Blueprint Income Launches with the Personal Pension
Blueprint Income launched today, announcing a $2.75 million seed investment led by Green Visor Capital and NextView Ventures, with participation from Core Innovation Capital, Kairos, and angel investor Jean Chatzky, among others.
The company’s flagship product is the Personal Pension, a guaranteed paycheck that lasts as long as you live. It’s more accessible than traditional annuities because the Personal Pension is purchased over time in manageable installments. And unlike traditional pensions, the Personal Pension doesn’t require your employer to sponsor the plan.
Today’s $27 trillion U.S. retirement market is in desperate need of innovation. Nearly 2/3 of Americans feel anxious about having enough money to live comfortably in retirement, according to AARP. As of 2016, half of working-age households are at risk of being unable to afford their current standard of living in retirement, according to the Center for Retirement Research. And that’s despite being in the midst of the longest bull market in a generation.
“Retirement security in this country is undeniably inadequate,” says CEO Matt Carey. “The 401(k) was never meant to be the main vehicle for retirement. Having your entire retirement wrapped up in the stock market is an increasingly untenable solution. If we don’t change how we approach retirement, it will quickly become something only the top 1% can afford to do.”
The Personal Pension provides a guarantee of retirement income with no worries about stock market volatility or fear of outliving your savings. And subscribers are able to continue contributing when they switch employers or move between W2 and 1099 workforces.
The Personal Pension will do the same thing for annuities that mutual funds did for the stock market — bring costs down, improve transaction speed, and make it easy for anyone to sign up. Now buying guaranteed lifetime income is as simple as purchasing a share of stock.
“Most products sold as annuities today are needlessly complex and aren’t intended to do what annuities do best — provide guaranteed lifetime income,” says Carey. “We’re bringing the annuity market into the 21st century.”
“Our firm invests in technology companies tackling substantive problems in financial services. Retirement security is such an important problem to address, and the team at Blueprint Income has come up with a very innovative and viable solution,” says Mike Walsh, Partner at Green Visor.
You can start a Personal Pension with just $5,000, and contribute in (optional) installments as small as $100. Each contribution locks in a guaranteed amount of monthly retirement income and continues as long as you live.
“We’ve helped our early clients purchase tens of millions of dollars worth of annuities, and we’re growing rapidly,” shares Carey. Blueprint Income’s products are guaranteed by insurers Rated A or better, such as Mutual of Omaha, Guardian, Integrity Life and more.
CEO Matt Carey served previously as a Policy Advisor at the US Treasury Department with a focus on retirement security. He started the company with Adam Colombo and Nimish Shukla, fellow Wharton School alumni. The Blueprint Income team includes those with actuarial experience at New York Life and part of the early engineering team from SoFi. The company’s advisory board includes personal finance expert Jean Chatzky, Amazon’s Dean Foster, Google’s Kent Eisenhuth, former senior US Treasury official Mark Iwry and behavioral scientist Hal Hershfield, PhD.
Guarantees subject to claims-paying ability of the insurer. Annuities are not FDIC insured. The information provided is not intended to be a recommendation to purchase an annuity. Blueprint Income, Inc. is a registered fixed annuity producer in New York, NY. Blueprint Income, Inc.’s fixed annuity producers are licensed in all 50 states and The District of Columbia.
