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Overview
In 2018, I was invited to be part of the Adobe Kickbox Program through TD Ameritrade. We were taught Adobe's problem solving process, and how to apply it to our business.
The problem I wanted to solve for was that most major financial institutions only offer tools that can help clients AFTER they already have savings. Meaning that there aren't a lot of great tools to help people build wealth, just tools to help manage the funds they already have built up.
I had a few ideas at this point of what a solution might be, but first needed to do more research.
Research Methodology
After the conference, we were given a small budget with which to conduct user research on each of our projects. For my project, we used Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a site that can connect businesses with users in your target demographic for focus groups or user testing.
We specifically screened for users between 25-45, who had less than $10,000 saved for retirement, to connect with the main demographic of potential users.
We conducted approximately 20 one-on-one interviews, each about 10-15 minutes long.
Findings
One of the things we found is that many of our target users were behind on their retirement goals because they hadn't had many, if any, jobs that offer a 401k plan.
Another common theme was the lack of financial education people had received until this point. Very few had anything from their K-12 education that had prepared them for the real world realities of managing your money.
Despite the lack of formal training, many had found useful personal finance, budgeting, and investing apps that were out there. However, since many of them are in their prime career building years, they don't have a lot of time to be putting it all together outside of work hours. A lot of them feel like they are waiting until AFTER they have more saved up to make a more serious plan. They told us in no uncertain terms that they wish there was something that would do it all for them now.
So they need something with the regularity of 401k contributions, that can also help them with the personal finance side of investing.
Solution
The solution I came up with was an app that would help users manage their spending through a budgeting feature, but would actually use that information to automatically save for retirement, or whatever goals the user wants to save for.
Also within the app was a chore management system that connects to small savings goals for the users' children. Most public schools lack in financial education, so this way people can also teach their kids about personal finance and investing
As mentioned above, the app first breaks down a user's spending into broad categories, so they can see exactly where their money is going.
Based on how users are spending their money, they can set contribution amounts on whichever categories they consider frivolous. This way people can make themselves save as they spend.
The app would then estimate how much extra the user would have saved on retirement, based on any changes they make to their savings methods. Showing the long term effects of these small, short term methods of savings would help motivate people to save more now, since they can see exactly the impact these small changes can make over their lifetime.
Once the app helps people acquire savings, it would also help make the investment decisions for the client. TD Ameritrade already had guided portfolios with different blends of investments based on a user's risk tolerance.
Altogether we are finding areas within people's budgets where they didn't realize they had some extra wiggle room, and giving them a tool to automatically take some of those funds redirect them towards saving for clients' futures.
Top Dollar UI V2 With Directions.pptx.pdfHere is a more in depth demo of how the app could look/feel!
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