Looking For a Retirement Planning Solution? There’s an App for That – Silvur

With the increase in lifespan, one of the biggest challenges in aging is making sure people’s wealthspan matches their lifespan. A recent survey in the US found that the median savings balance among baby boomers is a mere $144,000, for those who retire at 65 and can expect to live until they’re 85, that’s hardly enough.

1 out of 5 women over the age of 65 has nothing saved for retirement, and the poverty rate for women over the age of 65 are double that of men in that age group.

I sat down to speak with Rhian Horgan, the CEO and founder of Silvur, a retirement planning app for people over the age of 50. The following text is a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity.

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Rhian, can you tell us a little bit about Silvur? 

Silvur is the first and only super app that’s dedicated to helping baby boomers navigate retirement. Today we’re focused on the American retiree, on consumers between the age of 50 and 70, and our goal is to have a  combination of easy to use calculators and content that educates our consumer and give this consumer the confidence that they can retire fearlessly. 

What made you start this company?

Like many founders, it’s a little bit of a personal story. I had worked for JP Morgan for about 17 years. I had worked in asset management and as a result of that, my parents had started coming to me for some advice around their own retirement, and it was a really interesting transition for me because even though I had grown up in a traditional asset management world had started using a lot of financial technology myself just to manage my own personal affairs. But when I started to help my own parents navigate retirement, there were a couple of things that I noticed. The first was this intersection of health and wealth in the States because there is no public health system. 

Americans are spending close to $300,000 over the course of retirement on healthcare costs.

The average expected cost is 300,000. And that’s just your Medicare premiums. So that’s what you pay for Medicare, what you pay for a drug plan, your expected out of pockets, and then a supplemental insurance plan. The numbers get even higher when you start thinking about the costs associated with long-term care.

When the number is that high, what you start hearing is the consumer talking about that as a financial issue, rather than a health issue. So that was the first a-ha moment for me, about this intersection of health and wealth. The second observation I had was the complexity of the decisions that the consumer was making and and particularly in a post pension world, there wasn’t an existing advisor that was really able to holistically answer this question for the consumer.

So as an example, not only is this consumer trying to figure out their health benefits, they’re also trying to navigate social security. It’s your most foundational government benefit in the States. You basically have been paying into it since you started working. For most of our consumers, it’s half of their retirement income.

But what’s interesting is you end up on the social security website and there are 10 different calculators. There’s like gobs of information to try to flow through. And what consumers are basically saying is they’re really confused. They know this government benefit is really important. But they’re really overwhelmed by what they see on the social security website.

And this kind of continued the trend that really was the inspiration for Silvur, which is, these are really important complex decisions consumers are making. But the existing ecosystem of financial advisors is not really set up to have this holistic conversation. They’re typically really good talking to you about your investments, but the minute you start talking about Medicare, or you start talking about social security, you’re really outside of the area of this individual’s expertise. So what I saw as the white space, both helping my parents, but also just helping this community as a whole was this need to build a platform that helped consumers really pull together all these decisions in one place, create a plan. I would argue that today a retirement plan in America is more important than ever.

In the old days, when you just had a pension, you didn’t really need a plan. You retired, money came into the bank, it was kind of business as usual. Today, you need a living breathing plan. And I say living, breathing plan because things are happening in life that change your plan. We need only look at this past year to see that a lot of people left the workforce earlier than they had planned. And when that happens, it changes this individual’s retirement plan. And so for us, digital was like the natural place to go so that we could actually create this place for this consumer to really have this living, breathing plan that they could update and iterate as their life evolved.

Sounds like you’re really solving a critical need to really help people make the best out of retirement and have their wealth match their lifespan. 

I think what was fascinating to me is I looked at the landscape and there’s been all this amazing technology that’s been built to support accumulation.

There’s this generation of Americans now that are entering the decumulation phase. 

So there was this new set of decisions they needed to make. And for some reason, the tech community was ignoring them. And when I peeled back the onion, What I started to hear and see was this perception that baby boomers weren’t online, that baby boomers weren’t technically literate, that baby boomers wanted to always get in their car, to drive and see a financial advisor.

And I will just tell you that is not correct. This consumer is online. They start with Dr. Google. They spend a lot of time doing their research. Baby boomers invented the internet, so they are tech savvy. They have used technology their entire life.

And so what became really apparent to me was that we had this really interesting kind of set of tech rails in FinTech that had been built to solve a different use case, which was accumulation. And we really needed to think about a different use case, which was decumulation. And importantly, how do you design a technology that really embraces baby boomers, where they are rather than designing a technology for millennials?

Absolutely. So how does it actually work? What can people expect when signing up to Silvur? 

Getting started at Silvur is really easy. The first thing we do is that every customer, when they download the app, gets a free retirement plan and a free score through the retirement plan. You’re giving us a little bit of information about your financial assets, your age, when you want to retire.

And then we match that with over 3000 data points that include things like taxes and government benefits, spending curves to really help this consumer understand how long their savings are going to last in retirement. We call that the retirement score. It’s very simple. It’s a number. When you put your information in, you might get a number that says 85.

So it would be predicting that your savings are gonna last until you’re 85. And depending on what your views are on longevity, that number might be a good number or a bad number. If you’re not comfortable with that number. And you say, look, women in my family live until their nineties. We would then show you things that you can do to increase your score.

And so it might be, add part-time income and might be move from New York to Florida. It might be reduce your spending, but all these things that the consumer can really embrace. We get really excited now because we’re launching a membership plan. And what the membership does is it allows this consumer to dive even deeper on personalizing their score as well as access what we think is going to be a leading retirement school, that’ll help consumers do the research they need to do to actually navigate these big new decisions they’re making. The membership allows consumers to build their own care plan so they can decide whether and what parts of Medicare they want to opt into and see how that impacts their score.

They’ll be able to see how their score varies based on where they live. Almost half of Americans end up moving in retirement. And so really understanding that, that difference can add seven years to your score. That might be one of the biggest decisions you make, where you live in retirement, as far as driving that longevity.

And then particularly when we think about longevity, the membership will have a number of calculators that help customers really zone in on what their decisions around their social security elections are. So with the membership, they’ll get access to those tools and then they also get access to retirement school and here what I’m really excited about is creating a kind of an ecosystem that allows the consumer to get educated on these new decisions they’re making and not only get educated, but feel confident. It’s really interesting how much anxiety this consumer has about all these big decisions they need to make. You know, one of our customers recently said to me: “you know, I get really overwhelmed by government speak.”

And I think that says a lot, which is okay. There’s a lot of information out there in the world for this consumer, but none of it’s really written in a language that gives them confidence. And so our goal with membership is a modern membership, that’s built for this modern retiree, who’s in their fifties and sixties, who is digital, they’re online.

They want to do their research. And our goal is really to empower this consumer to feel confident. 

That sounds wonderful. So who can use Silvur? Is it available globally or just in the US?

Today in the United States there’s certainly a use case of what we were building in other markets you know. As you know, in different countries, I would say in developed countries, there’s a specific relevance.

Each country is a little bit different, particularly when it comes to kind of the equivalent of a state pension or how healthcare is run. In the States in particular, the cost of health is a real issue. But today our customers on average are 55 years old. So they’re in their late fifties.

They’re typically three to four years away from retirement. They still, I would say, their plan is in flux. They’re really trying to figure out, can they retire in three or four years? Where do they want to live? What are these big decisions they’re going to make? And we’re also really excited that half of our consumers are women.

So we’ve created an experience that really is welcoming to men and women. And I think particularly as you think about some of the historical biases with the financial services industry creating a really inclusive experience in the app has been something that’s been really important to us.

It’s so important. I just read an article that said that many women, let their life partner manage the household funds, and because women outlive men, many of them will have to manage their own funds someday, so it’s better to start doing it when you’re younger, rather than when you’re 80 years old and suddenly you have to manage your own bank accounts for the first time in your life.

I’ve thought a lot about this, a large group of our consumers are married. But we also have a large group of our consumer base that are single or divorced. The reality is that there’s a lot of decisions you make around retirement in the United States.

But if you are married, you really do need to make those together. It may be that your Medicare enrollment is individual. So like my husband and I will each enroll in Medicare on our own. But decisions that we make there impact our household budget. Same thing with social security, particularly in one income families, the decision that the working spouse makes around social security can actually impact the non-working spouse.

And the reality is that the stats don’t lie, women on average live longer than men. You see that with social security, where women are 12 times more likely to be receiving widower benefits. And I think one of the things that’s really interesting as you look at that is that there’s this opportunity, in your fifties and sixties to get involved in the conversation.

But I think as an industry, as we think about inclusive design I remember hearing a stats. Several years ago, and I’m not going to get the number a hundred percent correct, but it was something like 70 or 80% of women fired their financial advisor after their husband died.

And the reason that they did that it was at the financial advisor, never spoke to them in the conversation. They only spoke to the husband. And so what we get really excited about in a digital age is that, we can move away from whether it’s conscious or the unconscious biases that come up and have people talk to each other and just create an experience that’s really welcoming.

And so for us it’s all about how we choose language that evokes confidence, language that’s clear, design that makes you feel really comfortable making decisions. And when I see that our customer base is evenly split, it feels like we’re really equally serving both men and women, which is really exciting.

I think you really nailed it, your website is very welcoming. I wanted to put my numbers in and see what happens. 

Well, that’s done on purpose and I would really believe that it’s time for a new modern brand when it comes to retirement.

So a lot of the iconic brands that have been built around an older American. Were built in the 1980s and the 1990s. So you think AARP, Silver sneakers, the villages – phenomenal companies that redefined what’s retirement in the 1980s looked like, but it’s now 2021. It’s 40 years later. The retiree in 2021 is very different from the retiree in 1980.

And so we get really excited about building a brand new membership for this much more modern retiree. One who is starting a new business, who is moving to a new city, who’s embracing life. And I really say they’re embracing life because they’re not dying. And 

we have to get past this view that if you’re over 50, that you’re on the decline.

I think that those brands from the 1980s don’t do a good enough job of embracing what retirement and being 50 and 60 in America looks like today. So for us building a new modern brand for this demographic, we think is really important. I’m in my early forties, like I want Silvur to be the brand that I feel really excited about joining when I’m in my fifties.

Absolutely. So what’s the bigger vision. Where do you see Silvur in 5 to 10 years? 

So our goal is to be the go-to membership for financial wellness in America. For consumers in their fifties and sixties, we want to help them create their retirement plan. We want to really help them get educated about these big decisions that they’re going to be making.

And then ultimately through our retirement store, introduce them to the products and partners that will help them navigate this next act. My goal in five years time is that if you’ve got a question about retirement, whether you’re pre retirement or in retirement, the first port of call isn’t Google.

Your first port of call is opening up the Silvur app and finding the answer. 

Can you elaborate a little bit about the retirement store. 

The retirement store is a space that we put together to really help our customers access the products, the new products and services they’re going to need in retirement.

I’ll give you a couple of examples here, on the healthcare side, we’ve partnered with a company called e-health that has pre-retirement healthcare plans, as well as Medicare supplement plans. What we find is a number of our customers are going to be retiring before they turn 65. And so they’re going to need a bridge to Medicare.

They’re going to have healthcare insurance in between when they retire and when they enroll in Medicare. Same thing when they enroll in Medicare for the first time, they’re going to need an insurance partner to be able to actually pick out the different plans that they’re looking at. And so that’s an example where, you know, our customers can access e-health.

What we also show our customers is that the partnership with e-health is there not only to educate them, but also to save them money. So through the store, they can see that by using one of the Medicare plans through e-health they’re actually able to increase their retirement score. Another example would be a partner of ours called Medec, which has home and auto insurance with 50% of our customers moving during retirement.

Many of our customers are actually getting new home and auto insurance. And so again, just really trying to give our customers access to what we think are best in class digital brands that can help them in these life changing moments that they’re going through. Not only to access really good products, but also to access good savings.

So it’s a really holistic solution. 

Holistic is a great word and something that I use a lot.  You have to be holistic. When you think about retirement in America today, retirement in America is about so much more than what’s in your 401k. It’s about understanding your healthcare costs.

It’s about creating your retirement income plan. It’s about navigating social security. And what the consumer doesn’t have until Silvur, who was this one place that pulled it all together for them. So we’re super excited about launching the membership. For as little as $7 a month consumers can access the membership.

It’s $7 a month for an annual membership and there’s also monthly and semi-annual memberships. Our goal is to be that partner as they navigate all these big decisions. And again, if there’s one emotion we’re trying to evoke, it’s really confidence. Like how do we give this consumer confidence so they can live their best retirement.

Is there anything else you would like to add? 

The last thing I would just maybe talk a little bit about is designing for this consumer and I often have said that we really want to be the Apple watch for this generation, we don’t want to be life alert.

No offense to life alert, the core is excellent. But I think what you find is that a lot of consumers don’t want to wear a life alert. It makes them feel old. If you see someone with a life alert on you, you think they’re old.

Whereas an Apple watch. If you see someone in their fifties or sixties, have an Apple watch you think they’re cool, they’re hip, they’re modern. And I think that 

There’s this real opportunity for us to think about how we build beautiful, inspiring technology that doesn’t make people look and feel old.

Old is not the emotion or the vision that most of my consumers have of themselves. But for some reason a lot of the technology that’s still being built for this consumer is very clunky. And that’s, you know, again, as we think about designing the app, it’s about how do you design this beautiful lively, vibrant experience that empowers you rather than making you feel old?

I couldn’t agree more. Rhian, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been fascinating talking to you.

Thanks so much, Keren. I appreciate this.