When Learnvest CEO Alexa von Tobel landed a job in finance after college, she was struck by the irony of her situation. She was working on Wall Street, but she didn't know what a credit score really was or how to deal with taxes.

Though few skills can be as consequential as a basic understanding of personal finance, few schools teach how to balance a checkbook or save for retirement. Learnvest, which von Tobel later dropped out of Harvard Business School to found, is a collection of resources and tools for learning this sort of basic financial knowledge.

Since it launched in December 2009, the startup has raised $24.5 million in funding and amassed more than 100,000 users, most of them women.

Now it is expanding to offer not just email-based courses, financial tools like a manual budget planner and articles related to money management, but also affordable access to certified financial planners and a free money-managing tool that's similar to Intuit's Mint.

Starting Tuesday, Learnvest will add human personal investors to its mix of content and tools. For a $4.99 daily fee or a subscription for either three months or one year, users can ask certified financial planners who work full time for the startup an unlimited number of questions. No matter how you slice it, that's much less than someone would pay for access to a financial planner in a traditional context. Users who pay the fee can also enroll in video-based courses.

Obviously emailing questions and taking online courses is not the same thing as hiring professional money help. But von Tobel hopes to target the vast majority of people whose net worths don't excite money managers.

"Money is something that everyone in America has to deal with," she says. "Financial planning should not be a luxury. This shouldn't be something that you are lucky if you get advice on it. Arguably the less money you have, the more you need advice."







Both Mint and Learnvest ask users to connect their financial accounts to keep track of their spending and set a budget, and both companies' tools offer fairly similar functionality (Before it was purchased by Intuit, Mint used the same product that powers Learnvest's tool, Yodlee). The main difference is the format. Learnvest's tool works almost like an email account in which every transaction made is an email and spending categories work like folders. You can drag and drop all purchases from Walgreens, for instance, to the "health" folder. If you have set a budget of $20 for that category and have just spent $10, the folder will show $10/$20 on your main page. Mint keeps transactions, budget and trends separate.

The money management tool is just one corner of Learnvest. The focus of the site is education — content that Mint has only dabbled in.

Starting on Tuesday, Learnvest will add human personal investors to its mix of content and tools. For either a daily fee of $4.99 or a subscription for either three months or one year, users can ask certified financial planners that work for the startup full time an unlimited number of questions. No matter how you slice it, that's much less than someone would pay for access to a financial planner in a traditional context. Users who pay the fee can also enroll in video-based courses.

Obviously emailing questions and taking online courses is not the same thing as hiring professional money help. But von Tobel hopes to target the vast majority of people whose net worths don't excite money managers.

"Money is something that everyone in America has to deal with," she says. "Financial planning should not be a luxury. This shouldn't be something that you are lucky if you get advice on it. Arguably the less money you have, the more you need advice."

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