The Start
“How much money is required to have a retirement income at the US Poverty level?”
That question is where everything began. The question’s origin came from work with clients, reviewing current financial data and taking a serious look at how retirement income works.
The answer to the question revealed a situation that is alarming at least and catastrophic best, yet has not been pushed to the level of a true moral and ethical crisis. Rethinking America’s current experiment with retirement is the only way.
With that as our fuel, we set out to save the world with our mission being to educate, advocate and strategize to keep people from becoming The Future Poor.
A single person helped off the road to being The Future Poor means we have accomplished one aspect of our mission. Helping an entire generation off the road would mean our mission is complete.
With that, we invite you to know if you are on the road or not and join us in arriving at a destination other than The Future Poor.
The Project
The Future Poor Project was started by a financial ethicist Jonathan Grimm - an ethicist by education and a financial advisor by trade. With retirement planning being a central task of a financial advisor, he saw a potential problem emerging the deeper he got.
He set out to document what he was exploring in what is now a work called The Future Poor. Much of that is available in different parts of our blog and elsewhere on our site. More than that, it is the core philosophy that we operate from.
The Future Poor Project became the outworking of the ideas into the real world. Ethics cannot simply be philosophy. Ethics takes action on the ideas. We operate from the idea that to know what is to be done and to not do it is to miss the mark. Any issue worth working to change requires a team of likeminded people to bring it life and change the world.
We know that conventional financial advice will not get us off the road to becoming The Future Poor. In fact, much of the current financial advice is for a previous generation and not applicable for us and the current economy.
What is the point of a financial strategy that few or no one can do?
We don’t think that makes much sense.
We need to rethink strategies and America’s current experiment with retirement as a whole.
Many identify YOU as the problem and your ability to save money. We don’t. You are part of a much larger financial context than your monthly budget and you probably feel it. The current experiment in America has tried to put every financial thing on You while every social structure has backed away in their support and responsibility. Where this has left us is in a place that personal financial responsibility is not enough - we need broader social, economic and ethical financial responsibility when looking at The Future Poor.
Lastly, we believe personal financial advice is not just for the rich. No! It is for the rest of us! Countless times we have heard from people that advisors or firms won’t meet with them unless they have a lot of money. We have no barrier to entry here, just a variety of ways to learn, get your questions answered and receive personal professional financial guidance.
We may be contrarian to much of the conventional wisdom out there, but everything we do here at The Future Poor Project is focused on helping a generation avoid becoming The Future Poor.
Thank You
Thank you so much for making it to The Future Poor | Project and taking time out of your day to visit one of my ‘passion projects.’ I admit that the idea around The Future Poor was selfish in that I wanted to answer the question above for myself. I did not set out to write what turned into The Future Poor but I knew that I had to do something but wasn’t quite sure what.
I have a financial practice where I provide financial solutions to clients on a wide range of topics and goals. While I love doing that as much as possible, I knew that it would not be effective going client by client with what I was working on. Perhaps it is too big of an issue for one person to tackle. What I did know was that I could at least create a broader resource for people in our current day and current technology,
What I started to see was a future state where a majority of us will be living at or below the US Poverty level given the mechanics of income after work. When you combine that with where the majority of us are at and the circumstances around our current financial mobility - the math does not add up,
My thought was simply, “No one is talking about this.”
My hope was that someone else was already on it so that I didn’t have to. There are lots of resources and things surrounding the idea of low savings rates, the fate of the middle class, poverty, retirement income and more. However, there wasn’t anything pushing it to the level of an ethical issue or seeing the situation as I have worked to unpack.
For too long I tried to avoid doing something with what I was working on. The subject matter can sometimes not be the most fun - “Hey, you may be poor when you retire” doesn’t thrill too many of us. Through some work and encouragement of my wife, kids and friends, I moved forward to see what would happen. I also realized that things of significance are seldom the easiest to discuss but it must be brought to the light in order for any change to occur. And so, you have The Future Poor and this Project that I hope will help.
That is what this is ultimately all about. Poverty in all its forms is damaging and creates significant strain on individuals and society. Keeping a large portion of the population from entering a future where they are ushered into a low socio- economic state is of utmost concern and we have unintentionally placed everyone on that road. My one hope is to move people from any socio-economic status as far from poverty as possible.
Thanks for being here. Thanks for being a part of changing the world. Reach out with any questions, thoughts, needs. We all must know if we are on a road to being future poor in our context - and and we all must work to make sure that does not happen!
-Jonathan
