An AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant, Goalsetter is a Black woman–owned and led FinTech app with culturally relevant financial literacy content for the entire family. Featuring memes and GIFs to educate kids from kindergarten through 12th grade — and beyond — the app features weekly, age-appropriate lessons that explain foundational financial concepts. Parents, grandparents and others can send money through digital “goal cards,” and kids must complete weekly quizzes before spending their funds. Goalsetter also features content for adults to help close the financial literacy gap that many older adults face.
We sat down with Tanya Van Court, founder and CEO, to learn more about how Goalsetter is a game-changer for financial literacy for people of all ages.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Please tell us about Goalsetter.
Goalsetter is a family finance and financial education platform. Our mission is to cultivate the next generation of savers and investors. In our society, kids are often raised with no understanding about financial principles. Instead, they only understand spending. Our goal is to give kids both the knowledge and tools to become savers and investors. But it’s not just about kids — entire families are benefitting from Goalsetter, because many people in older generations never really received sound financial education.
How does Goalsetter help?
Goalsetter offers a savings account and an investment account, plus a teen-and-tween debit card with parental controls — but everything we do is education first. As an example, our teen-and-tween debit card comes with a rule called “learn before you burn”: On Sunday morning, the debit card automatically freezes if they haven’t taken their financial literacy quiz for the week. The minute they take the quiz, the card unfreezes.
Can you describe these financial literacy quizzes?
The quizzes are from kindergarten-level all the way though parent-level. Every single week, you get a different quiz appropriate for your age. They’re mapped to national financial literacy standards put out by the Council for Economic Education, and they cover six categories: saving, spending, earning income, managing credit, managing risk and investing. Plus, the quizzes are all rooted in memes and popular culture, so they’re fun and engaging. They’re all done with young people in mind — it’s kind of like social media meets financial education.
Each quiz is ten questions, and you have to score at least an 8 on that week’s quiz to unlock the following week’s quiz. Every week, we talk about a different topic. So this week, as a 6-year-old, you might get a quiz about Minnie Mouse going to Disney World. The questions might be about what Minnie needs to take, versus what she wants to take — so it’s a lesson in wants versus needs, which is a foundational financial principle. An 11th-grader might get a quiz about annual percentage rate versus annual percentage yield. Parents might get a quiz about mortgage interest rates and points on a loan. So the financial education topics grow as you grow.
How does the savings and investing side of Goalsetter work?
Parents or grandparents set up the account as custodians, then the kids download an app that’s connected to the custodian's app. The kids set their own savings goals, such as saving up to pay for summer camp or buy a computer. They can then earn money toward their goals, and that money goes into their Goalsetter account.
The app also allows kids to open an investment account, where they can buy whole or fractional shares of stocks, for example. So it allows them to begin their investing journey — but again, it’s all centered around financial education.
Clearly Goalsetter benefits people of any age. Are there particular benefits for people who are 50-plus?
Financial stability is a multigenerational problem for many families.Traditionally, it has been the patriarch of the family who has been the conduit of financial advice, and when that patriarch dies, many families are left with limited financial knowledge. There’s going to be a great wealth transfer in the next 10 to 20 years — $30 trillion will be moving into the hands of women, and $68 trillion moving into the hands of the next generation. So the future of finance is not about that patriarch — it’s about family finance.
It’s clear to us that when you educate the whole family, you’re insulating the whole family from financial instability. Goalsetter’s educational tools and debit cards, for example, empower older adults to pass down wealth effectively by helping them teach financial literacy to younger generations.
What inspired you to found Goalsetter?
Back in 2001, I had a job at a Silicon Valley startup, and they gave me a bunch of stock options. I had no idea what to do with those, so I just left them there. The company grew rapidly, and one day I discovered that those stock options were worth about a $1 million. I was 28 years old!
But — that was at the beginning of the day. By the end of that day, the big tech bubble had burst and those stock options were suddenly worth just $10,000. That was my first moment of understanding that my lack of personal financial knowledge had cost me a life-changing amount of money in just one day. And I thought, “I can’t turn back the hands of time, but I can make sure that this doesn’t happen to my own kids.”
Fast forward a few years, when my daughter was about to turn 9. She asked for just two things: a bike, and enough money to save for an investment account. Because of my efforts to educate her to help her avoid the experience I had with those stock options, she was on a very different trajectory than I was at 8, and even at 28. I thought, “Wow, I did that for her. If I can do that, I can do it for every kid in America.” So that’s what led me down this path.
What are some obstacles you’ve faced on this journey, and how have you navigated those?
The first obstacle happens to be my gender: Less than 2% of venture capital funding goes to women. We have this extraordinary product, but we get significantly less funding than our male counterparts and, frankly, that’s our primary obstacle.
How have we navigated that? We know that our solution is changing the lives of families, and we looked at the landscape and asked ourselves, “Who needs our solution other than those families?” What we realized is that banks, financial institutions and wealth management firms also need Goalsetter — so we’re now focused on B2B, and we're working to help those financial institutions cultivate their next generation of customers in a way that ensures those customers are financially healthy.
Any final words?
Earlier this year, a Mastercard study indicated that 85% of parents using Goalsetter say their kids are better savers because of Goalsetter, and 50% say their kids are better investors because of Goalsetter. But importantly, 75% of parents say they themselves are more financially healthy because their family uses Goalsetter. So the impact that we’re having is measurable, and it’s really exciting to see.
Learn more about Goalsetter at their website.
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