How well do you truly know yourself financially? Marla Sofer, Founder and CEO of Knomee, shares insights on aligning money, values, and personal fulfillment. With an impressive career in fintech and financial services, Marla reveals how understanding your financial identity is the key to making better decisions.
Can you align your finances with the life you actually want? Marla Sofer, a financial services veteran and founder of Knomee, believes financial wellness starts with self-awareness. In this episode, she shares her entrepreneurial journey, the lessons she learned from her hardworking parents, and why she left powerhouse companies like JP Morgan, BlackRock, and Microsoft to create a more intentional approach to money management.
Marla’s app, Knomee, helps users understand their financial identity before making major financial choices—shifting the focus from external expectations to personal fulfillment. Her story is a testament to the power of resilience, self-discovery, and taking bold leaps toward what truly matters.
✨ Key Takeaways:
🎧 Ready to rethink your financial journey? Tune in now for expert insights from Marla Sofer!
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Marla Sofer
You need to define what brings you joy. You need to define what you like spending time on. You need to know your values and you need to understand what, how you envision your future. You need to understand your history as you started with. And so that is my obsession right now. And what I launched at Nomi is a platform which is scalable to help people do that.
Narrator
Welcome to making change with your money. A podcast that highlights the stories and strategies of women who experienced a big life transition and overcame challenges as they redefined financial success for themselves. Now here's your host, Certified Financial Planner, Laura Rotter.
Laura Rotter
I am so excited to have as my guest today, Marla Sofer, founder and CEO of KnowMe.
No me is an app that helps you align your finances and goals through personalized insights and trusted connections with financial advisors. Marla herself is a seasoned financial services and FinTech executive. She's the founder of two women's networks, driving change and inclusion in corporations.
She's a frequent speaker on topics related to the future of financial services, wealth and asset management, and she's a proud mom and wife. Her experience is at Microsoft, Carta, Invesco. Exignite and Lending Club influenced her decision to create a solution that would improve personal financial wellness and enable financial services companies to better serve their customers and prospects.
So welcome Marla to the Making Change With Your Money podcast.
Marla Sofer
Thank you so much, Laura. It's great to be here. I'm excited to learn about your journey and get to what you're doing today.
Laura Rotter
But I'm going to start with the question I always start with, which was, what was money like in your family growing up, Marla?
Marla Sofer
It's a good question. So I, like many. that are Jewish in America have a story of refugees from Eastern Europe that really didn't have anything, lost everything. A lot of my great grands were, were killed in the Holocaust. And so one set of family went first to Israel and then made their way to Texas. And the other set of family was kind of a typical.
Ellis Island y type of a story went from from Germany to the UK and then made their way to the U. S. But came with nothing. I would say every single one of them came with nothing and Both of them both sets kind of found their paths. One was pretty traditional New York, one in Texas, El Paso, Texas.
Laura Rotter
Very different story.
Marla Sofer
Yes. Very different story, kind of an entrepreneurial, what we call it fondly like border machers, where you kind of like buy and sell stuff across the border and, you know, built a business. And so for me, I was raised in an environment where you, you can find the American dream. You can, you can build a business.
There are, there is a path and a hope. And what's really Has been studying for me as I'm, I'm pretty tapped into that really critical component of my identity and belief around money as opposed to my husband's. My husband is Israeli, and he was raised in a family that also emigrated there with nothing, but they kind of went.
On a different journey, like from military did went into careers that were kind of related to their jobs and worked in the same job for, you know, 30, 40 years until they retired and didn't have any of that entrepreneurial backing. It was, you know, very much kind of you, you live, you live to work. You don't necessarily have to enjoy it.
You're there for the paycheck. And. I would say my belief around money is you, you make, you make of it what, what you want. And so I've had a very different idealistic vision, which has served me well. I love that.
Laura Rotter
First of all, your self awareness, and obviously this is the work that you continue to do of the difference and perhaps similarities between yourself and your husband.
And, and though you started off with what were challenging circumstances that your parents faced, obviously, and yet the message is resilience. And, and positivity and hope and, and even the benefit of entrepreneurship. It really resonates with me. I too grew up, my parents were a younger generation than my husband's parents.
My husband's parents grew up during the depression. So they weren't first generation American. And so there was this message that you work for a paycheck, you make sacrifices in life for that paycheck. And my message, my parents were not quite that young, but like children of the sixties. You should love what you do.
And if you don't find something else to do, and it's interesting in a marriage that there's.
Marla Sofer
Same. I, I feel that resonates a lot for me as well, Laura. Like that, that kind of, I, I definitely have that dynamic in my marriage and it's, it's, you know, it makes for a lot of hard conversations about money.
Laura Rotter
Yes. So did you grow up in Texas? Did you grow up in New York? Where, where?
Marla Sofer
No, Texas. I was born and raised in Texas and yeah, my parents are still there. They're separated, but still there. My dad built a business as a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch. He had three kids already. My mom was, was also, they, they both have their own entrepreneurial journey, even after their own parents had an entrepreneurial journey.
So my, my dad like worked for my grandfather. He didn't make a lot of money. He was miserable. And one day, 1985. Or he had had enough and a friend told him, Hey, you can come work at Merrill Lynch, build a business, become independent, sell stocks at that in those days and call out of the phone book. And he did, and he built his business.
And my mom had a very similar journey. My mom's a huge inspiration for me where she started as a teacher and then she kind of rose in ranks, became an administrator in private colleges. She's very mission driven and wanted to kind of. Focus on underserved communities and help them get credentials so that they can get better jobs and find more wealth accumulation.
And also 1987, she had three kids, took out a huge loan and launched a business. You know, it was a huge risk, didn't have a lot going in very traditional kind of blue collar background and became an entrepreneur and had a very, very, you know, long, hard, successful growth. What kind of business did she launch a private college?
So if you're familiar with kind of technical colleges like DeVry and you know, that's like the big 1. most people have heard of, but it's a whole it's a whole big industry. They're very focused on collaborating with the government also in terms of funding to get underserved demographics who might not have gotten their.
High school degree, a GED, give them some technical skills. Back in her day, it was, it was computer skills. It was like, let me teach you word processing and DOS and a lot of kind of the older languages around computers. She's also had schools that focus on nursing and truck driving and masseuses and paralegals.
You know, a lot of those industries are served by these private colleges that take individuals, give them an education and help them find trades.
Laura Rotter
Oh, thank you. And Marla, how did that affect you? I mean, you mentioned that you saw your mother take out a huge loan. There was risk involved. Were you still in the home? Did you?
Marla Sofer
Oh yeah, I was 10.
I don't know if I was really that aware at the time, but I definitely saw how my mother always worked more hours than my dad. She had, I think, more, well, more evening hours. I think she would always leave later. He would leave. Anyway, she had kind of. She just had these big ambitions.
My father also did, but in a very, very different, very, both very entrepreneurial way. And I think for me, just like what you said, Laura, there was this belief and value of enjoy what you do, but pour your heart into it. It's not going to be easy. Like you. Working hard is part of living life. Both of my parents, they're now 75, and they both still work, and they enjoy work.
It's a part of who they are. It's a part of their life. And so I feel that, for me as a kid, that model. Of you go to work. You work hard because you want to because there's something in it for you was a huge part of my own belief system around work. And for me, I always was, you know, I'm a bit of a pleaser and an overachiever.
You know, I have some of those those traits, but it was Not frequently about the security and the money, maybe it should have been sometimes, but it was more about work hard and enjoy the work, work really hard, work, don't even count the hours. And so I pour in crazy hours, I pour in crazy amounts of stress and time and energy, but it's because I enjoy it.
Laura Rotter
It's a great message that you got from your parents and it sounds like you continue to get from your parents. Because there is always a trade off, right? We have scarce resources and time is one of those scarce resources and understanding how to allocate that time. Well, is probably our life part of our life's work.
Marla Sofer
Right? And as I've, I've come to believe less in the idea of work life balance. I don't think there is such a thing. I think in each period of life, we stress, yeah. Perhaps work more other times, perhaps family more, but it's never going to be a complete balance. And you really need to be able to follow both your head and your heart.
Laura Rotter
And it sounds like you watched your parents follow both that. It wasn't financial decision to work hard.
Marla Sofer
Yeah, one thing on that, Laura, I know you told me you do also yoga and meditation. I also do yoga. There's a yoga teacher who said once, and I really loved it, that balance is not a destination. It is something that you always have a relationship with.
And it just stuck with me, that you, that balance is, you never achieve balance. It's something that you, you have more of or less of. And it's true even like when you walk down the street, You know, like learning how to walk requires balance and sometimes you're a little bit more firm and solid and sometimes you're a little bit less, but you have this relationship with balance that kind of ebbs and flows.
Laura Rotter
Thank you so much for sharing that because as someone who did yoga this morning, I'm thinking, right, even when you're in tree pose, which for those of our listeners who don't do yoga, you're balancing on one leg and You feel the shifts and, uh, there's a constant adjustment, perhaps, you know, that your body is making as you walk as you attempt to balance.
It's not, as you said, that's so beautiful. I love that Marla, the idea that it's, it's a process, not a goal. So what was your process? I'm assuming you took it for granted that you would go to college. What was your journey?
Marla Sofer
Yeah, I did. I went to college in Texas at University of Texas at Austin. I sacrificed.
I would say money always played a role. And for me, it was, I did have a debt. Deliberate decision making history around money, starting there, where it was, my parents had saved up a little bit, but you know, it was kind of, you know, we had a little bit, we could go and get our bachelor's potentially, depending on where we chose, you know, whether we would have to get loans or not.
Both of my brothers chose to go to private schools. I went to the university of Texas and got a scholarship because I knew I wanted to take a junior year abroad. I knew I wanted to travel. I knew I wanted to do all these other things. And. I said, well, I don't want to spend all that money on college. I would, I would much rather make these decisions that allow me to do the things that I know are going to be important to me.
And so I know that this budget is somewhat fixed. I'm not going to be able to work full time as I'm in college. And I made a much more deliberate and thoughtful choice. So I went to the University of Texas and I got a scholarship, which meant that my tuition was, I don't know, 1, a year. It was something, something quite, ridiculously low.
And it is a very good school. Yeah, I was happy to, you know, when to be local and to get into a great school, had a great experience, got super involved in peace and conflict resolution. And I moved overseas, I moved to Israel, met my husband there, and studied conflict resolution, got very involved. It was it was kind of in the wake of the Oslo Accords when there was this strong belief in peace in the region.
And there was a lot of investment. There was a lot of hope. I actually spent some time in Gaza. I've been to the West Bank and I've been to Egypt and I met with some, some people there. It was extremely volatile back then. Nothing like now. And so after I graduated from my BA, I moved to Israel and I lived there for two years.
I started to get my, my master's there. The economy was horrible because the security environment was horrible. It was in the There was a rise of a tremendous amount of security situations, uh, suicide bombs, buses being blown up and it's termed the second intifada. The economy was bad and my husband was graduating.
There were no jobs. So Israel was not then like it is now. A lot of kids coming out of college were going to become waiters and waitresses and figuring out how to just make ends meet. And so we decided to travel around the world and see where we can, you know, take a next step and then maybe come back to Israel later.
Yeah. Which never happened, maybe, maybe still will in the future. Who knows? And ended up, I'll kind of make a long story short, got, got a job in New Jersey, lived there, worked in nonprofit, got into financial services in 2004. And my career has really followed a very non traditional, non linear path. path following my curiosity, started a nonprofit and then went into coding briefly and then into international banking learned a lot.
But I think I'm always one of those people that like, once I learned, you know, 60 to 80 percent of what I needed to know, it was time to move on. So spent six years at JP Morgan, five years at BlackRock and realized this isn't the future. I need to be part of tech and I need to be part of how tech is innovating and changing the way this industry operates to actually solve problems.
I was also very motivated by passion and mission and impact and really loved these themes around democratization of financial services and helping more people make better decisions. better choices with the right tools and having access to those tools. And so that got me into FinTech. Been in FinTech since 2015.
I've run partnerships at four FinTech companies, and I worked at Microsoft focused on the strategy for financial services and where it's going. And all of that culminated in this new phase that I'm in now, as of a year and a half ago, recognizing. Recognizing from a very unique perspective, the gap that is holding people back from making better financial choices.
And a lot of it has to do with information availability and self awareness and the ability to hold your financial choices accountable. And so before you can make a financial plan, you really need to know yourself and you need to know to clearly define. I wouldn't even say goals because goals is a big.
Hard to define question. You need to define what brings you joy. You need to define what you like spending time on. You need to know your values and you need to understand what, how you envision your future. You need to understand your history as you started with. And so that is my obsession right now.
And what I launched at Nomi is a platform which is scalable to help people do that with the support of gamified wellness tools. Focus technology, and with that access to the information, they can then make better financial choices, much more aligned with who they are, what they care about, where they want to go, and the impact they want to have in the world.
Laura Rotter
Thank you, Marla. And I'm excited to explore KnowMe and, and this phase of your life. And before we get there is, I'm wondering, you did identify, you know, something about your personality, where you love learning new things. And then in the past, you've moved on. Can you also identify for us, what are the, the skills that you see as the through line?
Marla Sofer
Yeah, I talk about this one a lot and it goes back to that peace and conflict resolution stuff. So I think my, a lot of my key skill is understanding incentive really quickly. I think people and, and, Companies are run by people, so I would just say humans are driven by incentives, and those incentives are rooted in values.
And so you really need to deeply understand someone's incentive in order to help them find a path forward, because if you're not tapping into their values and what they're looking to achieve, what's going to incentivize them to take action? And so going back to very, very high stakes context of peace and conflict in the Middle East and applying that.
In each of my jobs where I focused on strategic partnership, where you have multiple parties coming together and figuring out how do I ink a deal, what is the win, win, win in order to get to that end state? You have to deeply understand incentives and you have to understand what are the motivators? How are they going to get there?
Well, how can I, what can I help them achieve? And it is actually pretty scientific. If you, if you boil it down, there needs to be an understanding of the ends they are looking to get to. It comes back to the core tenets of like smart goals. What are and objectives and key results? What are the objectives of a particular entity, whether it's a human or a company?
And what are the results they need to see? And then there's a lot of peripheral. There's a lot of, well, who's accountable to getting them to those results? And who are the sponsors that are pushing that forward? Who are the ones that believe in that and, and want to see it happen? And the most important question always is, Why?
Like, what, what is it that they really are looking to achieve? Why are they looking to achieve that? Because if you don't understand that, that's really the core. That's that, you know, Simon Sinek, like the inner circle, when you understand the inner circle, why, then you can really start to clarify the outer circle so much more easily.
So for me. That's been the through line is when you're talking either directly with an individual as a high net worth client, but certainly as it relates to strategic partnerships, trying to get glimpses into the why, so that you can really frame out the outcome, which is the what and then there's all of the how the how is always, you know, complicated, but. You know, you get there.
Laura Rotter
I really love this and it brings up some things for me. First of all, when I'm first getting to know a new client, someone I'm working with, I like to go through their communication preferences. And one of the things I explore is what motivates you. Are you motivated by the people involved?
Are you motivated by recognition? And I, it is sort of a, a, I give multiple choices and I'm curious to then ask it of you, Marla, as someone who. You know, you're clearly motivated. We talked a little bit about watching your parents and what motivated them. What motivates you?
Marla Sofer
Yeah, it's wild how hard it is for people to answer that for themselves.
And they go through all these quizzes and try to like, make sure that they understand it. There's what I think motivates me. I think it's a Deep self awareness question that I'm doing my best to try to figure out what my motivators are. What I would like to believe it is, is impact and meaning. It is kind of those magical words, impact, meaning, purpose.
Like, what am I really here for? And that was for me. I know that we'll get to this and I'm sorry to come back to it again, but you know, the, the, the transition to becoming a founder. Entailed a huge amount of sacrifice and so when you sacrifice, you definitely need to key into the motivator because you're giving so much up.
And if, if you don't understand the motivator, then it's hard to give that much up, you know, and there's kind of extrinsic motivators, like money capital. Let me, let me see. Uh, it could be status. It could be, you know, having a big, Bigger friend group or, you know, having a whatever it is, right? I don't know.
But there's I think this really powerful intrinsic motivator and I kind of got to the stage. I was 46. I'm now 47 and I could not find the motivation to find another job. I could not find the motivation to there were times in my last role before I became a founder. Where I got off BART going into San Francisco and I literally had to think to myself one step one foot in front of the other.
I couldn't walk in the door. I was so not motivated to go into that job and I, I, that raised all these questions. Like, what is it all for? Like, why am I here? Am I here just because I need the BART? Paycheck? Is that really what this is all about? And it made me answer all these questions. I'll give you one other like quick thing and don't want to take out all the air here in this podcast.
But for me, I did a, a session with a coach who did this like meditative journey. And the question this coach asked me, and it was just one session because then I got like, it was, I was like, Oh, too vulnerable. Don't ever want to go there again. Thank you. But it was like this really deep. Experience for me and she, she kind of had me envision 75 year old me sitting next to me and what a 75 year old me feel.
About me right now and I, I broke down like crying. I was like, she just feels shame. She feels like you didn't tap it. You didn't, you didn't even try. And here I was like, I had worked at the best companies in the world. You know, I had a great salary and my 75 year old me knew that. Internally, like, you're kind of, you're still coasting, you're still doing, like, you're taking, you're following another person's version of what you think you should be doing, as opposed to what you truly want to be doing.
It's much harder what you truly want to be doing, but you don't believe in yourself enough to do it. And that was like this slap across the face of reality for me. And it is so in line with what I want other people to experience. I want other people to get slapped across the face. Theoretically, I won't really do that to, to make choices that are so much more aligned with what they really want, not what other people are expecting with them and not with standards and norms.
Uh, of course, when it comes to money, you have to survive. You have to provide a roof over your head. You have to be able to pay for your necessities. You have to, you know, everyone's got different obligations. You've got to meet your obligations. Many of us, even once we're able to do that. We stay on that hamster wheel, and, you know, I certainly got to the point where I can't afford the rest of my life unless I keep making money, but how long am I going to allow others to determine how I do that, and And defer to their own definitions of the terms, you know, what that looks like and who it's for and the purpose and mission of how I'm making my money and the change I want to make. And so I went on this journey to see how could I close that gap between what I do and why I do in a much more effective way.
Laura Rotter
So beautifully said, and I just wrote that down because I think so many of us fall victim to what you said, following another person's version of what you think you should be doing and, it's, you know, it's not our fault where we're in this culture that, you know, you, you go to college, you get a good job. And then, like you said, sometime in your mid forties, often you wake up and go, how'd I end up with this mortgage and these obligations? And why am I putting one foot in front of the other?
So I'm sure this resonates with a lot of our listeners. I also wrote down something you said at the. Beginning Marla, which is you've always been a deliberate decision maker around money. So as we now get into the discussion of know me and your vision, which I see how much it lights you up. What was the deliberate decision making as you walked away from employment to become a founder?
Marla Sofer
Part of it was, I feel like I had Proven to myself that I could get a job and not just any job, I'd proven to myself repeatedly. I can get a good job. I can get a job that pays me really, really well. It doesn't mean I'm going to like the job. It doesn't mean I'm going to respect the people I work with, and it doesn't mean I'm going to believe wholeheartedly in the purpose of the company.
In most, in all cases, I wouldn't join unless I did, but I would say in many cases I got there and I was like, Oh, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. And I don't really respect that guy. And, or maybe even the CEO. You know, and I don't like necessarily align with the vision of where this company is going, and I don't necessarily think that they make good decisions in some cases.
They do because they're good businesses. They create profit. The deliberate decision for me was I had. earned enough of a, of a little bit of a cushion to say, can I give myself a shot? And what does giving myself a shot look like? I'll be candid with you and say that in the beginning, it was extremely, extremely hard to have the family support I was looking for and to try to really look for that support I needed to get there.
The first year was really, really challenging. I had no money. I had no funding. I didn't get any commitments before I started this company. Not recommended. You should probably have some commitments from funders before you go and launch a software company. But I wanted the experience not only of Building a company.
I wanted the learning like I wanted the value that I would get and bring to whoever, whatever I do in the future in launching a software business in actually diving into what does that mean? What does fundraising feel like? What does overseeing all of these different functions that have to come together to launch a company feel like?
And I might be great at it. I might be horrible at it, but I know I'm gonna learn a lot. And that deliberate decision was, how critical is this experience to me, and is it worth sacrificing the pain, the income, the disruption to my family, the disruption to the savings that we have kind of accumulated to date, and is it worth it?
And the flip side of that is, Not now, when, you know, when am I going to make that better on myself and how can I live with myself having gone through that experience of looking at my, down at myself, a 75 year old me, you know, how, how can I live with myself if I didn't, if I didn't give it a shot, how could I, how could I continue on this journey if it didn't feel 100 percent purely authentic, full of integrity, where I knew what I'm doing is at least in my control, I know I'm going to make mistakes, man, I've made a Ton of mistakes.
And I thrive on that. I'm okay with it. And so I think the deliberate part is, I knew it was going to be hard. And I kind of built a bit of a reserve of, okay, this is the energy I'm going to need to deal with the hard. And it's, It's, it was much harder, that reserve was probably pretty thin. And I, you know, then I was like, Oh, I need more reserve of energy to kind of deal with how hard this is.
And, but every day, that's how it is. I wake up every day and I'm thrilled that I get to do what I love and pursue a mission that I envision of something truly impactful that I believe in. Other people believe in it too. Finding a way to make money isn't easy, but every day I'm waking up and doing it.
Laura Rotter
Thank you for sharing that. And, and I'm also hearing given how you just started that description that you had savings in the bank. So you had thought about how, you know, not only whatever emotional reserves you needed, but whatever financial reserves you needed, you, you knew that you had that runway. And you also knew that if you felt like it wasn't working, that you could get another position.
That you had the skill set that you had the network. And so this wasn't sort of a choice that was irreversible.
Marla Sofer
Exactly. Yeah.
Laura Rotter
So thank you and please share with us now about KnowMe and where you are.
Marla Sofer
Sure. So you're almost two years, I guess. I started in January of 2023 working full time on it. And what KnowMe is, it's a entirely different approach to finding the support you need to make financial choices, to driving those connections that will guide.
The right services and products to you because you know who you are and you can advocate for those things. So know me is this step before you work with a financial planner or advisor or even, you know, in time, hopefully the step before you take out credit or buy an insurance policy. Every financial product is in the business of selling something into your future and money holistically.
I believe that money and trust are synonyms. Money is trust, and you really are buying into this concept of trust. In order to use money as a, as a tool, rather than look at it as a goal, you have to trust that it is doing something. Going back to what we were talking about with respect to OKRs, and what are the incentives and the key results?
What NOMI is all about, and you asked about the through line and what I'm really good at, is getting really crisp and clear about your incentives. Until you know your incentives, You can't do the what. That is Nomi. Nomi is your own personal profile. We call it your financial identity. When you know your financial identity, it is your why, your values.
It is your history. It's your goals. It's your attitudes about money. It is how you define and not only, Define it. You understand your own opinion about risk. In which scenario would you act A or B? And why would you act in that way or B? So we talked a little bit about the risk I took in becoming a founder, and a lot of the why was, as you said, because I knew I had skill set.
I knew I had options. I knew I had a bit of a cushion. So there's kind of some very tactical thing. And then there's this kind of deeper, more intrinsic, you know, incentive for me, which was, you know, I know this is so critically important to me to get this done. So what Nomi becomes is a, to get geeky a little bit, it's a data layer.
It's an opportunity for individuals to know themselves. And the key part of Nomi, there's really two massive key features of what we're building. The one most important one, I would say, Is own your information. Nobody may see it without your consent. When you build a know me financial identity, because especially the financial industry is in the business of selling trust and selling money, you are the one who has your fingers on the keys to determine who do I trust?
Who has earned my trust? What are they giving me in return for the privilege of seeing me? of knowing me, of seeing not only how much money I have and where my statements and accounts and transactions and concentrations and net worth and all of those things are, yes, but seeing my values, seeing what matters to me, seeing who I share my money with and how I envision my future.
What does that look like? Trinomi will help you, like we help you write down and articulate how you envision your future. How do you want to spend your time? What brings you joy? These are the bits of information that a lot of financial advisors and planners, the planners are a bit better, don't ask or have never been trained to ask.
They are trained to ask you, and they have to regulatorily ask you about your risk, it doesn't have to make sense to you, they just have to have the form in the file, but they have to require, they have to ask you that, they have to ask you a bit about how much money you have. There's a whole host of thousands of other questions they don't have to ask you, and they don't, and many are not trained to ask.
It's your money. And this is kind of the major message of Nomi. It's your money. Your money is an extension of your impact. You have, if you have, are paying your bills, even, even your bills, like if your, your purposes and values is you want to put a house over your kid's head, or you want to have kids in the first place, that's another, it's another way that your money can have impact.
You know, it's not kind of, uh, yeah. Passive and and done in an unaware way. It's done in a very mindful, aware way. I am using my using my money to align with my values and it can be as simple as that. I want shelter or it can be. I want to have a real impact on sustainability. I want to do something around gun control.
Maybe I just want my money to be thoughtfully allocated in a way that Recognizes that I have worked at tech companies and have a lot of tech stocks and I don't need any more tech stocks. Thank you. But unless you get really clear and give guidance to your money, your money is always going to be handled by someone else.
And, and, you know, it's interesting, as we were talking about this earlier in this conversation, it's the same as. Your energy and we talked about how I didn't want to live by the rules of what somebody else kind of put on me, how I'm supposed to be acting. Same goes for your money. I don't want my money to be guided by someone else.
It's my money. It's my it's I have earned hard like with hard one. There's been a lot of work to get this cushion that is an opportunity for me to have the impact I want to have in the way I want to have it. And so Nomi allows me to do that by articulating that clearly and advocating for that with the team, the people that work for me on my behalf.
And so when you build a know me profile, you may allow your advisor to see it. You may find a new advisor. We have advisors that are on our platform that are looking for clients and we help them find the right client and the client find the right person because we know so much about their business and because we know so much about the client.
And so we help create that match really, really beautifully. And what's nice about it is. The first question is never, how much money do you have? Because just asking that question is isolating, it is condescending, it's shaming, it is, you haven't earned the right. We don't have a trust built up yet for you to ask me that question.
And so Nomi's first question is, tell me about yourself. What do you care about? What do you like in the world? How do you like spending your time? When you reimagine money as a tool versus a goal, what is it a tool for in your life, for you? And that can change. That's the other beautiful thing about NOMI is it can change.
So people change all the time. Their circumstances change, their values can change, their goals certainly change, their attitudes may change, where they, how they were raised might change, they might go through some trauma. So they're allowed to change. And the industry today doesn't recognize that when you go through a financial planning profiling, you might do an onboarding.
It might take a very long time, but then it goes into a file. And then maybe once in a year, there's like a couple of tweaks and updates, but it's kind of out of your hands. The, the planner advisor is kind of looking back at that file and saying, Hmm, what does this person care about? When in the meantime.
Last week, something huge could have happened to you and a lot could have changed and that might not have been your first phone call to say, Hey, something's changed, you know, like I went through. So Nomi puts, it gives you that power to say you're allowed to change and then work your way through achieving the goals that you're looking to achieve in your own, on your journey, finding your own motivation to get there.
Laura Rotter
Thank you. It sounds. You know, through my eyes as a financial advisor, it sounds like a great platform as, you know, we spoke previously, and I'm really also in this role as a sense of mission, sort of a self defined yoga teacher for one's money, and I really went into what's known as the retail side of the industry, or working with real human beings, as opposed to institutions, Um.
Because I find the stories and learning about the people and the history and their values so compelling and then the how, as you said, of course, can be complex, but that's that to me is not the interesting part of the work and people. Always evolve. I'm you know, I'm told sometimes that I have too many touches during the year, but I want to check in.
I want to know what's going on. We're always changing and it's important to again. I love what you described about know me to really understand the deep. Wise of the people I work with and not just the dollars and cents. Someone said to me recently that what we truly want. Whether it's security, whether it's freedom, whether it's connection, we have no way of measuring that.
So we use our money as a proxy because we can measure that. But money cannot be the means to an end. It's only a way of. facilitating our living lives that we truly want to live. So how does Know Me work?
Marla Sofer
Yes, I will tell you, but I also wanted to really quick, I will tell you how Know Me works. I just wanted to say you're also very good at it.
Like even in this conversation, you're very good at and skilled at helping somebody tap into kind of opening up and sharing their story and their why. And so I just wanted to recognize how it seems like you've found something that is just super well suited to your own skill set. And I kind of recognize that in you too.
So how Know Me works? It is a super accessible gamified app. You go to knowme. com it's spelled K N O M E E. And it will show notes. Awesome. Thank you. And the idea is, you know, if it's not obvious, KnowMe allows you to know me. I want to know me. I want to choose who knows me. It's important for me To know myself so I can become my own best advocate.
So when you go into know me, we immediately start asking you some questions and you get rewards. Somebody recently compared know me. It's like the duo lingo of financial wellness. So we are constantly giving you positive incentive and there's compulsion loops kind of built in. It was really important for me to bring in technical talent, not from the financial industry.
I wanted to bring in technical talent that deeply understands humans and psychology and compulsion loops and behavioral psychology. How do I get somebody to do this for that, recognizing that this is giving them value and wanting to do more of this? And there are so many applications out there that we've learned from.
Some of our, our reference points are, are, are Duolingo, you know, Noom, LinkedIn, Hinge for dating. A lot of these. Tools are excellent at getting you to share information about yourself because when you do, you get more value out of the tool and that's really where Nomi comes in. We're making it fun. We're making it accessible.
This process of self discovery is helping you ask questions like I shared of this individual, helping ask questions of yourself you might have never asked before. You might have never even thought about them before, and you might have never even paired them with money before. So I think. Creating fun gamified experiences where you go through, we don't, we won't even asking you, what are your goals?
There's always an option to enter goals. But for many people, goals is a big question. And so it's hard for them to answer and they don't know what their goals are. And so we ask much easier questions. What brings you joy? What are the things that you look back? Let's say if we do an exercise sometimes in webinars and when I do, uh, speaking at women's groups, look back at your credit card statement last month and just circle the experiences that brought you the most joy where you say, Oh, that was money well spent and that will be, it's so insightful.
You can like go back and say, Oh, maybe it was a meal. Maybe it was a movie with your kids. Maybe it was a coffee that you got when you were on a walk that was really impactful, but that 5 coffee just holds a memory for you. And so I think really being cognizant of your money is a tool. And when you recognize the moments that your money is operating in sync and in harmony with how you want it to be used, you can make more of those.
Those moments. And so Nomi helps you do that. And the more you create into this profile, the more value you get out of it, the more you are able to recognize, wait a second, this is where I want to optimize my own, my energy, my time spent, my money spent, and where I want it to go in the future. And so it, you know, it's a, it's a big, big shift.
When you go back to what you said that maybe I'm doing too many taps and I've heard that from advisors, they're like, Oh, my clients are like, Oh, good. It's because I think as a society, we have been trained, especially as we work with a professional to say out of sight, out of mind, I don't want to think about it.
Thinking about money makes me stressed. I hate thinking about money. I hate talking about money. Whenever I talk about money with my partner, we fight. We don't agree on it. It's just stressful. Maybe I'm just talking for myself now, but I, I feel that the, the alternate to that is I do want to talk about it.
I'm so excited to tell you about how I want my money to do for me now. Something's new. Something's exciting there. I can't wait to tell you about it. So there's a huge social norm change that has to happen to get there. I think Gen Z is a bit more tapped into it. Frankly, they spend money on whatever the heck, and they're, they're much less susceptible to judgment around how they're spending their money.
You know, the whole, the whole fire movement that came up with millennials on, you know what I. Don't want to work and be as rich as I possibly can and die as wealthy as I possibly can. I want to work as much as I need to, to get to an early retirement and live my life the way I want. And it might mean that I get income in through different means that I'm not in a full time employee type job.
And I love that. I love that. They're like thinking about money in such a different way. And that's why it's caught on because people are desperate for this. I do want to talk about money. Why has the society trained me that I shouldn't and that when it's out of sight out of mind I'm better off?
Laura Rotter
So interesting a lot to think about there.
Think I think it's very true. And is there a cost? How how does NOMI make money and who pays for what?
Marla Sofer
Yeah, excellent, excellent question. So there is no cost today for Nomi. In the future, there might be. So today, if you're an early user, you come in, it is free. It will be free for you forever. This is our effort to get users.
We would love users to come in and try it and see what value they get out of the platform. We also want feedback. The way Nomi makes money is if, and only if, you are looking for a provider to find you, the mechanism of providers to find you today is broken. It is through a friend, through Through colleague, maybe you go to a talk at the library where somebody is telling you about their advisory practice.
There is nothing wrong with that. But is it going to find you the right provider for you? Maybe, maybe not. Is that person going to know everything about your particular personal needs? And people are complex and their money is complex. If I am a woman in my demographic, let's say she has a nice nest egg, she's between 40 and 60, and she may have a lot of different things going on.
She might be a veteran. She might have some private equity assets. She might have real estate assets. She might have gone through a divorce. She might have some forgotten 401ks. She, she might have. An inheritance of a business from her parents. What, how am I going to deal with that? And you have to find providers that know how to talk to you on your level.
You might want to have a provider who can talk to you, which I think you're great at, Laura, at a much more mindful level, like get a lot more in tune with how your money is helping you in your holistic path on your journey. And, and some people really don't. Love that and want it. And other people are like, no, I just want the, I just want the facts, ma'am.
And tell me, show me, show me the graphs and the charts. And that's great. But how are you going to find the right match if you're not starting off writing down who you're about? So those advisors. If they get matched with an individual would pay a fee for finding a lead today. It is extremely expensive for them to find their niche client.
And so we make that easy for them and it's totally transparent to the user and it is not ever sold behind their back. No information Is shared with absolutely anyone without your consent. So you have to consent to say, yes, I would like to find an advisor and I will allow the advisor, this particular one advisor to pay for that service of finding me.
So if you think about the analogy of Google or Facebook, so Google and Facebook have your profiles and they sell you all day long. But you don't get to touch it. You don't get to change it. You don't get to feel it. You don't get to choose who sees you. They are selling you to whoever they want and who is paying them the most money, whether you like it or not.
No meat is doing the same, but you get control. You are the one in control. It is your profile. If you never want to hear from XYZ, you will never hear from XYZ. You get the chance to say my profile, we, we plugged into the people I trust, and maybe I will, I'm free. And I would like to be a prospect of these services that I want to get in touch with.
Help me find those and only those, and don't hawk me off to the highest bitter if I don't want to hear from those, because that's confusing and it undermines me trying to achieve my own goals in my life.
Laura Rotter
Privacy is so important and we've all. Sold our information. So it's very comforting to hear that that's one of your stated values.
Marla Sofer
Absolutely. Users will maintain their privacy.
Laura Rotter
So as we're coming to the end of our conversation, Marla, and I've so enjoyed this, I always like to find out how over this time, and you've been through a lot of transitions, how has your definition of success shifted?
Marla Sofer
That's a good one. So I didn't share this story, which I often share that.
Kind of what pushed me over the edge to launch Gnomi was I had been talking about it and talking about it and talking about it years even, and my daughter said, when are you going to do it already? And so, for me, doing it, because it's hard, because my daughter is looking at it, my son is looking at it, and they're watching me, my family is looking at it, my friends, my network, that's success.
It is, I am living in my own integrity. I'm being as authentic as I can be. I am, it's hard as heck, and I wouldn't say I'm good at it yet, but I'm finding my voice. I'm kind of stumbling around and getting to that point. It's Where I find my voice and I live with integrity between the career I've chosen, this hard path I'm going down, and who I'm serving.
And I want to serve humans, people, to live better lives. And so to me, that's success. Like if I am kind of hitting on those cylinders, that's the most important thing for me.
Laura Rotter
Thank you so much. And I will confirm Marla. You have more than found your voice. It's really inspiring to hear your story. And I, you know, I look at know me when, when on the app and it's very engaging and I think you'll be helping a lot of people, so thank you so much for being my guest.
Narrator
Thanks for listening to making change with your money. Certified financial planner, Laura Rotter specializes in helping people just like you, organized, clarify, and invest their money in order to support a life of purpose and meaning. Go to www. trueabundanceadvisors. com forward slash workbook. For a free resource to help you on your journey.
Disclaimer, please remember that the information shared by this podcast does not constitute accounting, legal, tax, investment, or financial advice. It's for information purposes only. You should seek appropriate professional advice for your specific information.