He recently finished a series of calculators designed to help investors - including himself - decide whether to convert pretax retirement dollars to a Roth IRA. Today, Ebert has built 471 calculators on topics such as retirement planning, housing finance and debt payoff that are available to the public and dozens of customized projects for financial institutions. We'd still like them to come talk to us to get more in depth," he said. "These aren't the end-all, these aren't financial planning by any means, but this is a good way for clients to get a directional read on where they're heading on specific issues.
Scott Wisgerhof, director of advice tools strategy, says the calculators add value for time-strapped consumers who want to do some number-crunching. Thrivent has about 80 of Ebert's financial calculators on its website. I like the lunch savings calculator myself. The retirement planner, mortgage qualifier and 1040 tax calculator are perennial favorites. More than a million people visit each month, with spikes in traffic once new year's resolution to shore up finances are put in place. "Search engines found them very well," he said.Ī dozen years later and Ebert has as many as 10,000 clients ranging from individual websites to financial institutions such as Anchor Bank, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans and U.S. And a business was born.Įach time he created a calculator, he's put it on, where people could use them for free. and asked me who this person was, 'because they just sent you a check.'" He doesn't remember who first licensed his calculators, but they sent him $250. He decided to slap up his Roth IRA calculator and a few others he'd programmed, and threw up information about how people could buy them and stick them on their websites. "No one was using the Internet in 1998," he said. But he couldn't convince stores and restaurants to sign on. He'd hoped to turn it into a community site for the area that made money from local business advertisements. "Having no contacts and no means of actually marketing that one little calculator, I quickly realized it was something to put on my website that was pretty cool."Ībout that website: The University of Minnesota grad, who bought a house a mile from campus in the area known as Dinkytown, purchased the url in 1997.
And my goal was to market it and sell it," he said. So the computer science minor with an MBA in finance built a calculator. But he couldn't find a calculator to show him if it made financial sense. It was 1998, and Ebert thought he might convert some money from a traditional IRA to a Roth. Karl Ebert can credit the Roth IRA for his success.
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