To understand what drove me to become a technology entrepreneur, you first need to hear a story that made a major impact on me and has become the driving force in this next phase of my life.
A few years ago, I was giving a financial wellness seminar when immediately after a young lady walked up to me. She must have been in her early 20’s and she was crying. She introduced herself as Angela. She had $120,000 in student debt and was making $53,000 at a dead-end job she didn’t like, but couldn’t quit because she was worried about paying back her student loans.
She felt trapped and helpless: Her net take-home pay after food and other expenses was barely able to cover her student loan payments. She couldn’t travel or buy a new car. She’d missed a few loan payments and now her credit was tarnished, making it harder to rent an apartment. Nobody told her this would be what her life would be like when she signed those student loans papers.
As a top financial advisor to the wealthy over the past 19-years, I had never given student debt much thought. Most of my clients had enough liquid assets to save for their kids’ college expenses, and those who didn’t save early enough simply wrote checks to cover the expenses or took out student loans if assets were tied up in other places.
But once I started looking into the matter, I was stunned! 46 million Americans are stuck with a combined $1.6 trillion in student debt. And most will carry that debt for decades as an anchor that, like Angela, could hamper their ability to achieve their dreams. Dreams that should be limited only by the extent of their imagination, not by the circumstances they were born into.
So, I decided to solve this problem using technology. I went out and hired the best software engineers I could find and set them up with the goal of solving the student loan crisis to ensure that within 10 years, no child would again have to take on student debt.
