Your Money: Aiming to Bring Financial Planning to the Masses

If Alexa von Tobel has her way, however, financial advice will be as widely available — and affordable — as any other mass-produced consumer product or service. Think gym memberships. It will become the perfect wedding gift for your best friend, or for adult children after they have their first baby.

As the founder of LearnVest, an online financial advisory that she started four years ago, Ms. von Tobel, 29, repeats these themes several times over the course of a recent meeting to underscore what she has set out to do: deliver comprehensive and conflict-free financial advice to the middle class.

“Financial advice shouldn’t be a luxury,” said Ms. von Tobel, a petite blonde with a big personality, in the company’s loftlike offices in New York. “We want to disrupt the industry.”

If her plan works, she would be among the first to crack the code, using both technology and bona fide certified financial planners — the gold standard among advisers — to make this sort of help more accessible to millions of Americans. Most individuals do not have terribly complex financial lives, nor should they need to spend several thousands of dollars to get the advice they need.

But for LearnVest to succeed, Ms. von Tobel will need to sell its product — one that, let’s face it, feels a little like eating your vegetables — to a vast number of customers across the country.

LearnVest, which started in 2009 as a budgeting Web site directed at women, just received another large round of financing from big-time investors, which will allow it to hire more planners and support staff as well as open a training and adviser hub in Phoenix. The company raised $16.5 million, which comes on top of the nearly $25 million raised since its inception.

The plan is to beef up its operation so it can handle the big distribution partnerships that are in the works, including a potential deal with American Express, one of its new investors. The company has broad plans to provide its newly designed product: a seven-step, customized financial plan. Ms. von Tobel, who dropped out of Harvard Business School to start the company, also said it was working with employers and financial planning firms to sell its program within 401(k)'s.

Most financial planners focus on wealthier people, whom they can charge $1,000 to $3,000 for a financial plan, or collect 1 percent of their assets, on average, to manage their money. In contrast, LearnVest charges a $399 upfront fee and $19 a month, or $608 annually. You can pay less for help on a specific goal, like paying off debt or starting a budget.

Ms. von Tobel, who is represented by William Morris Endeavor, the talent agency, has worked hard to raise the company’s profile — as well as her own — in the world of personal finance, though she has not yet reached Suze Orman status. A book by Ms. von Tobel will be released in December.

At the moment, her company does not have much direct competition, aside from the smattering of unbiased advisers that charge a flat or hourly fee. Several relatively affordable online financial firms have cropped up in recent years — including Betterment, Wealthfront, Flat Fee Portfolios and FutureAdvisor — but their focus is much narrower. These companies help assemble and manage low-cost investment portfolios. But they won’t determine how much you can afford to spend on a mortgage, what sort of life insurance you should buy and whether you should be saving more for a child’s college tuition or your own retirement.

Personal Capital, an online wealth management firm, also combines real advisers with technology, but it, too, focuses on money management and requires a minimum investment of $100,000. NestWise, a unit of LPL Financial, opened last September and probably comes closest to competing directly with LearnVest. It has 23 advisers who use technology to connect with its clients, but not all are certified financial planners. Its most expensive service costs about $825 for the first year and $575 annually thereafter, though it will manage your money for about 1 percent of your assets, in addition to the cost of the underlying investments.

So what do you get at LearnVest for $19 a month? Since the company became a registered investment adviser last year, it can now offer investment advice. Ms. von Tobel says she is ripping a page from Weight Watchers’ playbook with the most recent version of its service: a seven-step action plan, which begins with a diagnostic call that typically lasts 45 to 90 minutes. “You can be someone who is extremely sophisticated with millions of dollars or a doctor with $200,000 in debt,” said Ms. von Tobel, who became a financial adviser earlier this year. “But you should still go through this process.”

(So far, most customers are college-educated people between 25 and 55 with incomes of $70,000 or more.)

The advisers save time by leaning heavily on the company’s technology: a planner could see where you overspent on dinner the night before by viewing your online profile.

Some Schools Urge Students to Bring Their Own Technology

Officials at the schools say the students’ own devices are the simplest way to use a new generation of learning apps that can, for example, teach them math, test them with quizzes and enable them to share and comment on each other’s essays.

Advocates of this new trend, called B.Y.O.T. for bring your own technology, say there is another advantage: it saves money for schools short of cash.

Some large school districts in Central Florida and near Houston and Atlanta have already signed on, and they are fielding calls and providing tours to administrators from hundreds of other districts that are considering whether to follow their lead.

But B.Y.O.T. has many skeptics, even among people who otherwise see benefits of using more technology in classrooms.

“The schools are hoping, hoping there’s going to be a for-free solution because they don’t have any money,” said Elliot Soloway, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who consults with many school districts about the use of computers to promote learning.

“If you look at initiatives in public education, this has the momentum.”

But Mr. Soloway also said he was “frightened” by the notion of schools using B.Y.O.T. as a quick budget fix because there was no evidence that a classroom full of students using different personal devices would enhance learning. Roy Pea, a professor of learning sciences at Stanford University, also has doubts. He is the co-author of a White House-backed National Educational Technology Plan published in 2011 that advocates for technology-centric classrooms.

But he said the B.Y.O.T. approach could be counterproductive if teachers were forced to build lessons around different devices — in effect, subverting curriculum to technology.

“Why are they so happy to have these devices when just a few years ago they didn’t want them in the classroom?” Dr. Pea asked about school administrators.

The Volusia County School District in Central Florida, bordering Daytona Beach, is one of the places that used to have signs around its schools that admonished students: no cellphones allowed. But the signs have been replaced over the last two years with new ones that read: B.Y.O.T.

Volusia school officials say that they realized they should take advantage of, rather than fight, students’ deep connections with their devices. At the same time, the district found that the cost of providing and maintaining computers for students was becoming prohibitive.

Since the change, Volusia officials say, they have not encountered many tech support problems or complaints from teachers. Rather, students are more engaged, they say, and the only problem that regularly crops up is that students forget to charge the batteries in their devices.

“It’s almost like bringing your homework,” said Jessica Levene, manager of learning technologies for the Volusia district, where 21 of 70 schools are using B.Y.O.T. “Make sure you have your device and that it’s charged.”

She conceded that students could text each other more easily now but said the school was keeping them busy on their devices. And while district administrators worried initially that poorer students would not own devices, they discovered something of “an inverse relationship” between family income and the sophistication of their devices, particularly smartphones, said Don Boulware, the district’s director of technology services.

At Woodward Avenue Elementary School in the Volusia district, fifth-grade teacher Dana Zacharko said her students tended to bring in smartphones or iPod Touches. She said she had found apps that allowed her to teach all kinds of subjects.