“For every dollar you put in, you know how much more you will have on a monthly basis when you retire.”īlueprint’s initial challenge as a business, though, is to show that consumers will buy annuities directly-by subscription. “If you break down retirement savings into a way where it’s almost like a subscription for your future, it’s a lot easier to think about what it means,” Mr. Making the purchase of annuities a subscription accomplishes the once-impossible feat of explaining annuities to the average American. “And within insurance, annuities are by far the slowest.” “The insurance industry is far slower to adapt to newer technologies” than other parts of the financial services industry, said Michael Walsh, a general partner at Green Visor Capital. Iwry, who isn’t an investor, and Jean Chatzky, personal finance editor of “The Today Show,” who has invested. After the initial investment, buyers can increase their retirement income stream with deposits of as little as $100 a month to create what Blueprint calls “a personal pension.”īlueprint just announced seed funding of $2.75 million from a group including Green Visor Capital, where former Visa CEO Joseph Saunders is a general partner, and NextView Ventures, where Lee Hower, an early PayPal employee and member of the founding team at LinkedIn, is a partner. The real twist is part of a trend that’s swept industries from mattresses to clothing to movies: subscription-based business models. Carey’s website spits out a quote for a contract in 60 seconds and requires an initial investment of $5,000. They typically require five- or six-digit sums in return for a future stream that, should someone die prematurely, may never be used. One of Blueprint’s innovations involves how deferred income annuities are sold. The idea was inspired in part by the research of Olivia Mitchell, a professor and retirement security expert at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He and two co-founders are building a way for consumers to more easily buy what has notoriously been a hard sell: annuity contracts, both those that create an immediate income stream and others that produce income years down the road. His elevator pitch for a company now called Blueprint Income? “We are building the first digital retirement plan that guarantees you won’t run out of money as long as you live.” Carey’s struggle to map out his parents’ retirement). A subsequent job at Treasury, where he got to know Mark Iwry, a key architect of retirement policy in the Obama administration, gave him an idea for a new kind of business (as did Mr. The carmaker’s underfunded pension got him thinking about 401(k)s and how they aren’t a great strategy for making sure Americans have enough savings. Carey helped advise the Treasury Department on General Motors Co. Or, more precisely, the lack of it across the U.S.Īt Lazard, Mr. A stint at the advisory firm piqued his interest in a growing threat to the national welfare that didn’t involve espionage - retirement security. So he headed to Wall Street, specifically Lazard Ltd. A summer job at the State Department persuaded him that government service wasn’t as exciting as he first thought.
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