Financial Wellness Made Simple: Inside Budgetsimple With CEO, Sam Ingrassia

Josh St. Laurent: Welcome to the Wealth in Yourself Podcast, a show dedicated to helping you master the complex subject of money by simplifying it through stories and actionable advice. I'm Josh St. Laurent and this is Wealth in Yourself. Josh St. Laurent: Welcome to the Wealth in Yourself Podcast where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. I'm your host, Josh St. Laurent. Today, we're joined by Sam and Grasya. Sam is a serial entrepreneur and a fellow Tahoe local. His latest venture is his company Budget Simple where he's helping to build a membership portal for personal finance content creators. He has built out not only lessons that help people learn about personal finance, but also calculators to help people run their own numbers. He partners with advisors who help a wide range of clients and businesses and his background in software engineering. Me and his team can customize the portal to the needs of the team they're working with. Josh St. Laurent: I love all the work Sam is doing in this space and I'm glad you all get to hear him today. Sam, welcome. Glad you're here. Sam Ingrassia: Thanks for having me, Josh. I appreciate it. Josh St. Laurent: Absolutely. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. So I'll kick it right back to you. For anyone listening who isn't familiar, maybe with the work that you do, what do you want them to know about Sam and your company Budget Simple? Sam Ingrassia: Yeah, so my background is mostly in software engineering and I spent a lot of time working on and building mostly like the ad tech marketing tech. So I kind of started my career in Phoenix, Arizona, moved out to San Francisco around like 2011, worked at startups, a bunch of different startups and that type of thing. On the side, mostly honing my skills, doing like side projects and stuff like this. Sam Ingrassia: And during that time in San Francisco, I was also working on like side projects. I was able to kind of build one of my side projects and grow my side projects over seven figures and annual revenue kind of stepped away from W2 work and did this like traveling, you know, entrepreneur thing for a little while. Then around, I would say like 2014, I was going to conferences, I was remote, wanted to try to connect with a community and that type of thing. And what I kind of started to see was this like what I would consider like micro PE thing kind of spring up and you know, it was like these small like SaaS businesses and you know, there's a whole broker community that started to like kind of sprout up. And during that time started growing my interest in like personal finance and finance in general kind of went to my own school, learning pretty much everything from like personal finance, wealth management all the way up to like macro finance and you know, understanding the Fed and all the crazy stuff around that. Sam Ingrassia: And then yeah, so like there's this kind of like cool period of time where all these companies were like and it's still kind of happening now, but on a bigger scale, these prospectuses were becoming available. You know, I have my marketing hat on. I'm looking at, you know, these companies understand their distribution models, what's working, what's not. The incentives are why they're selling and this type of thing. So I kind of went on deep dive there. And then this kind of like leads into the budget simple story a little bit because it popped up as a prospectus. I got it. I really like the business. The background of the business was it raised some money. It was actually like a funded startup at one point. It was a competitor of mint.com. The catalyst for those businesses back in the day was right around Oh, nine-ish was the ability to actually ingest all of your financial transactions and actually build a budget. Sam Ingrassia: So they were sort of in a race, obviously like mint one and actually mint just closed obviously. So there is business model issues around the budgeting piece. Like long story short, budget simple had about 250,000 users at its peak. The founder actually sold it and the story behind that is he sold it and I had reached out to the person he sold it to thinking that it was still for sale by the original founder. So came back a year later and that gentleman was interested in selling and I bought it from him. Josh St. Laurent: So yeah, we talked a lot about this offline, right? Like your journey and the different businesses you've been a part of your background and not just software engineering, but specifically like marketing, I think is fascinating and I want to get into that a little bit today. Maybe first, let's talk about just 30,000 foot view of someone's thinking, okay, budget simple haven't heard this name before. Josh St. Laurent: You brought up mint, right? Which I think a lot of people are familiar with, but now it's gone. How would you compare a budget simple to a you need a budget or a, you know, monarch money, rocket money type program? How do you differentiate yourself from something like that? Sam Ingrassia: Yeah, sort of the main observation I had kind of going back to like reviewing the business even before I bought it and then you buy it and then you're like, what are we going to do next type of deal? Besides some of the technical issues that I saw, the main issue is the business model. It doesn't work. You know, there's this behavioral gap with staying consistent around a budget and the need for structuring it. There's a gap on the financial literacy piece, you know, even down to like understanding interest rates and these types of things. Sam Ingrassia: So my observation was is that you actually need an advisor, needed a coach to kind of bridge this accountability gap with some of the tools that are out there today. Man, obviously close down. They're nudging everybody to credit karma. Some of the other like platforms out there, they kind of address this in different ways. So like monarch money, they have their own kind of way to doing it, rocket money as an example is kind of super frictionless and not huge heavy lift, but no like financial literacy component or financial education. So there's a couple different ways to kind of approach it. My observation was that you needed the additional advisor kind of plugged into it and this sort of opened up some of the opportunities around new business models and then kind of opened up this whole new thread around like a self-served component, you know, for advisors and coaches, money coaches, financial counselors, that type of thing to kind of open up like a consumer, a user journey that is not like available currently. Josh St. Laurent: I'm thinking back to my own experience of budget simple. When I first got in there, started playing around and I was impressed with just like the layers of it, right? Because when you think of like a mint or rocket money, you know, you're thinking, okay, I'm going to link my accounts. They'll show me what I'm spending my money on. Maybe they'll categorize it and you sort of just draw a line in the sand and that's what you're doing. You're looking at your expenses, right? But budget simple. I liked how you could take that and then take the next step and say, okay, well, let me do a couple of lessons around utilizing my credit cards or paying down debt or whatever that might be that your focus is to the next layer where I have a call with a coach and a credited financial counselor who can actually help me personally with the specific issue that I'm working on and actually flip the switch and change that scenario. Josh St. Laurent: So I always love that. Can you talk about the experience with budget simple? Can someone just come and, you know, hit you up on LinkedIn and sign up for budget simple? Do they have to go through, you know, a company that's utilizing budget simple? How does that work? You have a couple different partnerships, whether it's maybe with financial advisors, but also 401k providers. Can you talk a little bit about like, where does budget simple exist today? Sam Ingrassia: Yeah. Our primary customer for budget simple is advisors, coaches, retirement plan, advisors. They each have their own, like, sort of entry point, but to answer your question directly, you could sign up right now and kind of get started. And that's like solo advisor, it could be a retirement plan, someone who administers a retirement plan, different use cases, but sort of the same outcome, which is basically helping progress people through their financial journey, you know, starting with financial stability all the way up into, you know, understanding more about insurance as an example. Sam Ingrassia: So the system is not just like for budgeting or debt tracking. There's basically a large library of content that they're able to kind of utilize to address these kind of gaps. So a couple of use cases there that I'll kind of tie back to the advisor side. But the retirement plan advisors, there's this sort of use case around financial wellness as an employee benefit on the financial planner side. It's financial planning as an employee benefit, basically the kind of the same roll out. And it's interesting because it does a couple of things that it helps on the organizational side, the business owner and the employees helps the advisor and then obviously it helps the employer and the user. The way that we kind of think about it basically is you have a retirement plan as an example where you, even if you're administering it or not, you have a retirement plan. Sam Ingrassia: I personally, when I got my first 401k, I had no idea what to select when you're going through the menu of like the actual securities or index funds and that type of thing. If I remember correctly, I never even did a risk profile to kind of understand like where I kind of landed. It was confusing and a little bit stuffy when I kind of talked to the retirement plan advisor and they didn't really want to talk to me effectively. So there's this kind of gap there. That's where the financial wellness kind of fits in and it addresses a couple of things. One is for the employee or participant, you're able to kind of connect with the actual retirement plan advisor through the system. So it's like that connected tissue. You can do a lot of self-serve stuff, kick off a budget, dive into the academy and then you could schedule a call with the advisor. Sam Ingrassia: So that's like a clear win for the employee. The flip side to that is that the system is built for everybody. So not just the plan participants, but also every employee basically. It's a benefit for everybody. On top of that, it helps to sort of progress people who might want to start contributing, gets them over the hump there, and then people who are contributing kind of at least kicks off the ability to inform a decision around increasing their contributions. On the advisor side, it's got to benefit for the employer. The more that you have employees contributing and taking advantage of employee benefits that decreases financial stress, all the issues around retirement planning and these types of things. In addition to that, it also kind of exposes maybe gaps and other benefits. For instance, one that pops up pretty regularly is student loan issues. The conversation around that is unfortunately a lot of the financial issues are foisted on them to deal with the retirement plan and that type of thing. Sam Ingrassia: And for the employee, personal finance starts with your income. They have to address these issues in some shape or form. That's the thread that I kind of pull on with advisors and retirement plan advisors on where that fits. Josh St. Laurent: Totally agree. And I think that's part of what drew me into budget simple at first was I spent years in a phone site talking to thousands of people helping them with their 401ks and it was always the same darn questions. The questions that you try to answer in the budget simple platform, the things that you built lessons out for. So I think from a consumer standpoint, it's a no brainer. It's like get those questions answered, build that financial literacy base so that you can take the next step and start really building upon those savings. So to me, that's a no brainer. Josh St. Laurent: Can you talk about from the advisor standpoint? I also love the work that you're doing because of your background in marketing and software engineering. Can you talk about that piece of budget simple and like how you're helping advisors to actually attract clients as well? Sam Ingrassia: Yeah. What I'll say is that I've spent probably the last like year and a half just talking to people and I'm always looking at like distribution and how you're acquiring customers. That's where I always start when I look at businesses. It's always interesting to me. Kind of naturally, you know, kind of deep diving into like advisors, understanding like how they're actually acquiring customers. And it's really interesting because there's a lot of dynamics that are not the same in other industries that there are in financial services and that type of thing. You have kind of the biggest one is the compliance piece, you know, especially with planners, health managers and that type of thing. Sam Ingrassia: And there's just some things that you have to deal with around that. But in general, what I've seen, like, there's just like a huge gap in terms of wanting to do marketing and understanding like the different frameworks for kind of repeatability. I've been basically kind of like focusing in on that, asking those questions, understanding like where people kind of land. I drilled down into basically how they're attacking it and like what's been successful in that type of thing. But I could pull in that thread a little bit. Josh St. Laurent: I would love that. I know there's a lot of advisors who listen to this podcast and I'm sure they're wondering like, okay, well, what did you learn? Like what are the missing pieces and what can I be doing differently? Sam Ingrassia: So yeah, I mean, go down that rabbit hole. The way I kind of think about it is there's this marketing channel and then there's like client or customer fit. So the easy way to kind of think about it is meeting your customers where they're at. And there's this kind of huge gap there. So the bad example is, you know, you're going after retirement income clients, you know, people are approaching how they're going to manage income and retirement effectively. But you're advertising on Instagram. You're not really going to find those people on Instagram as an example, likely find them on like Facebook. So I see a lot of those issues kind of pop out. There's a mismatch there. The other area that I thought was really interesting is all the niches that the advisors kind of attack. I've seen like advisors attacking surgeons, pilots. You don't say it, but they'll go after like early childhood education, employees, sort of like position themselves that way. The niche is kind of interesting. You pick your niche and then you're learning from that niche regularly. Sam Ingrassia: How could you learn from the niche? How many appats could you get that learning about that niche and then being able to use that and instruct your like future marketing strategy and that type of thing. The last piece that I kind of see is around the referral component. Not every niche has like a referral component to it. And knowing that right out of the gate is important because it's going to alter like the top of your funnel. On the financial coaching side, you know, people who need to reach financial stability, say for like an emergency fund and focused on budgeting and detracting in that type of thing. The stigma around money doesn't facilitate like referrals regularly. So there's a problem just on the coaching side. On the advisor side, it's more bound to the kind of the niche side of things. So if you have a community where pilots are hanging out with each other and they're interacting with each other, they will tend to refer, especially if something's really working for them. Sam Ingrassia: But then there's other spaces as an example, well, there's not a lot of like community component. And so they don't talk to each other. So being aware that alters like the ability to how you construct your basically, how you construct your marketing funnel. So guy talked to advisors all day every day, just about and it is this common, I'll say question in advisor's minds where it's like, okay, I know my niche, right? Let's say it's pilots and I'm trying to learn all I can about pilots. So I can tailor the content to that. But to your point, you know, there's extra complexity layered on top of that. What platform am I sharing this on that? It's going to make a huge difference. So what advice do you have for advisors? It could be advice or it could even be mistakes that you're just constantly seeing. Josh St. Laurent: But how does someone sort of hone in on that niche and create content that is more applicable that is more helpful and in turn leads to more client acquisition? There's not like a great process for it. It's literally you're in conversations and a new idea kind of pops up in those conversations and just having the ability to kind of jot it down and come back to and explore it. And I'll just be super transparent. You know, the financial planning is an employee benefit, financial wellness is an employee benefit. I had some inklings of that idea and then I kept sort of kind of hearing it over and then I started riffing on that more and it resonated with people. I'm hoping to kind of get an e-book actually kind of put together around that process of building those types of engagements out, but it started with conversations around that idea. Sam Ingrassia: So there's like a gold mine there of ideas and not all of it is verbal. That's the other observation that had you'll see it. People's eyes light up when you're speaking about a certain topic and that type of thing. So you have to dig there's gold there. When you find it, you know, it'll resonate. The next step is usually the easier part, which is basically kind of constructing like a content marketing strategy around it. You know, that's basically building up, starting with a long form piece of content, getting all the ideas out, stretching it out, expanding on it and then kind of condensing and facilitating the writing process. But that allows you to basically take out snippets that you can utilize, you know, on social media and that type of thing. You know, maybe there's like teaser videos you can kind of build out around it. Sam Ingrassia: These are the things that help with that flywheel. So if the goal is for budget simple as an example is to, you know, interact with more advisors and kind of help them facilitate, you know, some of these types of engagements, you know, I'll focus in on those things. I'll get more information and I'll kind of, you know, speak to it in the content. You're getting more conversations going, you get more understanding of the customer problem and then feeding that back into your strategy. Absolutely. I wanted to ask you what you envision for the future of budget simple, where do you see budget simple going in the next year, five years, where things headed? I would say over the last quarter we've been mostly focusing on advisor and coach, like advice engagement and marketing. In an ideal world, I'll just kind of start from the five year and work my way backwards. Josh St. Laurent: But my goal is to basically get budget simple and as many organizations as possible to help basically all the employees that are not taking advantage of the retirement plans. There's just that massive gap there that's, you know, not being fixed. So that's the goal. You know, one of the ways to kind of do that is through the financial advisors. It's a natural kind of fit for what they do. They're speaking with the business owners, you know, they're helping not only on the retirement plan side and the compliance side, but also plug into the, all of the employees and facilitate some additional opportunities for them and their businesses and that type of thing. So that's kind of the five year plan. In the short term, we're basically focused in on, you know, rolling on more features that help with that process. So last year we focused on our content library, building out our calculators, which are basically like life event decision support tools. Sam Ingrassia: We rolled out our financial checkup tool. That's kind of our main touch point that we put in the hands of the advisors so that they are able to baseline all the employees or individual users right out the gate, putting my marketing hat back on the main lead magnet that we kind of focus in on because it creates like a catalyst for a conversation, you know, with the advisor or with the coach. So yeah, we continue to kind of pull on that thread. Some of our early customers that are starting to ramp up these processes are hitting us up about new features. So last month, we rolled out a bunch of practice management features. We're going to continue kind of riffing on that. That's incredible. What else should we know about budget simple financial literacy education, maybe digital marketing for financial advisors? What have we not talked about that we should? Josh St. Laurent: One of the things that it when I first started thinking about about the businesses, what I see is on top of those marketing issues is potentially issues around business model. There's a lot of cohort of millennials and people who I would consider like high income, but not necessarily have a huge net worth just yet that need more advice and less wealth management. And that's like, there's a title wave of those people kind of just now becoming engaged with financial advice, financial services industry and that type of thing. There's a mismatch, not just on the marketing piece a lot at the time, but also on the business model piece. Michael Kitsy's brings up this idea of like the advisor instead of advisor and the advisor kind of model is, I'm looking for financial advice. I'm like, you know, maybe mid career, you know, I have a little bit of money to kind of invest outside of my 401k, you know, be having a kid, these types of different life events. Sam Ingrassia: And I need advice, you know, I go to my accountant who's like maybe a natural like unbiased person, but they're really needing to go to a financial advisor, you go to a financial advisor and this idea of like, I don't need like a complete plan, but I want to be able to engage with an advisor and I will likely need a plan down the road, you know, especially when I'm planning for a kid or buying an additional house or whatever it is. There's this, what I would call a gap there on the business model side where you want to build out of funnels. So it ties into the marketing piece, maybe on a subscription basis, which is natural for a lot of, you know, the millennial generation, you still need to build credibility and order to engage with them, but this gives them, you're meeting them where they're used to being met, which is on a subscription basis versus conforming to the financial services industry, allows you to get the get what you need at a price that's pretty clear. Sam Ingrassia: So there's, there's a gap there and we've been trying to focus in on that business model gap. So I'd say to that is it also plays into the marketing piece because there's some dynamics there that allow you to basically build out a top of funnel, then do convert into full wealth management, very comprehensive financial planning and that type of thing. So we've been exploring that as well. And then, you know, obviously kind of riffing on the financial wellness is employee benefit. There's a huge opportunity there in my opinion around the marketing piece because a lot of advisors are speaking with business owners on a regular basis or people who work with employees effectively. And there's a natural, I don't need to do the marketing because I already have a set of individuals, which are the employees basically that know who I am and I'm there to provide value and that type of thing. Sam Ingrassia: So there's this, what we call in like a land and expand type of model. If you land that employer can expand in the employee base, provide a lot of value there. So kind of cuts out a lot of the, the marketing piece and allows you to kind of riff on what you're already doing basically and continue to kind of expand there. So there's some of the ideas that we've done riffing on. I love that. I have seen that from my own experience as well on both sides on the workplace side but also the individual side. I think there is a need for advice versus financial management, right? I spent 10 years of fidelity. A lot of what we did was asset management. Now, you know, it's both in yourself. A lot of the clients come and they don't have assets to manage, but they're looking for advice, investment ideas, opportunities, getting organized, right? Josh St. Laurent: And it doesn't really have to do with investment management. So I think you spot on there. I do want to transition a little bit for some more personal questions about Sam. And so there's three of them. We try to ask him towards the end of the show. First question, what does living a wealthy life look like for you? That's a good question. I think as I've gotten older, it's mostly focused on like work, life balance. I have a tendency to work pretty hard. You know, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, like, you know, engineering, headspace is mostly like work super hard, grinding on stuff. Learning that back has been good because it's kind of opened up more time for other things. If you could give one message to someone working to gain financial freedom, who isn't there yet, what would it be? This one's tricky, but the one that pops into my brain is on that finance side just like with your personal health. Sam Ingrassia: You have to understand it pretty thoroughly that you have to focus in on your finances. There's that kind of agency issue that's always involved and you always need a lawyer. You need a financial advisor. Those roles are still kind of needed, but you need to kind of understand it and take control of it as well. And so, you know, deep diving into the finance thing, that's helped me out quite a bit. So speaking from experience, that would be my main piece of advice is to understand finances in general and really dig deep. Yeah, totally agree. You got to have visibility into it to even begin to understand things. So hard as question of the day for you here, it's if you only had a thousand dollars and we're starting over, what would be the first thing you would do with that money? Oh man, that's a good one. Josh St. Laurent: Having the same experience would probably be in the software space on some shape or form. I guess the funny answer to that would be I would probably plug it into chat GVT and see what it spits out. So I did do that like a couple months back just to kind of see what it would say, but yeah, it would probably be in the software space. I think I'd say that there's a lot of service space stuff out there that you can kind of plug into and automate. And so there's a lot of opportunities. So I probably spent some time doing some buy hand service business stuff and try to automate it. Does it that would do as a software engineer? Very nice. Okay. Cool. Well, this has been really fun. I'm glad that we did this. Thanks for being here. I learned a lot. Any parting words, any, you know what I want to ask you is where can people track you down? Sam Ingrassia: If someone's listening to this and they say, well, where do I go find Sam and budget simple? Where is the best place to look? Yeah. I'm on LinkedIn. You can always reach me by email, Sam a budget simple. If you go to budget simple, you can actually like schedule some time with me to do running into like marketing issues. You're looking for new ways to expand your like surface area and that type of thing. We can kind of help out with that. My other part time job I call it is basically helping out with marketing issues on the advisor and coaching side. So we can definitely jump on a call and I can look at your strategy and how you're approaching in that type of thing. But yeah, thanks Josh. For this. I really appreciate it. Definitely. Well, we'll drop the links in the show notes. Josh St. Laurent: Make it easy for people to find you. This has been the Wealth in Yourself Podcast where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. Our guest today was Sam and Grasya. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. The Wealth in Yourself Podcast is hosted by me, Josh St. Lorenz, an edited and produced by Ray Haycraft. To learn more about how to make your money work for you, visit us at www.wealthinyourself.com and connect with us on all social media at WealthinYourself. This podcast is educational in nature and is not meant to be investment advice. Please do not construe anything said to be advice and the opinions of the guests may or may not represent the opinions of WealthinYourself. This podcast and the information presented are separate from my employment at Golden Gate University. Still, they are part of my mission to make no cost financial knowledge more accessible. Josh St. Laurent: If you like the show, please take a moment to leave us a review. We read all of your feedback and we want to make sure we cover the topics that matter most. If you have a specific subject you'd like us to explore or a guest you'd love to hear interviewed, don't hesitate to shoot us a direct message. And as always, thanks for listening.