How I manage my money - Part 1: Who am I?

None of this is financial advice. If you need that, you should seek the advice of an investment professional.

My name is Ethan––I’ve been investing and managing my money since my early teens, and eventually I spent a decade building Digit, an automated personal finance app that made it easy for our customers to save over $9 billion.

We’re in an interesting moment for the personal finance conversation—on one hand, we’re a few years post ZIRP (zero-interest rate policy), there’s sticky inflation, upcoming pullback in government spending and de-globalization. On the other, the AI revolution is looking to make work and life easier than ever before.

So, this is the first in a series of posts about how I manage my financial life. I’m writing this series to clarify my thinking and as a way to potentially help others. But first, who am I and why might I have something to say about managing money?

I started investing and managing my money at 13; brokerage at E-trade, checking at First Union, credit card (well my moms cards I used for myself and paid myself) from Citibank. I learned early on, by day trading my bar-mitzvah money, the difference between speculating and investing.

I worked for Lockheed Martin during college as a Fixed Asset Accountant where I was responsible for auditing the depreciation of billions of dollars in assets. I learned how to review insane amounts of financial data quickly and accurately. I went on to lead an SAP implementation for the fixed asset department where I learned how big companies do finance.

I graduated college in 2008, as the entire financial world was melting. So I started a video podcast trying to spread what I had learned about investing more specifically spreading the index fund gospel. I was the 22 year old in 2009 telling everyone to buy the dip.

Around the same time I was lucky to score a job at a financial technology startup: Cake Financial, where we were trying to bring more transparency to retail investing. I learned that most retail investors were underperforming the market. Cake struggled, I was laid off, Cake was later acquired by Etrade.

After losing my job at Cake my good friend Dan Martell convinced me to start a software company. So together we started Flowtown, an SMB SaaS company funded by several prominent silicon valley investors including Travis Kalanick. We sold Flowtown for ~$4.5M in 2011 returning 130% to our investors.

After selling Flowtown, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Slowly I came back to my love of personal finance. I started thinking I would publish a book I had started in college but quickly convinced myself that wasn’t ambitious enough. I wound up stumbling upon the idea that if you could just help someone do the right thing financially, make it automated, you could have a huge impact on the world. That’s what led me to founding Digit in 2013.

I founded Digit with the goal to “make all the complicated financial services in your life automated, intuitive, and intelligent.” We wound up building a product that helped millions of Americans save $9 billion and in the process we set a new standard for financial services. Lots of apps later went on to build a “chat bot” and try to automate savings. In 2021 Digit was acquired for $238 million, delivering a market-beating return for our biggest investors like Ribbit Capital and General Catalyst.

I have managed my finances and investments for 26 years. I have also read dozens of books and thousands of articles on personal finance, financial history, investing, economics, portfolio management, wealth management, behavioral psychology and business. I have had 100s of conversations with consumers, high net worth families and professional investors.

My posts assume you have a basic understanding of personal finance and investing. If you don’t, don’t worry, just take my posts and throw them into ChatGPT and ask it to explain stuff.