Fintech Impact

Jason talks to Greg Leroux, founder of Retirement Optimizer. It is a Canadian software that optimizes your retirement specifically around strategies on drawing down your assets over time to ensure that you successfully make it to the finish line.

Episode Highlights

0.42: In existing financial planning software, you enter a series of inputs regarding your assets, spending expectations and what you want your retirement to look like and what you have to fund that, says Greg. 

0.55: As per Greg, the difference that we have at Retirement Optimizer is that we apply an optimization engine to the de cumulation side of things.

2.56: Many clients ask, what should you be doing instead of the rule of thumb and the answer is there is no answer. Because it depends on lots of things and that's why when it comes to decumulation and retirements or in a game of chess, computers generally beat people, says Greg. 

4.53: In any situation you are setting up with the spreadsheet, you are going to be making assumptions about the future, and your assumptions are by nature going to be wrong because we don't know what inflation is going to be over the next 30 years, says Greg. 

6.02: Greg started with a company that was a performance reporting company to comply with CRM two requirements and allow people to look at their rates of return and benchmark them against common indices.

7.21: Greg was originally contracted by a financial planning firm to build a suite of tools for them. And, once we actually had the solution working, they wanted to go into business with us and commercialize it more generally. 

12.21: Computer says you have enough money to retire. It says that you might fall a little bit short if you were just using bucket approach of withdrawing assets. But that might not be where you're concerned. You might want to stretch things, says Greg. 

13.18: As per Greg, the output of our system is a series of interactive graphs and tables on a computer screen. But many people who are retired and don't want to be staring at computer screens they can produce a report.

17.00: Greg doesn't work under a subscription model like many financial planning pieces of software; instead, it's on a pay per use basis.

18.56: As per Greg we are going in two directions right now. One is to make it even more user-friendly for the individual who doesn't necessarily have a financial planner. And other direction is to make it more complex for people who have crazy systems of accounts that include money that's offshore or overseas.

3 Key Points

1. The majority of people who are entering retirements have real estate as a substantial fraction of their net worth, but they don't intend to live in the same house until the end of their retirement. They intend to downsize at some point.
2. Greg shares his thoughts on conjunction of financial plan with other standard financial planning software. 
3. Tech has been red hot industry for the last bunch of years, and it is really difficult even for highly skilled, highly compensated people to resist the siren song of California.

Tweetable Quotes

• "I would like to see the industry evolving towards a computational stuff being handled by computers and human interaction being handled by humans." - Greg
• "Attracting, retaining talent as long as possible is probably the biggest challenge." - Greg

Resources Mentioned

Facebook – Jason Pereira's Facebook

LinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedIn

Woodgate.com – Sponsor

https://www.linkedin.com/in/grleroux/?originalSubdomain=ca

https://retirement-optimizer.ca/welcome