There’s nothing like building a company that brings true value to people, solving a specific problem they have. Even more so, when it’s the founders’ personal problem and passion.
Tomer Salvi and I were privileged enough to build a company with great people, create enough value to sell it and make some good money in the process. Money that was life changing, but at the same time, didn’t have us set for life.
The next step for us was to put our money to work, with a “Wealth Creation” mindset (as opposed to “Wealth Preservation”).
During the first “post-exit” months we received endless phone calls and emails from people and companies offering to help us manage our money. These firms are known as wealth managers, multi-family offices or investment/financial advisory firms (I’ll refer to them all as Wealth Managers throughout this post).
The Wealth Managers we met were good people. For the most part, their techniques were similar. They offered a financial planning questionnaire, allocation of funds based on our risk appetite, offering some sort of mix between stocks/bonds/mutual funds etc. The more sophisticated ones also offered access to some reputable hedge funds, private equity and other alternative investments.
Maybe it’s our generation, maybe we just like understanding the bits and pieces of our finances, or simply just love charting new challenges and taking risks, but at the end of the day we decided to dive in, take control and manage our money on our own.
We had our minds set on reaching a 10% rate of return — On EVERYTHING. Just to clarify, this number is an average annual increase of our total wealth. There is always going to be cash that generates 0%, and other low risk investments that deliver 4–5%. This meant that we would need to diversify our money into financial products with the potential to return more than 10% (and higher risk) — and use cheap debt (leverage) in the process.
We set off to allocate our money across various financial products, slowly finding those that met the strategy mentioned above. Finding these products is a story of its own, but it involved much research through friends, forums as well as meeting a lot of smart and experienced investors.
Six years later our money was scattered around 50 different financial products which included bank accounts, retirement accounts, brokerages, crypto, startups, private equity, hedge funds, real estate syndications and more. We found ourselves trying to remember where our money was allocated and what our expectations were for the different allocations and specific holdings. One additional “small” reality we discovered was that our spreadsheets became super complicated to maintain. When we pieced it all together, we were thrilled with the results — overall we overperformed our benchmark, returning 11.5% annually on average.
Yes. We could have hired a Wealth Manager, paid her $10k-$50k a year to stay on top of our finances, but that option felt like a very expensive solution. Like many others, we wanted to manage our money ourselves, and we needed a system that helped us get our arms around it all and build a holistic strategy — at a good cost.
Our financial challenge (headache) was basically split into two:
So, we set out to build a solution for these problems. A solution that will grant full visibility of our finances, enabling the projection of future net worth and cash flow, tracking the actual performance of investments compared to their original expectations and helping us achieve our financial goals.
Vyzer organizes all of our financial lives into one place: automating, monitoring and tracking, offering projections and insights for us to understand how our net worth and cash flow will look in the future and many additional cutting edge features tailored to the needs and requirements of people like us.
