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wealthtech on deck podcast - David Hegarty

Tax-Efficient Investing System for High-Earning Millennials and Gen Z with David Hegarty

For high-earning millennials and Gen Z, financial success often comes hand in hand with a perplexing challenge — how to make the most of their income. With their eyes set on the future, they know that making smart choices can make their hard-earned money work for them. By harnessing the power of a tax-efficient investment system, this young and savvy generation can pave the way toward a future with financial security, opportunity, and the freedom to live life on their own terms.

In this episode, Jack talks with David Hegarty, Founder & CEO of Playbook, the app for growing money with tax advantages and automation. From his own experiences, David realized that higher-earning millennials and Gen Z earn good money but need to figure out what to do with it. These younger generations also recognize a gap in their financial knowledge and understand that taxes are important to a financial plan. David created Playbook to help this group of individuals automatically put their money in the right places and pay fewer taxes legally.

Recognizing that money stuff can feel hard for most young investors, David talks about why Playbook chose to serve higher-earning millennials and Gen Z, the discoveries David made while building the app, and what Playbook solutions look like.

What David has to say

“It’s hard to beat the market, but it’s easy to beat the tax man. And the best way to build wealth is not to overpay on the taxes on your investments.”

– David Hegarty, Founder & CEO, Playbook

Read the full transcript

Jack Sharry: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us on this week’s edition of WealthTech on Deck. I love talking with people who listen to the marketplace, find out what’s missing or might be falling short, and then apply common sense to solutions that improve the user experience and financial outcomes. In other words, I love a good story where an innovator turns the industry on its head simply by listening and providing what the customer wants. Shocking, shocking stuff. Today we will talk with David Hegarty, otherwise known as Hegs. David is the founder and CEO of Playbook, a very cool and exciting new company. Playbook is a financial app and much more for high earning millennials with a focus on tax optimization. David, welcome to WealthTech on Deck.

David Hegarty: Thank you very much, delighted to be here.

Jack Sharry: So, David, we’ll start with you telling us about Playbook. What is it you guys do? How did you get started? I’d love to hear the backstory of where it all came from. You and I had a chance to talk a little while ago. It’s fascinating story. But please, fill us in. How’d the whole thing get underway?

David Hegarty: Yeah. So you gave the headlines, Playbook is a FinTech app with a focus on on tax optimization. I think philosophically, we believe it’s hard to beat the market, but it’s easy to beat the taxman. And the best way for you to build wealth is to don’t overpay on the taxes on your investments. So that’s kind of an overview of the app. I always describe Playbook as the app I wish I had in my 20s. When I was in my 20s, I was fortunate enough to be earning good money, I was working as a post MBA grad at Microsoft. So I was earning good money, had a healthy savings rate, and I think I was early into Netflix. So I thought I had this like stock picking stuff down. But, I hate to admit it, when I look back now, I was pretty clueless. And a great example of this is, you know, Microsoft offers a really healthy 401k match program. And I didn’t take it. So that was like free money that Microsoft was giving me and I just didn’t take it. Because I didn’t understand it.

Jack Sharry: I’m curious, why didn’t you take it? What held you back?

David Hegarty: I think…

Jack Sharry: It wasn’t arrogance, was it?

David Hegarty: Maybe a little bit of arrogance, right. So a little bit of like, I didn’t really understand 401k, I didn’t really understand the tax benefits of it. Additionally, I was kind of locking this money up in Fidelity or something where you know, there was restricted mutual funds or indexes I could buy. So maybe there’s a little bit of arrogance about like, I wasn’t able to, you know, purchase individual stocks. But I think mostly it was because I just didn’t understand it. Since then, personal finance and wealth building has been a hobby and a passion of mine. And I know this stuff now. It’s something I’m good at now. And I think I was just under the false impression that everyone gets good at it over time. And maybe because I was new to the US, I didn’t really understand the tax advantaged accounts that well. But it turns out, you know, I was wrong about that, too. I think a lot of people don’t really understand taxes, they don’t really understand finances. And this hit home for me when I started working at Atomic. Atomic is the, the venture studio where we incubated Playbook. And when I joined, I actually didn’t really have a business idea at the time. And I started kicking the tires on a couple of different ideas, one of which was life insurance. So I started talking to people about life insurance. And I’m talking to, for the most part, well paid Silicon Valley people. And a conversation about life insurance quickly leads to a conversation about finances. And I just had this aha moment that had these people also don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to finances, but kind of a big paycheck… a lot of the misunderstandings. And I think that was insight number one that kind of kicked off Playbook. And it’s just because you earn good money, it doesn’t necessarily mean you know what to do with that money, which feels really obvious in hindsight, but I don’t think everyone kind of gets that out of the gate.

Jack Sharry: So talk a little bit about your target audience. When we chatted, we first chatted and you were sort of giving this backstory, you talked about the fact that it’s a very specific sort of target audience, high income earners of a certain age, younger, on the younger side, of course. And frankly, as smart as folks are, who have high incomes and are young, there’s a lot that’s sort of just confusing and scary and they don’t know what the hell to do. So, and a lot of what you’ve done is really making it simple to do the right thing. So fill us in.

David Hegarty: Yeah, exactly. So our sweet spot is kind of 25 to 40 year olds earning more than $100,000, maybe $75,000. So it’s basically kind of the higher earning millennials and Gen Z. What we realized about this, this group of people is you know, when you talk to them, that part about like, just because you earn good money doesn’t mean you know what to do with it. That definitely rings true. And then when you talk to them about kind of what their pain points are, I think number one, which they nearly all say is I want to be smart about finances, I want to understand how it all fits together. And what they then complain about is, every time they go looking for solutions, what they tend to get are point solutions. So if you want to buy stock, you go to Robinhood, if you want to buy crypto, you got to Coinbase. Even those existing firms that kind of build themselves as robo advisors, they’re not really robo advisors, it’s more a robo investor. It’s like a managed, it’s a point solution to a managed, diversified portfolio. But it’s not telling our users you know, this is finance, here are all the different parts of finance, here’s how you use them together to get where you want to go. So there’s definitely a missing gap in their knowledge. But because our users are smart, competent individuals, you know, who are doing pretty well in many other aspects of their lives, they kind of recognize that there’s a gap in their financial knowledge. The second thing is they also recognize that taxes are a really, really important part of a financial plan. Here, the media does a huge service to us. There’s this pretty constant drumbeat about this is how the rich get richer, smart people don’t pay taxes. Look at Peter Thiel avoiding all these taxes on his Facebook investment. And so they recognize that proper tax planning is a really, really important part of a good financial plan. But if they don’t really understand finances, they definitely don’t understand taxes. And the thing about taxes is, you know, it’s the last thing that somebody wants to spend the weekend figuring out, trying to get better on. And so that’s really where we come in and fill that gap.

Jack Sharry: Why don’t you fill our audience in a little bit on how it evolved? Because I think, as I recall, you started by basically encouraging people to take the match, the company match, and I think you… there were a few other things along the way, little relatively easy things that people could do to have more money. And of course, now you’re expanding to include doing tax optimization across multiple accounts, but talk about that evolution. Talk about how things evolved as you, and also how you went about doing the research. I also found that fascinating.

David Hegarty: Yeah, so, you know, so how, how the company evolves, this is the third company that I’ve started. And, you know, I think the perspective I have about building a consumer business is that it’s really important to figure out, firstly, the pain point, and then kind of the solution that fixes that pain point. And a lot of times that’s just kind of uncovering like, what’s that X factor that is the key that, you know, sits into the user’s head, you know, the lock and key for the problem that they have in their head. And so it’s difficult to kind of try and figure out and tease out what that is. So initially, we started doing that by a bunch of different painted door tests on on Facebook. So we would build our landing page, we would run Facebook ads against that landing page. And here we’re trying to figure out like, what is the messaging or the unique value proposition that really gets a user to kind of click on an ad, land on the landing page and give us their contact information. Like, all those different things are quite difficult to do, like, you know, for, particularly for a brand that’s coming from from zero, you need to figure out a messaging that cuts through all the noise of their Facebook feed, Instagram feed, that kind of resonates with an existing problem they have. And then when you come to that landing page, you have to be able to, you know, briefly and succinctly demonstrate to somebody how you can solve that problem that you helped uncover on the, on the Facebook ad. So doing all those things successfully lets you kind of realize what the actual problem is you’re trying to solve for a user. And so that’s, that’s how we, we kind of built Playbook. We’d run Facebook ads, people would land on the landing page, we’d have them sign up, give us an email, phone number, then we’d call them and talk to them. And sort of okay, you signed up, like what attracted you about the ad? What was the pain point that, that you thought it solved? What was it about the solution? And we kept kind of iterating through that to figure out what was the actual pain point we had. And then we worked with some financial advisors to actually workshop solutions with them. So rather than building things in software, initially, we actually kind of did it manually. And what that allowed us to do is, is really kind of figure out like, what was the actual pain point that people had? What was the solution?

Jack Sharry: What did you discover? What did you find out as your… I think you told me, you talked to like, 500 different individuals about this as you’re going along. And what did you find when you talked to all these people? Because I’m sure you learned as you went along. Tell us about that.

David Hegarty: Yeah, I think, I think what we found was that, I think, one, initially when you look at the existing… the landscape of existing companies out there, there was, you know, I kind of divide the market into you know, people earning more than kind of $75,000, maybe people earning less than $75,000. I used to work at Credit Karma. And so I, Credit Karma’s target user probably earning a little bit less than our target user. So I knew that end of the market very well. And there was a lot of innovation in that end of the market between, you know, Credit Karma, Stash, Moneyline, Chime, a bunch of new kind of, kind of banks. And particularly with those solutions, though, there were a number of what I would call a comprehensive solution. So they help people understand their finances, budget effectively, kind of get to cashflow positive on a household basis, and then start investing that money frequently, kind of first, first time investing. So there’s a lot of very good solutions, a lot of innovation, a lot of very good solutions over there. If I looked at kind of the higher earning end of the market, there was much less innovation over there, there were those point solutions that I kind of spoke about. The other thing was there was a bunch of like FinTech applications that targeted people who I describe as people who have finance as a hobby, they love this stuff. So they’re happy investing in like, you know, alternative assets, DeFi, real estate, they maybe over index on, on kind of like stock picking and things like that. So if you were like that, kind of a five out of five on some financial sophistication, there were a bunch of different solutions. But if you weren’t like that, there was actually, there was a big hole in the market where there were not a, there were not many options for you. You could go see a private kind of wealth manager, but you know, those type of people need $2-3 million minimum under, you know, for you to have before they look at you, or you could go you know, work with a financial advisor, but they’re going to charge you $1,000-2,000 to do that. So there was like, there was a big hole there for, for kind of people who are, you know, our average user is 30, is earning about $150,000 a year. Usually has much less than that in net worth, like they’re really at the start of their wealth building journey. And so for that person who is earning good money, saving good money, there, there weren’t a ton of different solutions out there for them.

Jack Sharry: So what does your solution look like? Just to summarize for our audience, essentially, you target that 30 year old, 30 to 40 year old, but 30 year old call it $150,000 earner, has excess cash, not sure what to do with it, finds the whole thing confusing. They don’t want to spend their weekends figuring things out. Hate to pay taxes and figured out that rich people pay less in taxes. That’s sort of your thing, that’s who you’re going after? What do you offer? What is it, what do I get if I sign up for, for Playbook?

David Hegarty: Yeah, great question. So to start, when you sign up for Playbook, we want to figure out how much money you’re leaving on the table effectively. And we do this by asking you a couple of questions about your finances, that allows us to build a financial profile, which tells us kind of what you’re doing now, but also what you’re not doing or what you should be doing, and the difference. And then we quantify the difference between what you’re doing now and what you should be doing. And for most of our users that that’s actually a big number, it’s about $1.3 million in future net worth. It’s because you know, mostly people’s financial knowledge is actually not great. Even if it is great, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. And even just small improvements in what you’re doing, if you compound that over kind of 20-25 years, makes a huge difference in your future net worth. That’s basically the first part, is like we help the user understand, you know, how much money they’re leaving on the table. After that, we’ll get the user to subscribe. After they subscribe, we want to walk them through kind of like three steps of the Playbook onboarding. Step number one is to calculate your optimal tax strategy. So based on your income, marital status, and a couple of other data points, we’ll figure out which tax advantaged accounts you’re eligible for. What are the limits of those accounts? What’s the right order of operations to fill those accounts? Do you need to do anything, you know, more advanced like a backdoor Roth IRA conversion? So that forms your kind of like tax strategy. If you’re missing any of those accounts, we’ll go ahead and open up those accounts for you on Playbook. So that kind of completes step one. Step two is we want to build you a financial plan using the tax strategy is kind of the backbone for the financial plan. So for the financial plan, we want to understand if you’re saving for any short term goals, like a car, or a house, or a wedding, or something like that. We want to help you plan for those things. But we also want to help you understand the trade off between say, getting your house in six years, versus getting… sorry, getting your house in three years versus maybe pushing it back to six years and filling up your tax advantaged accounts in those years as well. So we help you understand the trade off between doing that on your future net worth, and when you might be able to kind of retire early. And so that kind of fills out the financial plan. The goal of doing the financial plan is to make sure that we put as much money as possible into your tax advantaged accounts. So that rounds out kind of part two. Part three is kind of turn on tax efficient investing. So now that you have money in your tax free accounts, or your tax advantaged accounts and your brokerage accounts, we want to make sure that you are investing as tax efficiently as possible. So you know, we use tax smart location, tax loss harvesting, and then making sure that if you withdraw money, it has the lowest possible tax implications for you. So that’s what we mean by kind of like tax efficient investing. And that kind of rounds out your full financial plan. And then after that, we want to automate it for you. So you know, one of the most important things about a financial plan is that you, you build it, but then you stick to it kind of pretty consistently. And so with Playbook you kind of make these kind of core primary decisions, you know, once when you kind of set it up. And then after that, we’ll automate it. So every month when you get paid, told us how much you’re saving, we’ll go into your account that receives your paycheck, we’ll pull out however much you told us 1000, 2000 bucks, 3000 bucks, and then we’ll push it into your plan. And your plan is smart, meaning that it always routes the money to the optimal part of your financial plan. it’ll fill up, for example, the most, the most advantageous tax advantages first. It’s smart, but it’s also adaptive, meaning, if some months, you’re saving less, your plan will update or another month, you get a raise, your plan will update or the tax code changes, you now have this kind of smart and adaptive plan, that’s basically always putting your money to the optimal account. And so that now becomes automated for you. And it’s that kind of like automation, which leads to consistency, which leads to you doing the right thing, which compounds over kind of 15, 20, 30 years.

Jack Sharry: And if I may remind our audience, I know David knows this, but the single biggest expense that investors/consumers incur are taxes. So if you can do this, what David has just described, as tax efficiently as possible, you have more money later. You have more money as you go. And it’s also a disciplined plan that’s set up automatic, I’m getting all this right, right? Am I… am I catching the drift here?

David Hegarty: Yeah. It’s pretty remarkable. Like, if you, I’ll speak to the numbers here, but if you’re average user, you’re 30, you’re earning 150 bucks… or $150k a year, you probably have access to about maybe $28,000-$30,000 in tax advantages that you can use this year. The difference between you maxing out those tax advantages and not using those tax advantages, if you don’t use that tax advantages, your… that money invested will grow to about half million dollars, give or take. If you do use those tax advantages, that money will grow to about $650k, give or take. So you’re talking kind of like a difference of about $150k to you for, between using your tax advantages and not using your tax advantages. And it doesn’t require any difference. I mean, you’re still saving the same amount of money. It’s just giving you a boost on how quick your money grows. And that boost allows you to, you know, reach financial freedom earlier, potentially retire earlier, all these different things.

Jack Sharry: And one of the things I’ll also remind our audience, many of whom have been around for decades, there’s an expression, those of us that have been around for decades would use way back when, the power or the magic of tax deferral. That’s all we’re really talking about. By avoiding taxes, by putting it to work, by having it grow and compound. This is assuming the same kind of returns however you might invest it, but doing so on a more tax efficient basis. You just have more money, because you’ve paid less to the taxman. Do I have that right? By the way, David and Playbook are now working with LifeYield. We’re working together. I’m not sure if the launch is imminent, or if it’s not already out there, but this will be incorporated into the whole idea of, of minimizing taxes and maximizing outcomes. But an interesting story you may not have heard, Paul Samuelson is who developed the algorithmic content of what we do at LifeYield. His father was Paul Samuelson, a Nobel Laureate, worked at MIT, started the MIT economics department way back when. Was a close friend of Jack Bogle. They talked frequently. And the Samuelson method of investing is by low cost long term index funds. And don’t take it out ’til much later, which is where the genesis of LifeYield came from. Because if you do that, eventually you’re gonna have taxes. So how do you do that in a tax efficient basis? But Bogle and Dr. Samuelson talked about this decades ago, and it’s really, that’s been Vanguard’s philosophy from day one. So you’re in good company.

David Hegarty: Exactly. I mean, that’s our philosophy. It’s hard to beat the market, it’s easy to beat the taxman. You know, philosophically I think we’re Bogle heads when it comes to kind of like how we invest, you know, it is very difficult to beat the market. But, you know, you have to be thinking about your investments from a post tax perspective. You know, what do they say about the two things certain in life, death and taxes. So you know you’ll have to pay taxes on these things. So it’s really important you figure out how to minimize the taxes that you do pay on that. And it’s hugely significant. Like it means if you were to max out your tax advantages, it means that you can retire five, you know, five, or even maybe ten years earlier than, than you would have. That’s great. I’m really glad to hear that. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, you know, when they think about investing, they’re always trying to think about like, how do I get an edge? How do I figure out what the next Tesla, Apple is, or whatever. Our perspective is, the best edge you can get is, is tax, you know, figuring out your tax advantages. And then the second thing about that is, it’s a certainty. You’re definitely going to get those tax advantages, like no matter what happens to your investments, as long as it’s a guaranteed return on your thought process to try and figure those out.

Jack Sharry: I’m fascinated, as I understand it, I may have this not exactly right, but I understand that your chief marketing officer isyour daughter, who has helped you with the Facebook testing, as well as the work that you do on Instagram in terms of getting new clients. So talk about how that all plays out. I’m not sure I have it exactly right. But I think I’m close.

David Hegarty: Yeah. So you’re generally there, although she might enjoy the chief marketing officer title. So I have two college age stepdaughters. And I think when we first started running Instagram campaigns and TikTok campaigns, I was showing them to her. And she had just a lot of critiques about like, that’s not how you do it. This, like, you know, this is wrong, this is wrong. I also learned this expression called cheugy, which basically means to be kind of like, you know, Dad-like and lame, I guess. So, sometimes, our TikTok campaigns and Instagram campaigns were cheugy. And so she became our advisor on basically kind of like, what are the norms and the conventions about, about how we do these TikTok campaigns. And what was amazing was the first one she advised on, the first TikTok campaign that she she advised on, up until then, I think our TikTok videos had gotten like, maybe a couple of thousand views. Anyway, her first one got 1.2 million views. And at that point, you know, clearly, I didn’t hear the end of it, but it was very welcome that she was able to do that.

Jack Sharry: And as I understand it, you’ve built up a quite a following. And it’s all been through Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, correct?

David Hegarty: Yeah. Most, mostly Instagram and Tiktok. Instagram, I think particularly is where our audience is. And that one feels like, like a really good channel for us to talk to.

Jack Sharry: How many users or how many followers? I’m not sure how you…

David Hegarty: On Instagram, we’re probably, I don’t know, over over 20,000 or something. Maybe 25,000, something like that now.

Jack Sharry: And many more users, as I understand it.

David Hegarty: Yeah. I think we’ve probably, there’s like 70,000 people have kind of signed up for the app, and then a portion of those actually convert to full subscriptions.

Jack Sharry: So where do you go from here? What’s, what’s next, as you take over the world around tax?

David Hegarty: I think, you know, our goal, our vision is to build a wealth operating system. So the way I think about this is there’s been a ton of FinTech innovation over the last 10 years. But I still feel that we’re very far behind where most people’s expectations are, from a usability perspective.

Jack Sharry: Yes.

David Hegarty: You know, I think most people still find it very confusing. I think also, they’re kind of disparate, it’s very difficult to cobble these things together. And the analogy that I always use is that it feels like we’re at the hobby stage of the computer revolution, where you had a very small percentage of hobbyists who are happy building their own PCs, and then they were happy accessing those via MS-DOS. That’s kind of the point where I think we are in terms of FinTech innovation. What we really need to bring that innovation to a mass market is something like an operating system like Windows 3.1, or iOS, which makes all this innovation easier to understand. It gives you kind of like a glide path about how you should be accessing this innovation. But you know, in this situation, your finances. And that’s what we’re trying to build at Playbook. It’s basically an operating system, or a playbook for your money. We want to pull in the best of this financial innovation, mostly around the lens of like, minimizing your taxes is the best thing you can do. And I just continue to kind of like build in these features and services to kind of like deepen the value we provide for our users and also kind of expand to a couple of different segments that we don’t service just yet. And as I understand it, you’re, you’re not… you’re starting on more of the sort of quote unquote wealth management side, but also have intentions to get on the workplace retirement side and there’s developments that are occurring on that side as well, which I think makes all the sense in the world. If you’re gonna have a playbook, you should have it on the whole thing. Do I have that right? Exactly. So, you know, we just launched Playbook for work. We’d started to see a bunch of employers asking, can we have this solution to our, for our employees, like as a financial wellness benefit? You know, because we build for people a pretty comprehensive, airtight financial plan. But it’s also, it’s easy to understand. And it’s delightful. And, you know, we’ve seen it ourselves in a couple of interviews, like as we onboard, still onboard a lot of users face to face. And, you know, I think one of the best compliments we’ve received through that is one user, who I think used to work as a airline mechanic, he told us, he’s like, I’ve learned more on Playbook in 15 minutes than I did over five years with my financial wellness solution at my old company. And I think it’s because, I mean, there’s lots of different reasons. But for us, we know that when we acquire users, we have a job to do before they will trust us to give us their money. And part of that job, from our perspective, is demonstrating to the user that we know what we’re talking about. And we have to do that in a way, like our user is smart, they’re competent, they’re sophisticated, you cannot pull the wool over their eyes. So we want to be able to explain to the user very simply why this is the right thing for them to do. And typically what we find is when they understand, understand that, they understand that we understand it, and then they’re happy to kind of trust us with the, with the next set of recommendations as well.

Jack Sharry: Oh… Before you can get their money, they have to trust you. Is that what you’re telling us?

David Hegarty: Yeah. I mean, like, that’s the crux of kind of, you know, of financial services. And if we were a traditional bank, we would probably build a big, you know, neoclassical building, put it downtown and try and make it look like, you know, we’ve been there for a long time. But because we’re a, you know, a FinTech company, our user is discovering us on Instagram, they may never have heard of us before but they saw something that they liked. And now we have to get them to trust us. Which, you know, as you pointed out, like that’s, that’s the key of financial services. And we do that by clearly explaining things to people. And we spent a long time from a product and kind of design copy perspective on making sure that that, that works really well for our users.

Jack Sharry: So for those of my friends that are listening to our podcast, if you want to find out how you connect with your target audience, because this is very much designed for their target audience, and I have a hunch this target audience will expand as their age expands. But because they know their customer well, and they actually know them as and they talked to them, over 500 conversations, as I understand it, they know their customer. And that’s sort of basic in any business, but certainly in the financial services business, check out their Instagram site, check out their web page, their website, it’s playbook.com. Talk about how to talk to a client, how to engage them and how to elicit trust. It’s you can go to school on how to do that. And there’s a whole lot of story behind that, which unfortunately, we don’t have time to get into today. But it was not by accident. They did it by listening. They just talked to their target audience, found out what they wanted, found out what their problems were, understood thay taxes were at the core, and then built a simple, delightful, you may have missed it, but David used that term delightful a moment ago. They created a delightful system that helps you have more money later and along the way. So my hat is off to you. You guys have done a great job. I have high expectations that this is going to take off like a rocket.

David Hegarty: I appreciate that. Thank you very much, Jack.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, good stuff. So David, as we look to close out our discussion, this has been fabulous. I really enjoyed it. What are three key takeaways that you’d like to share with our audience. They might benefit from your, your wisdom, from your experience.

David Hegarty: I think that three things that I kind of tell our users about money, I think one is wealth as possible. So Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone guy, he defined wealth as that moment when you can stop working and just live off the income. And the thing I love about that definition is that it’s not a function of how much you earn, it’s a function of how much you save, and how well you invest it. So someone earning you know, a million dollars and someone earning 100k, they both reach financial freedom at exactly the same time if they’re saving 20% of their salary. Now, granted, it’s much easier, the higher your salary, the easier it is to save. But I always find that quite empowering, that, you know, building wealth is something that’s available to all of us. It’s not just for those who are earning a lot, a lot of money. So I think that’s kind of key takeaway number one that I always tell users. Key takeaway number two is a little self serving, but it’s like always maximize the money you put in your tax advantaged accounts for all the reasons that we have already spoken about. Like it really does give a huge boost to your, to your wealth building. And then the third one is just kind of to avoid lifestyle creep. Like if you start young in terms of building your investing system and your financial system, if you can avoid lifestyle creep, as you kind of like get more and more salary increases, you just end up putting more and more money into that kind of like efficient investing system that you’ve put together. And you will get to financial freedom much, much quicker if you can do that. That’s what we’re aiming for is like that point where you have the option to early retire, it doesn’t mean that you will necessarily retire, a lot of people enjoy their jobs. But when you have the option to retire, that’s when you are fully empowered. It’s when you have kind of freedom, you can turn down that crappy job that you don’t want, or you can take six months off and go traveling or you can work part time and spend the rest of time with your kids. That’s really what it means to kind of be, you know, financially free. And for a lot of our users that’s very achievable for them in their kind of like 40s or 50s.

Jack Sharry: Thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation, really enjoyed it. So, David, thank you, or, as I’d like to refer to you now, Hegs. As we do in each of our podcasts, my favorite question comes right about now, what do you do outside of work that you’re excited or passionate about, that people might find interesting or surprising?

David Hegarty: Surprising, I don’t know. I actually really like gardening, which, I think gardening is probably associated with people who are slightly older than me. But there’s something very satisfying about you know, getting your hands stuck in the dirt. I also, you know, I work in a, in a very collaborative role here. And I love collaborative, creative things. But there’s something very nice about non collaborative, creative work. And so I really, really enjoy that at the weekends.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. Terrific. So, David, this has been a real pleasure, really enjoyed the conversation. Can’t wait for our next conversation. So, for our audience, if you’ve enjoyed our podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, and share what we’re doing here at WealthTech on Deck. We’re available wherever you get your podcasts. David, once again, thanks so much. It was a real pleasure.

David Hegarty: Thank you.

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