Fintech Helping Families Navigate Grief & Money // Money Isn't Everything 2x10

Welcome to Money Isn’t Everything. I’m Mary Wisniewski, Cornerstone Advisors editor-at-large and host of the show that explores early-stage ideas that could, if not already, shake up financial services.

Today on the show is Ben Hough.

He’s the founder and CEO of Atticus, a young fintech firm that’s built an estate settlement and inheritance platform.

We chat about a lot of interesting things, including the idea of gifting financial services products like Atticus.

We also explore how inheritance could change as Gen Z ages and the thinking that goes into designing an app that aims to have users need the product less.

As Ben said, “We don’t want someone hanging out here. We want them to get it done so they can move on with their life.”

Here’s our conversation.

Ben, welcome to Money Isn’t Everything.

Thanks so much for being on the show today.

Hey, thanks, Mary.

Great to see you.

Yeah, good to see you too.

I just wanted to get right into it.

I have a big smile on my face, but we’re about to take it to a darker place immediately because of what you’re building.

It’s a heavy, heavy subject, but it’s something everyone encounters, what to do when someone dies.

In your case, guiding individuals through the money process.

I’m just really curious how you entered this world or decided, hey, this is what I want to help build a solution for.

It’s a great question.

Yeah, it can get dark.

It can feel heavy.

I’ve actually had engineers in the past, developers, turn down opportunities to join us because they were thinking, “Oh, this is going to be kind of emotionally difficult to build in this space.”

But I would say it’s interesting across our team.

We really try to have an uplifting view on it and it being something that’s beautiful.

It does happen to everybody.

It’s kind of not culturally normal to talk about it across families, which is one of the big problems across the industry, whether it’s fintech or even the legal industry, normalizing some of these conversations.

But it can be something that’s very beautiful.

That’s the way we try to approach it and try to make it feel like that for families because they’ve got so much on their plate already as they’re going through things emotionally.

The biggest thing we could do is try to take off some of the logistical and administrative burdens.

But to jump back to your question, how I got into it, I fell into a track on the estate settlement side through my background and my education, actually, through college, as trust and wealth management.

I went to a school that has the only undergraduate program in the country for trust and wealth management.

It’s taught through law professors at the law school.

It literally puts out 75 to 85 students per year that go on to be trust officers for the private banks and the trust companies across the country.

It’s a really niche program.

It’s really, really cool.

It’s an insight into kind of how wealth is acquired and how it passes, both from the legalistic sense in terms of how to structure things, tax avoidance, but also in the sense of how do you pass that down philanthropically or even to other family members and kind of steward the same cultural values that the matriarch or patriarch kept as they acquired that, speaking obviously toward high-net-worth individuals.

I went into a program through school for that and was working for a smaller boutique family wealth office for a number of years.

Then recruited out to build out some of the generational transfer offerings for Bank of America, U.S. Trust out in San Diego, where most of their business was high retail investment, a lot of brokerage, a lot of lending.

They wanted some more of the trust assets.

So I did that and then saw an opportunity to fall into the estate settlement side and build out some software.

Long story short, that’s kind of how I fell into this side.

Well, Ben, you didn’t start with your Q&A that’s on your website, but you were in the watermelon-picking business.

Those were my first jobs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So how dare you not start with that?

I know, right?

Well, it’s funny.

My mom’s side of the family grew up doing watermelons.

My grandfather had a brokerage where they would buy watermelons from Florida, Georgia, South Carolina as the season would progress, and then ultimately pick their own watermelons in North Carolina and then Virginia.

We would sort them out in a warehouse and sell them brokerage-style to the grocery store.

So when you walk into a grocery store and you see the big cardboard box with all the watermelons in it, for many years there, that’s what I was doing, touching those and throwing them.

Spent many, many summers throwing watermelons in hot North Carolina summers.

I tell you what, that will teach someone young to study hard and to work hard and go get a different job so you’re not doing it for 40 years.

But yeah, a lot of fun doing that.

Yeah.

And it has a dreamy quality to it as an outsider.

I’ve picked strawberries for jam for the family, but that was like a one-day sort of situation.

You started this chat by talking about the beautiful side of this too, and that’s really important because it’s something I’m noticing with banks, credit unions and fintech.

It’s usually focused on more of the retirement, you’re walking down the beach sort of thing, and that’s the future.

But you’re drilling into something else.

You’re right, the cultural norm is not to embrace or think about death so much.

So you’re building a product that is engaging in the darker subject and, as you said, beautiful subject.

I remember, I think this is what maybe brought us together a bit ago, and I saw that the blog was still up, was your funeral playlist, as like, hey, what are your songs?

So let’s talk about that.

How do you create content to be like, hey, this is not just darkness, it’s also a celebration?

I think a lot of people have different approaches on it, and it’s really interesting the timing in which you catch those conversations.

A conversation between you and I now, or the viewers who are listening that don’t have this going on, versus those that maybe just lost a loved one and what their sensitivity is to it.

You would think that the ones that just lost somebody would be the least likely to want to speak toward this or even have the cheerfulness of, like, “Hey, I’ve got a song recommendation.”

But it turns out that when I’m in conversations, a lot of times it’s just a call with a bank partner or even just a call with some of our customers or leads that they’re saying, “Hey, I saw that article, for instance, and I’d love to add something to it.”

So that list is backfilled by a lot of recommendations from people that we actually engage with, which is really cool to see.

But yeah, I think everybody approaches it differently.

Some people have plans.

Some people have wills.

Some people don’t.

In the will, some people specify the way they want their funeral to go.

Some people are like, “I don’t care. Give me a Viking funeral. Set me out at sea and hit me with a torch and arrow, and I’m gone. Don’t worry about it.”

Others are like, “No, I really want to have this scripted kind of experience, and this is what I want.”

Whether it’s the music or this is how large I want it, this is the gathering, this is what I want from a conversation standpoint, this is what I want it to feel like.

It does vary a lot.

I saw, and I think this is really striking, that you can gift Atticus to someone.

Then it got me thinking, gifting a financial product, a financial-related product, is a very interesting idea.

So, A, do people do that?

And B, what made you try this out?

The way we started with that, I think, was from a conversation with a client or customer.

I never know what to call them.

In the tech space, we call them users.

In the banking world, a user in the trust world particularly, when you’re talking high net worth and trust management, you’re talking about clients.

Users, it’s like all of a sudden spendthrifts or they’ve got some addictions and abuse.

It’s funny from a conversation standpoint.

So we’ll call them clients.

But we were talking to a customer and they were saying, “I’ve got so many flowers sitting around my house,” or they did at the time, and that it felt beautiful.

It felt loving.

But then all of a sudden there was this wave of grief that came two weeks after the passing when all of the flowers started to wilt and die.

It made them realize all of a sudden a second time how empty the house is, or just a second wave of the grief of loss and death.

It was from that conversation they said, “I wish I’d had fewer flowers.”

Everybody didn’t know what to do.

They wanted to bring me something.

What I really need is help now.

Everybody was there at the funeral.

Everybody held my hand as we were going through this process.

But no one was there for me afterwards when the real stuff happened, whether there was a bill that needed to be paid, an account they couldn’t access because their name wasn’t on it, things of that nature.

They didn’t really have anyone to speak to.

There was no centralized advisor.

There was no attorney that could step in and do some of this.

The life insurance was in a different place, and they really needed help from someone just to kind of walk them through it.

That was kind of the novel concept toward, can this be a gift?

Can loved ones gift this to each other?

Absolutely.

So we do see that now.

We enabled that as kind of an offering.

A lot of times what we see for that usage is that prior customers of ours will come back and gift that to a friend or a family member in need when they hear of someone that’s passed away because of the value they got from our product and they know about it.

Yeah.

Well, let’s talk about your product because it feels like a guide through a process.

How long is, I know it changes.

It depends on all the legalities and do you have a will, do you not, as you already hinted toward, but what is the range here?

Is it like a year-plus?

It can be.

To speak toward averages, I would say on average it’s like eight to 12 months.

There are certain legal things that time-gate the process.

As an example, one of the big things, and it makes sense from a government and legal standpoint, is that you want to time-gate it so that an estate doesn’t close too quickly, so that any potential creditors of the estate have the ability to get assets from it.

So let’s say an aunt or uncle is out there.

It’s not apparent, but they’re there.

They had some plumbing work done or electrical work done, and then they passed.

How does the plumber, how does the electrical contractor learn of the passing?

How do they submit a claim?

How do they get money from that estate so that they’re not just out?

So from a legal standpoint, there’s time-gating where you can’t start the process until a certain amount of days, typically like 30 days after the date of death.

Then you can’t close from a statute of limitations standpoint until, and it varies, three and a half, four and a half, six months, based upon the types of assets or the state that they’re living in.

But beyond that, there’s a lot of logistical things, like closing the accounts and just tidying up the loose ends.

We did a big study a while back, and on average executors were spending around 500 hours working to get through this process.

Whether that’s in a few months or over the course of a year, it varies.

It gets more complicated when you’ve got multiple beneficiaries.

Adult children are still very much children.

Siblings that have grown up are still very much children when their parents pass.

It becomes a lot of arguments.

Not always negative and contentious.

Sometimes you have litigation or mediation with legal parties.

But you also have disagreement due to the emotional sense of assets and the connections that each of the beneficiaries might have.

So let’s say it’s a family farm.

Let’s say it’s the matriarch’s house that the second and third generation have come and done Christmas at for the last 30 years.

How are you going to sell that house?

Half the family wants to keep it.

The other half doesn’t.

The logistical side of, if you’re going to keep it, who’s going to pay for it, and property taxes and maintenance and cutting the grass?

There are all sorts of decisions.

And when you’re emotional, there could be a lot of disagreements.

So that will slow the process down.

Our goal at Atticus is to automate as much as possible, increase transparency, decrease the cost, decrease the amount of time spent having some of these conversations.

We could step in with tech and facilitate a best-means resolution.

But a lot of times it really is just dependent upon the family taking the time to marinate on the ideas.

What are their options?

Learn what has to happen from a logistical standpoint, and then ultimately make those decisions and act upon it.

Have you found, are you using GenAI in your product design, or do you see...

Yes.

Yeah.

AI is fascinating.

It’s changing daily.

It’s a topic that, I don’t know, I could spend hours thinking through and talking through.

We are using it.

I think there’s huge potential for it to be used more.

We were slow to adopt on some of this because a lot of the early AI, in my opinion, was really, like you said, GenAI.

Generative, content-creating content.

What you saw with a lot of founders or a lot of startups was, let’s go blast a lot of SEO articles and things of that sense.

We’ve always taken the approach of wanting our users to need our product less or read our content less.

A lot of our team came from TurboTax, and it was a very similar mindset there.

It’s different than building an app like Instagram, where you’re trying to increase time in app.

How many daily active users?

Monthly active users?

TurboTax is like this: the more simple it is, the more adoption you’re going to get.

The more simple it is, the less you need it, right?

You might have 10,000 screens, but let’s hope it only takes five or 10 minutes to get through the tax filing process.

It’s the same kind of connection with us.

How do we decrease the amount of time that a user needs to engage with our platform?

So from a generative standpoint, we’ve never been of the mindset of, let’s just create more content.

Let’s try to reduce a lot of that.

We’ll use GenAI conversationally to try to soften the tone on certain things or come up with talk speak to accelerate some of our copywriting more.

So I’m excited for the deeper LLM kind of things that are happening now around MCPs or agent-to-agent, all these agentic workflows where we can actually start stitching systems together to achieve different things.

As an example, maybe you’re an executor and you need to contact Time Warner Cable to close a relative’s account.

The companies out there, and not to pick on any individual, companies out there aren’t really incentivized to invest money into optimizing the experience of offloading customers.

So it gravitates toward being difficult and frictional.

How do you close an account?

What are the paperwork you need to submit?

How do I know that Mary is authorized to close Joan’s account when I can’t talk to Joan?

How do I know this is a legitimate death certificate?

How do I know this is a legitimate paper?

How do we go through that process?

Again, when you speak back toward why this takes a long time, you’re having to do this across multiple companies.

How do we automate some of that?

I see potential for that very much leaning in toward agentic systems and workflows that can automate it.

You’ve got a burden of authorization.

Who is the user and how do you authorize that?

So we get really excited on that side of it, proving out who the executor is.

You’re obviously very familiar with KYC, know your customer, from the banking world.

That’s ingrained upon me.

We’ve come out with something similar, which we call KYE, know your executor.

We’ll actually go through a verification process where we will ask our customers for these different steps to verify who they are, and the ultimate being really the signed form that you need back from the government, from the court system, saying, “Yes, Mary’s authorized to act over this estate.”

That’s also, by the way, a form that we help surface for the user.

So as a customer comes, the typical lifecycle is someone passes away.

They have a funeral, everything happens, and then 30 days later all of a sudden there’s a mortgage to pay or rent to pay, and they’re like, “Well, I don’t want to pay it.”

Siblings are like, “I don’t want to pay it.”

It’s like, how do we get access to the money to pay it?

That starts the whole flow of, what do we need to do?

We haven’t thought about this yet.

How do we put our hands around the assets, the accounts, the estate, and start acting?

You go down to the local bank, and the bank’s going to say, “I have no clue. I heard the private bank come into the retail bank and educate us toward some of these topics, but it’s over my head. I’m not sure. I just know I can’t touch it. Good luck.”

So that’s really where we step in.

We help provide the right forms.

How do we get you authorized to act?

Then we verify that.

That’s where I get really excited from an AI standpoint, is that once somebody has been verified, how do we kick into some agents and some workflows that will start to do some of that?

Whether it’s generate a letter to Time Warner for you so that you’re not writing it, or go connect to obituaries.com and sniff some of the information and create one for you, things of that nature that can really just be embedded into creating efficiencies.

Yeah, Ben.

That’s so interesting because I think banks and credit unions and fintech will have different approaches to this, right?

Some of them actually do want people to linger in their app, even if it’s just to handle their transactions.

So the fact that you’re designing for, get out of here, make it easy during this unusually stressful time, I’m projecting, but I have to think that’s often the case.

What’s a design trick or something that you do to be like, hey, we don’t want someone hanging out here.

We want them to get it done so they can move on with their life.

Yeah.

A lot of it is designed toward progress.

Throughout our experience, we have a very visual sense of, what’s next?

What do you need to focus on next?

We have nearly infinite reading where you can go and learn and educate.

But it’s our theory that you don’t really want to become an expert on this.

You just want to get through the process.

So what is next?

We have full details for everybody, but our goal is to always shrink that down into the most minimal amount of reading.

We started actually as a mobile app, and now we’re much heavier desktop usage and kind of web platform.

A lot of that being because of COVID, right?

We started with a mobile app because a lot of the tooling was like, I’m on the go.

I’m at the relative’s house.

I’m taking photos of the assets that we need to be split up across beneficiaries.

I’m doing this on the fly.

COVID happened.

We all get locked down.

We’re in front of our devices.

So I’m not on the run quite as much.

Also, as we got deeper into some of our building, a lot of the forms capabilities and actually doing the work, spreadsheets, it just renders a lot better on a larger screen.

But even still, we’ve retained that sense of visual design toward everything that we write should have a summary snippet, and then you can expand for the full details if you would like.

Or even taking them out of our platform or sending them the emails to their inbox saying, “Hey, this is next. Click the button and we’ll go do it.”

Then we authorize who the user is through those links without them having to log in just to kick to somewhere else.

How do we accelerate them toward the path of what they need to get to?

It might not be the typical experience of walking through just a software app step by step.

It’s kind of spread out at different places.

Ben, you mentioned tone and using GenAI maybe for tone.

Tell me about that.

What tone do you like Atticus to take?

How do you even think about the structure of your sentence within the app?

We take a warm, kind tone.

I think we have some talk speak toward what this actually is from a marketing standpoint.

It’s like the empathetic advisor, is what we call it.

But it’s a warm tone.

We aren’t nonchalant.

We don’t joke about death.

We’re not insensitive, but we’re also not overly empathetic toward the emotional side of it.

We’re not here to be your emotional counselor.

We’re not trained in that.

We don’t do it.

There’s a time and a place and a need for it.

But there’s also a time and a place and need for, you’ve got to act.

There’s a legal forcing function of something that needs to be done.

What is it?

How do you do it?

How do we help you through that?

We take the approach of, we’re going to help with everything else so that you can focus on the emotional side of grief, loss, relationships, meaning of life, all of that side.

We’re just going to take everything else off your plate and help advise upon, how do you get access to the accounts?

How do you distribute them?

What are the right forms?

Here’s the clerk that you need to go to.

You have to show up physically.

You can’t do this remotely.

All of those different things, and accelerate that process.

So I’d say from a tone standpoint, we’re kind of matter-of-fact and straightforward.

There is an embedded element of literacy that is underestimated with this.

The statistics of American adults and the average American adult who read at a certain grade level, I don’t know, fifth grade level maybe.

I don’t know what it is.

That sounds right.

But it’s something like that, which is kind of mind-blowing.

But then again, I’ve got a second grader who’s reading chapter books now.

So maybe fifth grade, that does make sense.

I’m probably like in first grade.

But there’s the literacy side of competence, but you add financial literacy on top of it, which all of your viewers would get.

Banks have talked about this for a long time.

How do you democratize education toward savviness of financial terms and investing, and then fiduciary and legal stuff, which most people don’t even know the word fiduciary other than the ads they might see on CNBC talking about, “We’re a licensed fiduciary. We have to act in your best interest.”

But these words.

The amount of times that I’m talking to a customer on a call and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I think I’m the executor.”

And I’m like, “I don’t want to stop you, but you’re not the executor. You’re the executrix.”

But they don’t know what these words are.

So we’re pretty matter-of-fact with our voice and tone, but we also have to take the time to really explain and educate what these things are.

What’s an executrix?

It’s the same as an executor, but for a female.

There’s actually a word for it.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

There’s all these different things.

Testate and intestate.

The words get super bizarre.

It’s old, old English.

How do we educate the average user toward what those things are so that they don’t feel intimidated when they show up in court or in conversations with an attorney or a financial advisor that’s kind of throwing things around to make them think that they need more help than they do?

How do we empower through that?

I think that the confidence and the respect and relationship we build with our customers through that and empowering them to be educated circumvents any of the emotional side that we just kind of skip on.

They leapfrog right into action, and it really helps streamline the process.

Yeah.

I can see the case for that.

Another big thread that financial institutions care a lot about is the great wealth transfer, which is always, I feel like, in the sidebars of conferences and whatnot.

I guess this is going to be a broad question for you, but how do you interpret it?

As this happens more and more for Gen X, millennials inheriting whatever they’re inheriting or not, does anything change from decades past from your point of view or the way that you’re creating your product?

I think a lot changes.

I think this would be an interesting conversation in three to four years even.

This is beyond what I’m doing for work, but the whole world seems like it’s changing to me right now.

A lot happened in 2020, 2021, and it’s just accelerated from there.

AI, everything’s just kind of being rewritten.

All of software is being rewritten.

Business structures.

Generationally, what we see, the talk was all millennials, and millennials are set to inherit it.

It’s all Gen Z now.

When you look at the typical Gen Z mindset and the way that they approach life, it’s entirely different.

They’re creating businesses.

It’s all Web3, just digital natives that are out there using these tools, whether it’s AI, all of the no-code platforms.

Everybody is tinkering with things like Windsurf and Cursor, creating apps and spinning things up.

When you look at the great wealth transfer, a lot of the assets over, I would say, the last 20 years have shifted from the traditional assets of investments and liquid assets.

I’m going to call it liquid assets in our case, even stocks and bonds, which is not like liquid cash like an investor would call it, but it’s liquid in the sense that it’s not a house, it’s not real estate, it’s not a business.

But when you look at that great wealth transfer, it’s not just financial assets.

It’s everything.

We actually did a deep dive and worked with the Federal Reserve to come up with some data.

I could share the report with you in terms of demystifying some of that great wealth transfer because a lot of financial advisors hear that and they see it and they’re like, “Oh, this money is moving.”

It’s not just liquid money.

It’s businesses.

So a lot of the conversations that we’re having or that we’re walking through with our clients, our customers, should I keep the business that my uncle had?

Should I keep the business that my son created that’s an internet business, that he passed, and the parent saying, what do I do with this?

Obviously there’s crypto there.

There are all sorts of assets that are there.

So I do think a lot changes.

All of it needs advice.

I think that the structure around wealth management is changing as well.

Obviously with crypto, but it’s so much more than stocks and bonds now.

It’s the diversified portfolio, including retail.

The amount of millennials that have gone out, bought homes and spun up Airbnb businesses where they’re managing six to eight houses and that’s their living, that’s their income that’s coming through, and that is a business that will get transferred.

Do relatives want to keep that or not?

So it’s really interesting to see the way that inheritors are viewing the assets and their receptiveness to retain those and look at those as wealth-construction resource tools during their life.

Yeah.

That will be really curious to follow.

I’m glad you brought that up.

There is one segment in the show, and I guess I’ve saved it for the end, but it’s called “That’s What You Said.”

You were quoted as saying, “Financial wellness is about balance.”

The article was saying that you had this dinner, maybe, and you were talking about how it’s important to be active, seeking opportunities, making money, but also creating your life.

I thought, oh, that’s really interesting because here you are, an entrepreneur.

I do know it’s really hard to balance things as an entrepreneur.

So I’m just curious to learn a little bit more about your philosophy on doing your life, but also building a business.

Yeah.

I think that’s great.

It’s funny you brought that up.

I remember that dinner.

That was a good steak at that dinner.

I want to say all these things about creating balance, and it’s probably right.

I haven’t figured anything out.

I’m far from an expert on life.

Every night you go to bed and you’re like, man, these are the things I did wrong and how can I get better?

I haven’t gone to sleep then.

I know.

Well, it just happens.

I’m a tinkerer.

I’m a builder.

I’m a founder.

I’m always thinking, how do I optimize?

I haven’t found balance.

I think that the days of balance died with the internet.

I’ve got two young kids.

I try to raise them like it’s the ’80s, man.

No helmet, build a ramp, take a bike off of it, no technology.

We just don’t do that stuff.

It’s like, go swing on vines out in the tree.

Be young, be healthy, do all those things.

But I think that the balance is really about finding the things that you care about and spending the time in it, and exposing your circle that’s around you, whether it’s friends, whether it’s family.

How do you expose them to it?

My daughter’s six, but like, hey, this is Figma.

This is what UX/UI design is.

So yeah, we could be drawing these cartoons, but let me show you how this works in Figma and design these things.

So I’ve got kids that are interested in prototyping on that, or my son, who’s eight, looking at coding and going through a code school already.

How do you introduce them to these things?

I’m learning at the same time.

So the balance is really about how do you create the exposure to those things as opposed to setting aside these hours to do this and these hours at home.

I think it’s all kind of integrated.

Yeah.

That’s kind of lovely to think about it that way.

I’m sure chaotic at times.

A lot of times, definitely can be.

Ben, for people who might want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way?

How should they interact to find Atticus?

Yeah.

You can grab me on LinkedIn, Ben Hough.

Shoot me an email, ben@atticus.biz.

Shoot me a text, 252-917-4779.

I’m out there.

Not too hard to find.

But yeah, give me a shout anytime.

Love to talk.

Ben, one last question for you, but before I ask it, anything else you wanted to bring up on trends, lessons, inheritance?

There’s a really cool study that we did.

I’ll link it to you so we could send it to the audience.

Okay.

I’ll put it in the show notes.

Yeah.

When we looked at inheritance across the industry, you can get a lot of financial advisors, you kind of start, for those that are listening, not even looking, you’re doing the hands like, “Oh, I’m excited,” like greedy.

There’s a lot, they get excited around, oh, you’re about to inherit money.

All of a sudden, all of the financial advisors show up.

We’re really big toward, there’s a huge opportunity to innovate in this space.

There’s no fintech that’s really nailed inheritance.

I’d love to be a part of that, but it starts with providing meaningful value upstream.

So how do we help?

How do we build trust during the process?

One of the things that’s really cool is that we did that study and we looked at the actual assets that were being inherited.

That forced us to segment the demographics of inheritance and who was receiving it and who’s set to receive it, how those trends have changed.

By and large, the biggest indicator of a change in inheritance over the past 50 to 100 years was a change in education.

So we all drove down toward, as we were looking at what’s the average inheritance, what are the average inheritance sizes, the most common types of inheritance assets that are passed down.

By and large, the coolest trend that we saw was education.

To bring it all full circle, we were talking about death and is death dark and heavy and how is it more beautiful?

There’s a huge amount of inheritance that passes that people don’t even really call inheritance or realize it’s when generationally you pass down education.

That happens in the home.

That happens in the community.

Obviously, it happens in the school system and higher education, going and getting learned up as we continue to see the world evolve.

I think that the four-year college degree, not that it means less and less, but the amount of doers who are out there DIY everything, whether it’s coding, whether it’s designing, whether it’s the plumbers, the contractors, a huge push back into some of these trades and industries that can provide great living, scalable businesses within them.

It’s really cool to see how education as a society has paid into just the bettering of the entire society and the economy, families, just kind of all of it.

So yeah, I mean, thanks for asking that question.

It’s a really cool trend.

I’ll send you more information on it so you can read it.

But I just think that demystifying the fact that passing down education really should be considered inheritance because it’s such a massive indicator toward financial success, financial balance across the next generation’s lifetime.

That’s a conversation that needs to be had just as much as normalizing, hey, at some point I’m going to pass away.

I don’t want to leave a mess.

Here’s everything so that when I do pass, it’s prepared and it’s not a burden to you.

Way to bring us full circle.

I’m really appreciative of that, and that is a beautiful thing to think about as inheritance.

Certainly feels much more meaningful than, here’s money.

But last question for you.

What is the image on your phone’s lock screen?

Oh man.

Let me see.

I stumped him finally.

He’s looking.

There you go.

Surfing.

It’s surfing.

Oh yeah.

Picture of me surfing a wave.

Oh, cool.

I’ve surfed exactly like three times, and I wouldn’t call any of them notable other than I had fun.

Yeah.

Well, Ben, thanks so much for being on Money Isn’t Everything.

It’s been a pleasure to talk to you about death and what to do about money.

Likewise.

I appreciate you having me.

Thanks.

Okay, so one thing that stood out to me is that death isn’t only about darkness.

It’s also a celebration, as evidenced by funeral playlists.

Two weeks from now, we have Piere’s Amy Lo on to talk about small business and fintech.

See you then.