at these things, always trying to reduce it to first principles or understand the basic elements of things, I started looking at our world, I started looking at how things fit together and it really seemed to me that economics, monetary systems, finance, that is really the language, for better or worse, that our world is written in.

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It is the answer to many questions, it is the source of power, it is the source of control, it is the source of freedom, of so many different components of life and being able to understand, to speak that language, to be able to wield that power.

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It seemed like a really important perspective to go, a direction to go.

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And so I retasked myself with understanding that space, understanding how these things fit together and really understanding how you can wield these systems to achieve a goal that is desired or directed towards it.

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That's really interesting.

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So it wasn't that you started off with an interest in finance.

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It was that, through your explorations of understanding how the world works, you came to the conclusion of the observation that finance, or money, is a very high leverage aspect of how the world works.

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Yeah, and so I remember gosh.

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I remember in high school taking an economics course.

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I thought it was just incredibly interesting, so I've always been interested in everything.

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To be honest, I think the exercise is to really focus on directing your energies towards something.

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Otherwise you wind up having, I think, too wide of a field and you don't necessarily get something done.

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I think that was kind of like the lesson that I learned in college.

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The thing that I really developed was understanding this and understanding that you have to pick something when looking at the impact of it.

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The idea was to become a researcher or a physician, and I was looking at that and saying, if I don't do that, all of these kids that I'm leading the library with in the middle of the night when they shut it down, they will take my spot in medical school, they will take my spot as a researcher.

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Will the world miss me in that role?

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I was confident that I would be a great physician.

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I was confident that I would be a fantastic researcher.

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I don't know that I would be the one that changes something, and I think that was kind of the idea of saying that in the nature of this.

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It really is in many ways, kind of like startup, the startup world where you focus all of your energies on this one long shot and it's basically your entire career and it works or it doesn't, whereas when you move into something else, it's less like that right, you're going to have a career that spans a long period of time and there's many kind of cracks at it.

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And so when I looked at it and I thought about how to make an impact in the world, how to change things, hopefully for the better, looking at these different avenues, that really seemed like the one that touches more things, more spaces, right.

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So there was looking at Jonas Salk, the guy that created the polio vaccine.

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There was somebody that looked at him and said this crazy idea is worth our backing, it's worth our money.

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And, yes, there was this brilliant man who came up with this contrarian idea about how to create this vaccine.

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But there was also an institution that backed him that was funded by people that saw the utility in this research and took a gamble on it, and that seemed like a much more unique and expansive way to kind of look at making an impact in multiple different areas and understanding how that all fits together.

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Yeah, so that's about doing something new, isn't it?

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That's about doing something that otherwise might not take place, which is interesting.

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So did something happen when you were at college that brought home to you this notion of, okay, I could just keep being interested in everything.

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But I actually want to make some sort of a difference, because some people are curious, become kind of polymaths and just become really brilliant at everything and don't necessarily do anything with it.

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But that sounds like a very strong development that happened there, when you went from somebody who was very, very curious to somebody who was intent on making some sort of application that would be different and new and make a difference.

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Sure, yeah.

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So I think college was the first time in my life that I really had any free time.

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So my life all the way up to that point it was kind of always, you know, work, work, work, school, school, school.

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There never really was any time.

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I remember I took like a month off, like the summer, between my junior and senior year and that was like the first time that I ever really had, and by the time I was probably like two weeks.

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It just felt like.

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It felt like it was probably the first time that I think I ever really had a I want to say, open calendar.

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I had no real responsibilities and I think that was kind of when I sat down and looked at what was going on, looked at my life, looked at what I was doing, what trajectory was on, how I felt about it.

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I never really actually sat down and thought about how I felt about things.

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It was kind of always just, you know, chasing the dopamine of learning something new or, you know, balancing that with the responsibilities that I had to keep track of.

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So this was kind of the first time.

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It was just that moment to breathe or take a pause, kind of much like during the holidays and around like life's milestones of the new year.

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This was kind of that moment where, for the first time in my life, I had a moment to pause, to think, to reflect.

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And then I had, you know, my upcoming graduation from college, which was kind of the milestone on the horizon.

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So, thinking about this, what I wanted to do, how I felt about things, and you know this idea that pretty soon, you know, it's not going to be about my responsibilities of work in school, it's going to be about my responsibility of building a life, a direction and a thesis about what I want this all to mean at the end, what I want this to do, where I want to go.

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And so that was kind of, I think, the real focus of saying, okay, let's actually look at how we feel about this direction or path we're on and decide whether or not we want to do this.

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And that was kind of the catalyst.

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But the curiosity is still there.

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I indulge myself in many of these things I can.

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It's about the focus, about like I go to work every day, working on this one thing, but I allow myself the ability to, you know, learn about other things.

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Absolutely, and go on podcasts and meet people, sure.

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All that sort of thing.

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But it also sounds like you had quite a well-developed sense of responsibility from quite early on, would you say that's true?

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Again, I wonder if that is true or if it was just the nature of my life moving in that direction.

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I don't know that I ever sat down and thought to myself you've got to be responsible.

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I probably did.

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But it was really more.

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The long lines of life creeped and became more expansive, I'm doing all of these things.

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And then I had college too.

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It wasn't necessarily like I sat down and said, okay, I've got to do all of these hard things together simultaneously.

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It was really more just adding things to the plate.

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I don't know.

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I guess there really has always been I'm thinking about it always.

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I guess there is a responsibility there, an idea of wanting to do more or see more.

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Maybe it comes back to that curiosity of seeing how is this going to play out.

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But also a lot of it was being young and trying to figure out how to pay for my life, how to make my life work, how to make all of these things that I want to do possible.

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I think there was that understanding of, and then that almost leads into how economics works, how capitalism works.

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You have these inputs of control for these outputs of desire and figuring out how to match those two things up.

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Yeah, yeah, fascinating.

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It's that thing about that.

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We grow up a certain way and we've got certain aspects to us, but that's just the way we are and we don't necessarily think about it.

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Then we're having a conversation with somebody and someone says oh, you seem to have quite a well-developed sense of responsibility.

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Oh do I?

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Oh, I guess maybe Maybe I do, I don't know.

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It's a really interesting thing about being a human being.

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I often think that some of the most interesting things about a person are the things that that person doesn't even think about because to them it's completely natural.

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It's just a natural, normal thing, I think, to most people when you go to college.

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A lot of people when they go to college, they think that is a trigger to be irresponsible, at least some of the time.

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I definitely had those moments, Catherine.

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I'm glad to hear it I definitely had those moments.

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I thought you did.

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You came out having with this understanding around money and the relationship between money and the way the world works.

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How do things go from there?

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How do things progress from there?

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I went to work for an investment firm.

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We were invested from, owned by, an insurance company.

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It was really really fascinating stuff.

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An amazing company.

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So much mentorship there.

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I learned so much so fast.

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I was there.

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It was right when the 0809 recession hit.

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It was like this trial by fire you got to see a lot of things when you get to see what it means when things go horrendously wrong.

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I think it really set me up or tempered me, I don't know In my career.

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I actually said this the other day to a friend of mine.

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I was like how many once in a lifetime financial crises am I going to see in one career?

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You think about how this all got.

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There's the O8 crisis, there's the pandemic, I don't know.

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Anyway, but that was a really cool place to get to understand the world as it sits.

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The company that I work for, american Money Management.

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It's owned by a great American insurance.

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They really believe strongly in mentorship.

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They believe strongly in developing their people.

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I think I'm the only person ever in the world to not start a career there and finish their career there.

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Everyone wants to stay.

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It's a great company, but it really helped develop me, exposed me to things.

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At that point I was doing credit analysis for investment in subprime corporate bank debt we would look at and it's really boring stuff for a lot of people but we would look at companies and they were trying to borrow money to expand or do these things.

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What was really fascinating about this for me was the way that the economic system was able to take these large sums of money and then whack them up into smaller pieces and then disperse them to different investment groups.

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This is what made it possible for I don't know, say something like a company like Neiman Marcus to get access to $5 billion in financing.

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No singular bank or lender is ever going to give them that much money, but if you give them that much money and then divide $2 million into this investment firm, $4 million into that investment firm, you shed the risk.

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The idea is that you now have created an opportunity for this company to do something that normally they wouldn't be able to do.

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It was this idea of creative finance.

00:22:25.025 --> 00:22:42.606
I mean, sometimes it goes a ride, but it was an interesting thing to look at and see how you could basically engineer this solution to really help this company achieve an end For me personally being able to look at these companies.

00:22:42.666 --> 00:23:02.384
Basically every week I would get to know three or four companies intensely and then I would get together with my colleagues and I would learn about the three or four companies that they looked at and so at the end of the week you had this idea of 15 or 20 companies that you now really knew about and you understood what they were doing, what was going on with them.

00:23:02.384 --> 00:23:06.525
It was really an interesting time, an exciting time.

00:23:06.525 --> 00:23:10.104
It was a really great time in life.

00:23:10.104 --> 00:23:13.844
At the same time I was going to school in the evenings to get my MBA.

00:23:13.844 --> 00:23:19.506
So it was a tiring time but it was a fun time.

00:23:19.914 --> 00:23:30.567
But you're not afraid to do the work by the sounds of it as well, and that's something which I think is another important element.

00:23:30.567 --> 00:23:41.207
I remember when I was much younger it seemed to me that people were much more willing to get down and do the work on average than people are now.

00:23:41.207 --> 00:23:58.623
There's more of a sense now of people wanting to do a bit of work and get a result quickly, not necessarily really invest the time and energy and effort into achieving something or learning whatever they need to learn.

00:23:58.623 --> 00:24:06.689
So that's another quality that you seem to have, that willingness to get stuck in and do the work.

00:24:08.998 --> 00:24:14.147
Yeah, I think maybe a lot of times that comes down to nothing is really done alone anymore.

00:24:14.147 --> 00:24:16.900
Everything is done in teams.

00:24:16.900 --> 00:24:22.722
There's support groups, for example, having mentorship at this company.

00:24:22.722 --> 00:24:37.623
So at that point it's hard to look at something and say I'm going to put in this one input and I'm going to get this output, because it's not just you, it's the entire team around you, it's your network, your group, your people.

00:24:37.623 --> 00:24:41.063
So I think that has to shift the way that things are.

00:24:41.736 --> 00:24:58.586
Even in science, when you think about things like the Large Hadron Collider, where they were looking at the Higgs boson, this is this massive team that took decades to build this, once in a lifetime machine, and there's thousands of scientists I don't know.

00:24:58.586 --> 00:25:06.221
So I think, looking at this stuff, we need to change really our expectations of what needs to come from our singular inputs.

00:25:06.221 --> 00:25:16.707
Our singular input is one of many that's required to achieve a goal, and I think this idea has really allowed us to start thinking about larger goals.

00:25:16.707 --> 00:25:45.365
So my goal can be to get up and go to the gym this morning, but if it's me and a thousand people like me working towards a singular direction, why then the goal is a lot bigger than getting to the gym before work, and I think that's a really important distinction about how our society has shifted and really what makes us human is the idea to work together in a collaborative way to achieve an idea that starts out as an idea and then becomes a reality.

00:25:45.685 --> 00:25:53.019
Yeah, I think that's such a beautiful point, because that is one of the aspects of being human that we can pull on, isn't it?

00:25:53.019 --> 00:26:02.923
And we can create so much more when we work collectively on it, and so you were obviously very connected to that at that point.

00:26:02.923 --> 00:26:05.319
So what happened from there?

00:26:06.535 --> 00:26:14.884
So I was looking at all these companies and I would say, wow, this company is really doing a great job here, but they're missing out on this opportunity.

00:26:14.884 --> 00:26:28.842
And so where I was at that space in my career, basically at the end of the week I would say yes or no, we invest or we don't there was no position because we would be like a small part of that right Like getting back to this huge debt deal.

00:26:28.842 --> 00:26:30.266
We would own like a small piece of it.

00:26:30.266 --> 00:26:34.003
We don't really have a lot of say in the matters of operating the company.

00:26:34.003 --> 00:26:42.964
So I decided that I wanted to kind of get out and do something where I could actually have ideas, share them with leadership and then help them enact them.

00:26:42.964 --> 00:26:49.840
So I got into consulting and so I did that for goodness, I guess about three years, and it was great.

00:26:49.840 --> 00:27:01.083
I got to really work with a lot of interesting companies, a lot of interesting founders, solve some interesting problems and really kind of recommend things, help implement them and see how they work.

00:27:01.083 --> 00:27:03.881
I did that for a few years.

00:27:03.881 --> 00:27:10.145
I really enjoyed it, and then I decided that, ok, well, now I want to do this stuff right.

00:27:10.255 --> 00:27:21.539
So it's kind of like this journey where it was like I'm looking at something and I have no control over it.

00:27:21.539 --> 00:27:27.019
I'm looking at something and I have some input, and then I'm looking at something and I'm actually going to go do it.

00:27:27.019 --> 00:27:29.138
I liken it to like.

00:27:29.138 --> 00:27:38.863
I think the entrepreneur's journey it starts with saying something to the order of like, looking at something and saying, well, that's dumb.

00:27:38.863 --> 00:27:43.509
And then the next step is saying, well, that's dumb, here's what they should do.

00:27:43.509 --> 00:27:47.522
And then the final step is, well, that's dumb, here's what I'm going to do.

00:27:47.522 --> 00:27:56.784
And so it's kind of like that journey of discovery or I guess it starts with criticism to then discovering a solution, to then implementing a solution.

00:27:56.784 --> 00:28:03.003
I kind of look at this as that almost that three-act sort of art.

00:28:03.806 --> 00:28:04.886
I understand Right?

00:28:04.886 --> 00:28:06.068
Yes, that makes perfect sense.

00:28:06.068 --> 00:28:09.825
In a way, it's a version of the creative cycle, isn't it?

00:28:09.825 --> 00:28:23.095
It's a version of actually showing up to create something, and interestingly, in your story you've spoken about a whole series of steps that sort of seemed to follow naturally.

00:28:23.095 --> 00:28:29.484
Of course they followed naturally one from the other, but of course your particular path is unique to you and different from anyone else's.

00:28:30.434 --> 00:28:31.598
It was all part of the plan.

00:28:35.541 --> 00:28:46.145
Well, that's an interesting point actually how much of this was something that you sort of planned before and how much of it was something stuff that sort of evolved as you went along.

00:28:46.994 --> 00:28:56.959
That's a really good question and it's kind of hard to really parse through it through the lens of results and then understand how much you want to actually own.

00:28:56.959 --> 00:29:00.559
I don't know.

00:29:00.559 --> 00:29:01.738
I think it was really kind of.

00:29:01.738 --> 00:29:09.195
I think I've always had long or not always, I would say since kind of that epiphany in college.

00:29:09.236 --> 00:29:16.124
I've always had long arching goals and you know where you are and you know where you want to be.

00:29:16.124 --> 00:29:22.742
It's the steps in between that maybe you're a little bit foggier and you're trying to figure out how to fill in those gaps.

00:29:22.742 --> 00:29:31.604
And I think as you fill in those gaps, like that end place that you want to be, of course it's informed by what you've learned as you've filled in these gaps.

00:29:31.604 --> 00:29:33.861
And so I think that destination kind of changes.

00:29:33.861 --> 00:29:41.125
So I think as I moved through the journey more, where I am now is kind of an inevitability.

00:29:41.125 --> 00:29:47.575
But when you look at the beginning, like there was an idea of where I wanted to be, it wasn't haphazardly.

00:29:47.575 --> 00:29:49.580
Like there was an idea and a goal.

00:29:49.580 --> 00:29:52.280
I don't know that it was this.

00:29:52.280 --> 00:30:00.903
I think this is kind of something that moved or crystallized as things came into vision, as you begin to understand more of what's out there.

00:30:00.903 --> 00:30:08.220
I think that's probably more accurate of what happened, but it's really never.

00:30:11.875 --> 00:30:13.901
You can't control what you're going to learn.

00:30:13.901 --> 00:30:15.756
You can't control what you're going to find.

00:30:15.756 --> 00:30:21.940
What you can control is what motivates you, and I think having that far-reaching goal it's what motivates you.

00:30:21.940 --> 00:30:24.256
What gets you off the couch, is what gets you out the door.

00:30:24.256 --> 00:30:31.423
But you have to be willing to change what that's going to look like based on what you find right.

00:30:31.423 --> 00:30:40.397
It's like in science before you investigate something, you create a hypothesis and then you develop an experiment to test that hypothesis.

00:30:40.397 --> 00:30:46.461
But you have to be completely prepared to abandon your hypothesis because it was wrong.

00:30:46.461 --> 00:30:48.355
And that's like life.

00:30:48.355 --> 00:30:58.662
You've got to have that hypothesis and that experiment to get you out the door, but when that experiment tells you something different, you have to switch your hypothesis to something else.

00:30:58.662 --> 00:31:07.748
I think that's kind of probably a better description of what it was and I had this vision of here's where I would be in 10 years and here.

00:31:07.768 --> 00:31:07.890
I am.

00:31:07.890 --> 00:31:09.296
Now I get that.

00:31:09.296 --> 00:31:10.492
That's really that's.

00:31:10.492 --> 00:31:11.375
I love it.

00:31:11.375 --> 00:31:37.390
And that kind of reminds me that one of the things about curiosity that sometimes for people is that when they're curious they get less attached to being right about everything, because they're more interested in finding out the next piece of information or the next piece of truth or next understanding than they are in saying no, I've come to this conclusion and it's absolutely right and that's the end of the story, right.

00:31:40.015 --> 00:31:45.163
And that's the idea of being right on this instance or being right directionally.

00:31:45.163 --> 00:31:50.320
And so I think to be right on this one thing is great.

00:31:50.320 --> 00:32:01.898
It's always nice to be right, but I think being right directionally means that you're going to be right on more things in the long term than this singular thing.

00:32:01.898 --> 00:32:22.758
I think if you are unwilling to accept what the data is saying, if the data is saying you're wrong on this and you continue on the direction of not adopting that, if you continue in the direction of believing something that the facts are saying otherwise, then you're directionally going to be wrong, because as you continue on that path, it's based on a bad assumption.

00:32:23.259 --> 00:32:23.881
Yeah, yeah.

00:32:23.881 --> 00:32:48.217
So it's like a dance between getting very connected to what motivates you and going for it and doing the work, along with gathering information and paying attention to that information and allowing it to help you to adjust and modify how you're following your path or what your end point is going to look like.

00:32:48.217 --> 00:32:52.721
So it's almost like the inner and outer thing of it, isn't it?

00:32:52.721 --> 00:33:12.800
Because on the inner side of it is that you remain curious and you remain committed to what matters to you essentially, but the outer side of it is that you're finding out more about what's going on outside of you in the world all the time, and that then naturally affects what your end point is going to look like.

00:33:12.800 --> 00:33:16.044
Does that match what you're saying?

00:33:16.084 --> 00:33:16.970
Yeah, 100%.

00:33:16.970 --> 00:33:18.817
It's very well said.

00:33:18.817 --> 00:33:26.834
It's the idea of being right about a big thing means that you have to accept being wrong about some little things.

00:33:26.834 --> 00:33:31.681
It's like figuring out how to frame that.

00:33:31.681 --> 00:33:52.218
Like I want my daughter to be an athlete, I didn't say I want her to be a tennis star, and so it's the idea of saying I think there's lots to be learned about sport, about athleticism, about using your body in three-dimensional space and understanding how you fit with either your opponent or the world and understanding your body in it.

00:33:52.218 --> 00:33:58.519
I think that's important, but I'm not going to hem my child into what sport that's going to be.

00:33:58.519 --> 00:34:11.905
So I think it might be tennis, but I'm willing to be wrong about that, because what I'm actually trying to solve for isn't producing a tennis star, it's about producing an athlete that understands their body better, right.

00:34:14.032 --> 00:34:20.416
And when you say it that way, it doesn't sound like you want someone who's going to be like a performance star.

00:34:20.416 --> 00:34:29.583
It sounds like you want her to be somebody who is healthy and strong and has that relationship with her body.

00:34:29.583 --> 00:34:34.039
Which is a different goal, isn't it?

00:34:34.789 --> 00:34:38.800
But then that helps you, I think grow up to be a performance star in the world.

00:34:38.800 --> 00:34:57.056
So it's giving her the tools that she needs to have her journey of discovery and say here's where I want my journey to go, here's where I want my world to go, and I have the tools to start filling in those steps and then reevaluating and then pivoting and moving as I move through it.

00:34:57.077 --> 00:35:01.077
Yeah, that sounds like you're an interesting father.

00:35:01.077 --> 00:35:03.675
Watch this space and see how she evolves.

00:35:03.675 --> 00:35:12.755
So I suppose that thing you just said about when you've got that relationship with your body that can help you be a performance star in your life.

00:35:12.755 --> 00:35:31.157
That raised a question for me, which is as part of what you were finding out earlier on in life, did you discover stuff about what supports you personally to be happy and to be successful and about your personal kind of practice of supporting yourself?

00:35:31.157 --> 00:35:33.958
Did you find stuff out that was helpful for you?

00:35:35.210 --> 00:35:38.398
Yeah, I think some things early on.

00:35:38.398 --> 00:35:42.097
Exercise was really important to me early.

00:35:42.097 --> 00:35:50.358
I mean early, when I said probably, I would say college is when I really kind of connected with that and it kind of always stuck with me.

00:35:50.358 --> 00:35:56.922
It seemed like the way of keeping myself in shape was how I was able to maybe produce more outputs.

00:35:56.922 --> 00:36:06.443
And then, as I started looking at this and saying, okay, this is becoming an increasingly larger part of my life, I need to find a way to make this more interesting.

00:36:06.443 --> 00:36:13.255
And that's when I started getting into, I started learning some new sports, which was really kind of a cool thing to learn.

00:36:14.789 --> 00:36:54.233
But yeah, I think for me, a lot of the things that help us support me in my life developing relationships, having good relationships, I think curiosity, learning new things, always keeping my mind active in that sense in a down time and then getting a good sweat in, I think some sort of like there's the idea we work so hard in this knowledge base, this knowledge work, this mental work, and then there needs to be the physical representation of that, of the truest sense of work, whether that's gardening, building something, whether that's sport, whether that's training for something, and these things always help.

00:36:54.233 --> 00:37:04.657
And then sometimes you just need to go out for a pint with the boys you know kind of helps, will offer a little bit of steam.

00:37:04.657 --> 00:37:10.760
But finding these ways to really kind of, I found that to be a really good balance and mix.

00:37:11.201 --> 00:37:12.222
Yeah, beautiful, thank you.

00:37:12.222 --> 00:37:21.000
Well, thank you so much for sharing all these things about yourself, and we're going to come on now to talk a bit about these things that you are doing.

00:37:21.000 --> 00:37:39.961
But all of that information is so interesting because it creates a much more 3D relationship with this whole theme of curiosity, because you kind of mentioned a whole series of things there that have occurred in your life or things you've learned and discovered out of your natural curiosity.

00:37:39.961 --> 00:37:45.992
I mean, we could go back and analyze where that came from, but we're not going to do that right now.

00:37:45.992 --> 00:37:48.231
But thank you very much.

00:37:48.231 --> 00:37:53.501
It's really interesting and kind of colors in the picture.

00:37:53.501 --> 00:38:04.893
So would you like to tell us a bit about these offerings that you are now put together and this new one that you're now creating, and how those occurred to you, how those came into being?

00:38:05.849 --> 00:38:06.713
Yeah.

00:38:06.713 --> 00:38:10.418
So our first product we launched our shareable college savings fund.

00:38:10.418 --> 00:38:27.012
It kind of happened when a lot of my friends were beginning to have their first children, they started to start families and I remember looking at this and because my undergrad was in state, I basically left with zero debt.

00:38:27.012 --> 00:38:28.798
Not, basically I did.

00:38:28.798 --> 00:38:35.079
I left with zero debt and then the company that I worked for paid for my MBA, so I left there with no debt.

00:38:36.972 --> 00:38:41.818
And again, this isn't me being smart, this was just the luck of the draw.

00:38:41.818 --> 00:38:46.742
These things happened and they made this huge difference in my life.

00:38:46.742 --> 00:38:53.795
They gave me the freedom to kind of pursue things, to have more freedom to really look at where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.

00:38:53.795 --> 00:39:08.960
And so when I started looking at this and reading so much about how there's all this student debt out there, in America we have 1.7 trillion outstanding student debt and this is owned by I think it's 73 million Americans.

00:39:08.960 --> 00:39:31.869
So there's this huge swath of America, america's young, that are hindered by this insurmountable amount of debt and that, how it's things, the implications of deciding where you can live, putting off starting a family, getting married, investing in your future, all these negative externalities that are putting my generation and the generation behind me behind schedule.

00:39:31.869 --> 00:39:42.559
It's making it harder and harder to get on a path, and so when I looked at this and I thought about how big of an impact having no debt was for me, I was like, okay, well, what's out here?

00:39:42.559 --> 00:39:44.697
So for young parents, what should they be doing?

00:39:45.110 --> 00:39:48.478
And we discovered in America we have this thing called the 529 College Savings Plan.

00:39:48.478 --> 00:40:06.882
It's a weird name, but it's named after section 529 of our tax code, and basically what it means is you can invest money into an account for your child's college savings or your college education, and basically that money grows tax-free when you use those funds for college.

00:40:06.882 --> 00:40:08.657
They've since expanded what you can use it for.

00:40:08.657 --> 00:40:11.798
You can use vocational training, you can funnel into your kid's retirement account.

00:40:11.798 --> 00:40:28.733
It's an incredible program, but what we were seeing is that the audience that it was intended for, which was parents who were going to have difficulty paying for college in the future, they weren't utilizing this plan, and the reason why they weren't utilizing it was they were paying off their own student loans.

00:40:28.733 --> 00:40:31.146
They were trying to get on track for their retirement.

00:40:31.146 --> 00:40:40.838
Maybe they were saving for a down payment on a house, but at the end of the month, there was no discretionary income to pile into an expense that you may or may not have in 18 years.

00:40:40.838 --> 00:40:53.898
And so what we're seeing is that young parents, they just weren't doing it, they weren't saving for it, even though they had the drive and the want and the desire, and it was always catalyzed with the fact that every month they're paying their student loans and they would see this and they would want to do this.

00:40:53.898 --> 00:41:01.998
So we looked at it and said, okay, well, we have this incredible tool, the 529 College Savings Plan, but it's being underutilized by its audience.

00:41:01.998 --> 00:41:03.634
What is holding them back?

00:41:03.634 --> 00:41:06.018
And that's kind of what showed us this part.

00:41:06.018 --> 00:41:08.336
There was no discretionary income there to put into it.

00:41:09.030 --> 00:41:17.601
And so the hypothesis was what if we make these really easy to create and, instead of you funding it, we make it easy for you to ask your friends and family to contribute?

00:41:17.601 --> 00:41:31.219
So you know, surrounding life's milestones birthdays, you know all these different things Christmas, new Year's, graduations, grandma and grandpa, your college roommate, you know your fraternity brother they can invest money directly into this account.

00:41:31.219 --> 00:41:33.315
It gets invested and grows over time.

00:41:33.315 --> 00:41:35.795
So it really was just a passion project.

00:41:35.795 --> 00:41:40.036
It kind of blew up because there is that viral component to it.

00:41:40.036 --> 00:41:43.835
For our audience to be successful, they have to invite friends and family.

00:41:43.835 --> 00:41:47.018
So, as a result, our audience really started, you know, exploding.

00:41:47.018 --> 00:41:52.135
But the number that really stood out to us was that our plans had 10 times as much gifted contributions in them.

00:41:52.135 --> 00:41:58.797
So we sat down with this number and look at any time you see a 10X, you've got to give it pause and really understand what's happening here.

00:41:58.797 --> 00:42:04.501
And it was this realization that we didn't invent college savings.

00:42:04.501 --> 00:42:10.798
We looked at the audience and said what is holding them back and how can we make this tool work for them?

00:42:10.798 --> 00:42:12.630
And that was the aha moment.

00:42:12.769 --> 00:42:23.201
This is the thing that's missing in finance across the board, in consumer finance, there's this idea that finance is all about giving access to financial tools to people, and that's great.

00:42:23.201 --> 00:42:24.543
We've done a good job of that.

00:42:24.543 --> 00:42:29.677
We've done the Robin Hoods, the E-Trades, all these different things, but the tools have remained unchanged.

00:42:29.677 --> 00:42:32.336
The only thing that's different is the access to them.

00:42:32.336 --> 00:42:38.521
So that's not solving the problem, because I've looked at this, I've lived this, I see this.

00:42:38.521 --> 00:42:43.030
It is different for today's millennial and Gen Z investor than it was for my parents.

00:42:43.030 --> 00:42:44.255
It was for their parents.

00:42:44.255 --> 00:42:46.277
It is just completely different.

00:42:46.277 --> 00:42:51.101
The whole picture is different and it requires purpose-built tools, and that's what we do.

00:42:51.101 --> 00:43:01.126
We look at what it means to be a young investor today, what those headwinds are, those challenges, and we innovate and build new products from the ground up to help you achieve your goals.

00:43:02.652 --> 00:43:03.052
Awesome.

00:43:03.052 --> 00:43:05.159
Well, nobody can argue with that.

00:43:05.159 --> 00:43:08.215
So what happened?

00:43:08.215 --> 00:43:16.458
Did you wake up one morning and think right, I'll start a company that does that, and then by the afternoon you've got it all set up?

00:43:16.458 --> 00:43:21.641
Or was there an interesting process of bringing it into being?

00:43:22.291 --> 00:43:25.677
So I don't know if it was interesting or not, but before this I had a company.

00:43:25.677 --> 00:43:29.199
It was called Waffle and what it really set out to be.

00:43:29.199 --> 00:44:04.715
My background in college was sociology and chemistry, at a minor in anthropology, and so I spent a lot of time looking at large data sets, asking questions of it, and I had this idea that if you could look at all the disparate channels that feed your information so think about all your social channels or email, what you're watching on Hulu, all these different things if we could pipe those into one funnel, essentially we would have this more complete picture of who you are, and then we could use that data anonymously, obviously to do research and understanding of individuals and then ultimately train AI models.

00:44:04.715 --> 00:44:09.119
Young first-time founder trying to figure this out.

00:44:09.119 --> 00:44:16.297
We built the MVP and we were getting really interesting feedback on it, but, looking at it where I was, it didn't feel like I was going to be able to raise money.

00:44:16.297 --> 00:44:23.280
So we pivoted into making this a business and so we shifted it to a brand management tool.

00:44:23.280 --> 00:44:25.197
Basically, we would produce this tool.

00:44:25.197 --> 00:44:33.380
Brands could come to us, put in all their feeds, find content that surrounds them, mostly from social, embed that content in their website.

00:44:33.380 --> 00:44:40.418
It seems all rudimentary now, but at the time it was pretty cutting-edge stuff and they could use that content in their website printing materials.

00:44:41.570 --> 00:44:42.775
So I did this for a few years.

00:44:42.775 --> 00:44:45.498
Screw the business and I wake up.

00:44:45.498 --> 00:45:01.041
It actually might have been right around the new year and I'm going in thinking about where I want to go, what I want to do, and I realize that I really dislike consumerism and I can't stand social media, and I was quite literally at the intersection of these two things.

00:45:01.041 --> 00:45:04.217
So that was in the morning.

00:45:04.217 --> 00:45:18.619
I had this epiphany and by the afternoon I decided to make a change, and so I opened up a spreadsheet that I've been keeping in my Google Drive, and I think it had 17 ideas in it that I wanted to explore.

00:45:18.619 --> 00:45:22.541
I spent the next three months really diving deep into these 17 ideas.

00:45:22.541 --> 00:45:23.974
Three of them survived.

00:45:23.974 --> 00:45:36.260
Of the three that survived, and the one that seemed to be most of the times and of an impact was the idea for a shareable college savings fund, and so that was really kind of the catalyst to make that career shift.

00:45:36.260 --> 00:45:40.659
But really it was kind of something that I thought was going to be like a nice project.

00:45:40.659 --> 00:45:43.237
It was going to be something that was going to demonstrate value.

00:45:43.237 --> 00:45:52.699
I didn't necessarily know if it was going to grow into a business, because I didn't know but it seemed important enough to really try to figure it out if it were.

00:45:52.699 --> 00:46:01.338
And we launched it and learned our lessons from our early adopters what their lives looked like, what was going on in their space.

00:46:02.190 --> 00:46:03.092
The pandemic hit.

00:46:03.092 --> 00:46:04.918
We really hit like a growth trajectory.

00:46:04.918 --> 00:46:14.460
At that point it was kind of simultaneous from when we were launching it was when the pandemic was happening and two kids, three dogs at home, so work from home was not really an option.

00:46:14.460 --> 00:46:18.416
So I was going to the office every day and just being kind of lonely.

00:46:18.416 --> 00:46:31.536
In that same timeframe I'm just constantly calling our customers, getting a feel of like what's going on in their lives and what the world looks like, and trying to understand them more and understand how we can help, what we need.

00:46:31.536 --> 00:46:38.077
And one of the things that we kept hearing from our audience was they didn't think they were going to be able to own a home.

00:46:38.077 --> 00:46:43.456
They thought it was unlikely that was ever going to happen and that that was scaring them.

00:46:43.456 --> 00:46:47.675
It was going to hold them back financially in the long term, and so we started really diving into this.

00:46:48.510 --> 00:46:50.557
What are the implications of not owning a home?

00:46:50.557 --> 00:46:56.873
When you look at your monthly budget paying $2,000 in rent versus paying $2,000 in a mortgage it's the same thing.

00:46:56.873 --> 00:46:58.719
It doesn't necessarily impact you.

00:46:58.719 --> 00:47:05.362
Where it impacts you is in 30 years, when you've built via $2,000 a month.

00:47:05.362 --> 00:47:06.695
You've built the equity in this home.

00:47:06.695 --> 00:47:11.119
And so you look at that difference and that's a pretty massive impact.

00:47:11.119 --> 00:47:26.822
But that impact is it's accelerated by the fact that the way that most people buy homes, they go to their bank and they say, hey, I've saved up $40,000, the bank gives them a note for $400,000, they buy a $400,000 asset.

00:47:26.822 --> 00:47:40.760
So when the real estate market for complete lists or ease of mass, let's say math, let's say it goes up 10% this year, you don't earn 10% on your $40,000, you earn 10% on the $400,000.

00:47:40.760 --> 00:47:49.621
And so this is where this sort of investment in a home and building equity in a home really has these long-term positive impacts for your financial position.

00:47:50.690 --> 00:47:54.597

Ep 128: Wesley Belden ~ Risk, Curiosity & Financial Liberation

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