Intro: From Childfree Insights, this is Childfree Life by Design, the go-to resource for building the Childfree life you want. Every episode gives you practical guidance, clear direction, and meaningful conversations to help you live intentionally and design a future on your terms. This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please consult your advisor before implementing any ideas heard on this podcast.

Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®: Childfree Life By Design listeners. We’re gonna do something a little different today. This is not gonna sound like your normal podcast. We’ve had some weird things happen for Childfree Trust® and our own Childfree world over the past month, and I wanna take you behind the scenes of some great wins we’ve had, some things that are going on, and a little bit of how the sausage was made. We’re gonna take you through the good, bad, and ugly of Childfree Trust® and what we’re building. And I have Bri here, who has been with me forever. I think officially, like, what, three, [00:01:00] four years, three and a half years, something like that, Bri?

Bri Conn, CFP®: Yep, about three and a half it sounds like.

Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®: Forever feels like. And she’s seen the ups, the downs, the lefts, rights, and some weird things. So we’re gonna take you through a little bit of history. If you’re looking for actionable things that are gonna change your Childfree life, it’s not this episode. I’m just gonna call that out. If you’re looking for an understanding of what is it like to actually run a company serving the Childfree audience, if you’re looking to understand, like, why we do what we do, if you’re looking to understand what it’s like to talk about this in the real world, that’s what this is for. And I’m not gonna be offended if you skip this episode ’cause you’re just looking for, you know, financial tips or something like that. This is more behind-the-scenes stuff. I do wanna hear what you think about it, so please send us notes after. But Bri and I are gonna kinda break this all down and work it through. So Bri, you and I have been working together since [00:02:00] 2023, and you’ve seen, I don’t know, 50 different versions of what I was building. And that’s probably not an exaggeration. Like, you’ve seen me try to fight things, and I’ve actually started this in 2021 and, went back and forth, had some people helping in little parts here or there, but you were the first kinda full-time hire for what we’re doing and been here forever. What’s the biggest thing you’ve seen over the last three and a half years you’ve been here?

Bri Conn, CFP®: I would say 50 iterations is probably on the low side. And it really is a constant improvement and constantly trying to say, “Hey, we think this is gonna work, but we don’t know.” We’ll come up with different ideas and somebody will say, “Well, do you think it’s gonna work?” And it’s kind of fun because people ask me, my response is always, “We have no idea, but we have to try it because if we don’t try it, we don’t know.” And it’s really pushed me to be in a mindset of we can try it, it doesn’t have to work, that’s okay. We continue on, we will try something new instead of [00:03:00] the perfectionist mindset of it has to work perfectly right away because that’s not gonna be the case for anything that we do. And it took a lot of iterations to get to where we are today, and we’re still constantly evolving things.

Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®: Yeah, and I’m gonna give you guys the punchline first, then we’ll work our way backwards. So the punchline is, over the past month, we’ve had three major things happen for Childfree Trust®. One, we got a $434,385, because I have to say it that way, grant from the National Institute of Aging. That’s a small business research grant, but specifically to create Childfree AI. We also then were named as one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2026 in the social impact category. And then the week after that, we were named as what’s called an UpLink Venture from the World Economic Forum. So really what’s happened over the past month is we’ve gotten kind of big awards and credibility with the government in the National Institute of Aging, in the public with TIME, and in [00:04:00] this overall economic world. I mean, that’s the Davos world and World Economic Forum. So we’ve get to the punchline of those are the wins. I’ll talk a bit more about what those wins mean. But the reality is when people see businesses, one of the kind of things they have, they go, “Oh, that’s an overnight success,” ’cause they see the wins. I’m gonna tell you right now, that is not how it actually works. And that’s why I started with, like, how many versions of this have we seen? And we’ve seen a boatload of them. And I’m gonna be frank, when I started in 2021, I was making this sh*t up. I didn’t know how to run a Childfree firm ’cause it didn’t exist. The concept of Childfree financial planning did not exist before I started writing about it in 2021. This is the hard part. I was talking to somebody the other day, and they said, “Well, why is the community,” meaning the financial world, “hiding Childfree financial planning?” And I’m like, “It’s not they’re hiding. They didn’t know it existed.” I mean, Bri, you saw [00:05:00] how we’ve built this over time. And really what you saw was us meeting, and when I say us, I mean lot of it was me and Bri going on, with over 1,000 Childfree people to figure out how to build this. What did you see along that process?

Bri Conn, CFP®: First, I want to dive deeper into really how much of it was us sitting down and meeting. If anybody who were to join our team today, the amount of time that just you and I spent together in the first few years, it was sometimes all day together on meetings. Meeting with people, meeting with clients, and then talking with one another afterwards. And I’m sitting down, we’re recording this later in the evening, and I’m like, “Oh, feels like old times.” We would finish with clients during the day, and then we would talk into the evening, and just that would be our days and going through. So when we had these, after every call we do, we do what worked, what didn’t work, what would we do differently. I think that foundation was so fundamental to us being in this constant [00:06:00] problem-solving mindset of saying, “Hey, these parts really worked. These parts really didn’t work. And this part kind of worked, but we want to change it a little bit.” And that allowed for us to get to the iteration that exists today and continually evolving. And when I’m looking at things, especially on the trust side of how can we improve certain areas with the client experience, that’s fundamental items that I think about every day. And I ask the team, “Guys, I need you to tell me what this is, because I’m not always going to know.” And sometimes I just need to have somebody else validate whether or not my thoughts are correct or they’re incorrect, and also hearing it from members themselves.

Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®: Yeah, and just for clarity so everybody catches it. So we have Childfree Wealth®, which is a financial planning firm serving Childfree people. That started in 2021, and that was really working with clients. And by the way, if you saw how many different billing structures and meeting structures and systems, probably the only thing that’s actually sustained the entire time is that we meet on a regular basis, usually monthly. [00:07:00] That’s probably the only structural piece, that and kind of the no debt concepts. Those are the only two that I can guarantee were there in 2021. And then we have Childfree Trust®, which is really on this estate planning side and who makes decisions for you when you can’t. That launched publicly beginning of this year in 2026. But Bri and I were talking about this concept back in 2023, and part of this time that Bri was there was when I was writing the book, The Childfree Guide to Life and Money. Making up what are our, no baby steps, our structures, our systems as we go along, and we’re doing it by talking to a lot of clients. At the time, we were doing what we called introductory meetings or consultations, and we would do these free meetings with people and, I don’t know, we might on a bad day talk to six folks. We’re talking a lot of meetings to understand what matters to people. And one of the interesting things that happened early on is we found that about half of the consultation meetings would end up in [00:08:00] tears, and I was trying to figure out why. And we asked somebody finally, and what they said was, “It’s the first time they felt heard and seen.” And we heard that over and over. One of the things that we found was that by listening to people and meeting them where they’re at, they were like, “Look, you actually understand me.” Now, I’m gonna be frank. At that time, I’m not sure I did understand them. We’re trying to understand, like, how does this actually work? But we’re able to listen and go through that and, Bri, talk a little about you and I met hundreds of people a year. What was that like?

Bri Conn, CFP®: Every one is always a different experience, but then the core of it seems to be the same. People are coming and wanting to be heard, wanting to be understood, and wanting to gain control of their life and their money and make sure that they’re okay. More often than not, I just hear people say, “I wanna know that I’m okay. I wanna know that I’m okay to do this thing.” And you’re right, I don’t think I understood them either. Initially, I was like, “Well, [00:09:00] I’m good at listening. I can shut up and listen.” I’m really good at that, but I don’t fully think I understood to the degree that I do today of how much people are looking for somebody who can sit down and hear them and talk through these conversations and bring up things that go, “Oh, I never thought of that.” I just met with people again today, and they said, “I wonder how many times we’re gonna say today in this conversation, ‘I never thought of that.'” So bringing new ideas to them and not just sitting down and going, “Hey, here’s your investments. Let’s take care of that.” Because sometimes in the financial world it can be easy to just look at investments and miss the life side of things as well.

Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®: For context, Bri did not come to this as a financial planner, okay? We got connected actually on Facebook, and she’s like, “I do some marketing stuff. I kinda wanna do some financial stuff. Can we talk?” And I think it took a couple months to convince Bri to work with me. But we got there. But then you went and [00:10:00] did your CFP and all that. And one of the things I tried explaining to you early on was just how different what we’re doing is than the rest of the financial community. And I don’t think it’s possible to see that until you go out and talk to a whole bunch of other financial planners and realize it’s night and day. I mean, it’s completely different. And Bri, now that you’ve got a few years under your belt, you’ve been a CFP for a while, like, how do you see what we do versus the rest of the financial world?

Bri Conn, CFP®: It is very different. Our approach is, “Hey, let’s go through your life first and work on how can we make it simple, how can we make it so that,” we say, “Simple finance is amazing life.” That’s our approach to things. Whereas I’ve sat down and had conversations with other people in the financial world, and they just wanna talk numbers all day. And I go, “Okay, I like finance. I don’t really wanna talk about numbers all day. That’s not exciting and fun.” I’ll find myself saying in client [00:11:00] meetings, if I’m talking a lot about numbers, I will often also say, “Hey, I know that I’ve talked a lot about numbers today. Let’s check in on your life now. We talked a little bit at the beginning, but there are some other things I wanna touch on too to make sure you’re doing okay as a person.” Because everything that we do and we want as a person impacts our numbers, and if we build financial plans solely to get the most bang for your buck, we might be missing a lot of what you want out of your life.

Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®: Yeah. And we are not the, “Hey, give your assets, investment, and we’re gonna meet with you twice a year.” No. We’re in people’s lives. I mean, the amount of time people end up in tears and it’s not a bad thing, is pretty high. And that’s because we’re really trying to get there. And what we try to do is understand clients. So in 2022 actually the same day, MarketWatch and Wall Street Journal did a feature article on Childfree Wealth®. It was kind of just odd that it happened to be the same day. And it was the change for my [00:12:00] firm. So at the time, if you asked anybody that was in my networking group, we had a mastermind group, I had told them, “I’m gonna get 50 clients, close the door, nice lifetime firm, call it a day.” And they still remind me about that every day, ’cause I’m not doing that now. That’s what you need a group of peers to do, is to remind you of where you’ve been. I think it was May of 2022. I had done the first book, The Portrait of Childfree Wealth®, and got some press. We had 15 people come in. And that day, I got a phone call. Now, I have, since that day, only gotten a phone call from a client twice since. So I don’t even know why I have a phone number, but I do. I had got a phone call, and this gentleman reached out he said, “Hey, I don’t know what this Childfree stuff is, but I read this article in Wall Street Journal, and it’s me.” And I was like, “Cool. Let’s have the conversation.” And ended up working with this couple, and one of the things that was very apparent is he had always [00:13:00] managed the finances. And if you listen to our podcast, we talk a lot about when couples, you both need to know what’s going on and need to understand that, but it doesn’t always work. And he was very worried about if he ever gets injured, who’s gonna make the decisions for his wife? We went out and looked. Now, this client has a bunch of money, could afford whatever we find, and I spent about a year trying to figure out a solution for him. I couldn’t find one. He was in Texas, and in Texas, no attorney will be your medical power of attorney. They just won’t. The board has said, “Hey, we’re not doing it.” And they found a trust company could do the financial part but couldn’t do the rest. This started Childfree Trust®. It was the question that I couldn’t answer. Now, mind you, that’s 2022, so by the time Bri comes in, I’ve talked to pretty much everybody I can find and asked people, “How do you solve this?” And not getting an answer. Bri was part of kinda where I was still poking around, and then I said, “All right, Bri, we need to figure out how to make this [00:14:00] ourselves.” Do you remember that, Bri?

Bri Conn, CFP®: I remember that conversation so clearly. It was one night after lots of client meetings, and we were discussing it, and it was, “Does this need to happen?” And as we talked through it, it was, “Well, if we don’t do it, who’s gonna do it?” So yes, it does need to happen because people need this. I’m going through the CFP journey at this point too, and one of the big things is estate planning. You need to get estate planning done. And I’m sitting here going, I’m reading all this information and going through all this education about how important estate planning is, and I’m talking with clients who don’t have estate planning done. Not that they don’t wanna get it done, but they just don’t know who to appoint and who to name on there. And that was part of the catalyst of me being on board of saying, “Yes, this does need to happen,” because otherwise people are gonna be left stranded.

Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®: Yeah, and if you read The Childfree Guide to Life and Money, I talk a little bit about the origin story of Childfree Trust®. And, actually I got lucky. I was [00:15:00] in a mastermind group, and I had actually found Robert, who was working with his partner John, were starting a trust company. We’re like, “Okay, let’s figure it out.” And we went through, I don’t know, 20 different structures there. Like, how do we structure it, and how do we do this, and meeting with regulators, and, oh, what a nightmare. So in January of 2026, we finally launched Childfree Trust®. It’s been, at that point, I don’t know, four or five years we’ve been working on this. And that’s what it took. The Childfree Trust® team itself came together in 2025, and started kind of working this through after we had some ideas. But it took years to figure out a way to do this, and I kinda understand now why people don’t do this, ’cause it’s super hard. And Bri, you saw, I don’t know, 30 different versions or whatever it was. Help people understand the difficulty.

Bri Conn, CFP®: It takes the ability to try to run into roadblocks [00:16:00] and sometimes be frustrated at the system and at the world a little bit, and still say, “We’re gonna keep going. We’re not gonna let this stop us,” to actually get to a point where we could take on members today. Because there were a lot of roadblocks. There were a lot of doubters. There were a lot of people saying, “Oh, that’s cute. I don’t think it’s gonna work.” And that can really kind of weigh on you and also suck to hear a little bit. But it does feel good now that we have the awards to say, “Hey, you know, we actually did something that is worthy of time, and it’s helping people.” And I had a conversation today with somebody, and they said at the end of it, “You know, this conversation’s really brought me some hope, and I feel uplifted. This could be what I need.” To hear that after all the time and some of the pushback from people has felt so… I don’t even know if I can put into words how wonderful that’s felt.

Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®: This is the part of running a business that people don’t see. I swear [00:17:00] Shark Tank has like, glamorized doing this and like, “It’s real easy. You create a pitch, you go to the sharks, and you do that.” By the way, I did go to Shark Tank. There’s a different episode on that. Didn’t make it to the final rounds, but I did try that. But what people don’t see is running headfirst into walls and over and over and over. Right now for Childfree Trust®, we’re finishing up a capital raise. We’re raising a million dollars to actually fund the business and grow it. I have talked to and reached out to over 300 folks to do that. I wake up each morning to five people going, “You suck. I’m not investing in you.” Now, that’s not what they’re actually saying, but that’s the message you hear. And it’s over and over and over, and part of it is it got really political around that time. We’re talking about when Roe versus Wade got overturned was part of this timeline and all that. And if you haven’t caught my episode on the TEDx talk and, you know, how I got told to wear a bulletproof [00:18:00] vest when I went on stage, I’m not talking about small problems. I’m talking about running headfirst in the wall, and I’ll tell you, I’ve wanted to quit 100 times. And Bri, you’ve been on that side. I mean, what have you seen? You’ve seen kind of me running through this.

Bri Conn, CFP®: Yes. It impacts everybody. And during one of, I’d say, the probably the toughest times, I was at an airport. It happened to be that weekend, pretty much some things happened. We ran into roadblocks, and I was traveling. And I was just questioning, like, “Is this going to work? Is anything gonna take off?” “What does this mean for the future?” And I went and got a coffee at the airport, and I went and sat in, you know one of those honestly nasty airport massage chairs that you just slide your credit card in. And I kept sitting there. I think I sat there for three hours and swiped my credit card multiple times, just as I need to sit here and just think, because what does this mean for people? What does this mean for the future? What does this [00:19:00] mean for me? All of those different things come together, and sometimes, you’re right, do make you wanna quit in the morning. But then it’s like, “No, I actually don’t wanna quit.” I love this too much, and I couldn’t imagine not helping people in these ways.

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Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®: I’ve now gotten to the point where, you know that meme of the old man screaming at the sky? That’s me. I swear, like half the time I’m just screaming at the sky and it’s not listening, and you’re like, “How come nothing’s moving?” So the hard [00:20:00] part is, I was at a retreat and it was a three-day retreat, and the leader of it said to me, “All right, Jay, you’ve told me about how hard this is. Just why the hell do you do it? Why don’t you just give up?” And let’s be real. I probably could make a boatload more money just going to work for a firm and call it a day. And I finally got through the three days and I was like, “Look, if I don’t do it, nobody else will.” Which is what Bri and I started with that conversation in 2023. Like, it’s really hard ’cause we’re now three years later and, like, how do you keep going? So we’ve been trying a lot of things. I’m a researcher by nature, both my wife and I are PhDs, and I said, “Okay, let’s do this. Let’s see if we can leverage the federal government to help us.” Right now the idea of the federal government helping the Childfree community is a little bit laughable. I’m just gonna call that out. I don’t wanna get too political on it, but it is. So we applied for a huge grant, $400,000 plus. That was just about 15 months ago [00:21:00] we started that, and finally about a year in we heard, “Hey, yeah, we can get some money to create a Childfree specific AI for estate planning and long-term care.” And that is huge because if you ask ChatGPT about what to do with your plan, it’s gonna all assume you have kids. It just is. It doesn’t have the data we have. It doesn’t have what Bri and I have learned over the past years of how it changes. So we’re able to build a Childfree specific tool to do that. Now, it’s gonna take us about a year to do that, and we’ll include in the show notes, you can actually, if you’re 50 and older, you can be part of a research study we’re doing with that ’cause we’re finishing a series of interviews and a process. But we’re doing that to get more people access to good advice around estate planning for Childfree people. It’s not because that’s gonna make us a boatload of money. It’s not. But it’s gonna get good advice in the hands of Childfree people that matches them. Yeah, we gotta jump through a boatload of hoops and it’s [00:22:00] a whole research study. And anyone who’s ever done a federal grant research knows it’s a giant pile of paperwork and all of that. But it’s a great example that actually the government’s willing to help us with this cause. Bri, what do you think about that?

Bri Conn, CFP®: Hearing the government help us with this cause is really just a sentence that I don’t think many of us in this world could ever imagine. It feels good to be able to say to people, even in these tougher political times where this is a touchy topic, there’s still a belief that what we’re doing is important and what we’re doing is needed. And getting the ability to have people use AI in a good way to help them with estate planning and long-term care, they’re already doing it. I talked to an 80-year-old who said, “Hey, I’m going through my estate plan using ChatGPT.” And if we don’t build a tool that they can use that’s well done, I’m worried they’re gonna have even more incorrect advice [00:23:00] coming at them, like you said, ’cause it’s not built for them. So building a tool that can assist them in their journey and where they’re at in life, and to get this grant to be able to do that is a huge win in my book.

Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®: Yeah, and part of the reason why these SBIR grants exist is to help companies try things that otherwise the world won’t pay for. I can tell you right now that I’ve had more doors slammed in my face on the investing side, and I’ve had people say flat out to me, “I can’t invest in a Childfree company and then go to church on Sunday.” It’s a political topic. It’s a hot button. It’s not because they don’t like our business or don’t like the structure, but a lot of it’s political. I keep getting that door slammed in my face, but then the government said, “Hey, let me do this.” Now, I’m not gonna be surprised if a few months from now I come back and I’m on a rant because they pulled our money because it’s political or something. I just gotta call that out. That might happen. But we started on the right foot, and I’m hoping it actually continues through. That came out end of September. And [00:24:00] then middle of October, on the 15th, Childfree Trust® was announced as one of the best inventions of 2026 by TIME Magazine. Now, TIME Magazine for the younger audience, it’s a big deal. Now, by the way, it’s technically TIME now, not TIME Magazine. I’m old enough to remember it when it was a magazine. But they put out these lists, and they say these are what’s best. And on the cover of the magazine is the new Apple phone, and Anthropic’s in there and all those, and we’re in that same list. But what’s interesting to me is they put us in the category of social impact. Now, they could have put us in the finance category, the aging category. There’s a bunch of categories. But the TIME folks came out, and the reporter did a great job, talked to our clients, talked to a whole bunch of people, and talked about what we did and decided we go in the social impact category. Now, I’m at a conference. I saw, I got the note, “Hey, you are accepted as a TIME best invention.” I was really excited. We kinda knew that was coming, but we didn’t know for sure. You know, you got that final email. And then I read the social impact category. I was like, “What does that [00:25:00] mean?” The other people that won in that category with us is a group trying to save the art of Ukraine from the war, a group trying to help girls in Africa get uniforms so they can go to school, and a group trying to cure malaria and other diseases. If we go back to elementary school, which one of these does not look like the other? It feels like we don’t fit. But there’s a reason we’re in that category. The reason is the work we are doing, and I didn’t know this when we started in 2023 or 2021 when I originally started or whatever year. The work we’re doing is a societal change. That’s what they’re saying. It is about the solo aging world, about the Childfree world as they age. They’re saying we’re on par with people trying to cure malaria. Now, I have a little problem accepting that, but I think that means a lot for the community. What do you think, [00:26:00] Bri?

Bri Conn, CFP®: To hear we won was a huge success. And then to hear we won in the social impact category, I spent the first few days just stunned to the point where I actually had a neighbor say, “Are you okay? You seem a little distracted.” And I went, “I’m just tired. I’m just tired.” Because at that point it wasn’t out yet for everybody. And for it to be out and be a big change, one of the things I had said to somebody when I left a different job was, “I just want to help people.” The job I was doing at the time was not helping people. When this award came out, I made a post about it on LinkedIn, and I ended it with, “Now I no longer just want to help people. Instead, we get to help people.” For me to hear social impact category and know that it’s not just seen as a financial win or some sort of estate planning win, but it’s really helping people as a whole, makes me sleep every night really well knowing that the work I’m doing each day [00:27:00] is fulfilling what I’ve always wanted to do. I hope when I die that people say I just helped people my entire life, and that’s what my life was about. So it feels not just like a business win, but also a personal win in fulfilling one of my deepest desires.

Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®: If you’ve read the book or you’ve kind of hung around me for a while long enough, you’ll know that one of the mantras that I use for my life is you can have everything in life you want if you just help enough other people get what they want. It’s from Zig Ziglar. And that’s the point. Yes, we are going to make some money doing this business. I sure hope so. Like, I haven’t had a paycheck in five years, okay? I’d like a paycheck at some point. But it’s really about serving others. If you’ve ever seen an email from me, you will see they all end with “Yours in service.” It’s really about that serving others, and that is what that social impact category to me means. We are there to serve others. I’m not gonna try to hide that we make money off it. I’m just not. Everybody’s like, “Oh, I’m just doing it for the [00:28:00] good reasons.” No, you gotta pay the bills because one of the renditions we tried of Childfree Trust® was doing it as a nonprofit. It doesn’t work because a nonprofit’s just not stable enough. You just can’t assume that nonprofit’s gonna be around, ’cause if the money runs out, that nonprofit’s gone. You need profit to make the company keep going. So that was amazing and at the same time I had kind of the inside scoop ’cause we’ve been kinda working through this. But the next week, we were announced as what’s called an UpLink Venture for the World Economic Forum. So the World Economic Forum you all know as Davos. That is where the people take their private jets, and we’ll have a whole different conversation on taking your private jets and talk about saving the world. But, this is where the big players go once a year to Davos and talk about the economy and the structures in the system. Well, they did a what was called a Shaping a Longevity Challenge for Canada, and they were talking about how do we do [00:29:00] this as we age? Turns out, by the way, Canada has a lower fertility rate than the U.S., most likely a higher Childfree population than the U.S., and is what’s called super aging, they’re older. And we were at a conference, and I met somebody from the World Economic Forum. They said, “Hey, we have this program. It’d be great if you’d apply.” Cool. If you’re a longtime listener, you may have heard the name Steph. That’s our COO and my co-founder. She’s not public. She doesn’t hang out here. But I had said to Steph on our dream list was, we’ll know that we’re really making a difference when we get on that Davos stage and talk about the Childfree economy.” And we both kinda laughed at it, like, ha, ha. No little small company is getting to hang out with those people. So I saw this and I was like, “Sure, we’ll apply for it.” It’s kinda like the TIME thing. We applied for it, didn’t think we’d get it. Might as well just keep trying. Grant, same thing. We’ll apply for it, see if we get it. We’ve taken big swings, and some of them we get, and some of them we don’t. Let’s do it. So we applied for this World [00:30:00] Economic Forum thing, and it’s sponsored by Manulife. So Manulife is one of the largest insurers in the world. If you’re outside the U.S., you know them well. Inside the U.S., they own John Hancock. You probably recognize that name. And the CEO of Manulife Canada said it this way. One of the things he’s working on is how do we free people from family dependence as we age? I was like, “Damn, I kinda wanna steal that line.” Well, we applied, said, “Hey, here’s what we’ve built, and we’re only in the U.S., but our structure would work in Canada if we had the right support.” So, we’re taping this the day it actually came out. So today it was announced that we are going to be an UpLink venture for World Economic Forum. What that means is we get to use that structure to talk about our mission, and to open doors, and to go meet with people and say, “Look, as a startup, we don’t usually get access to that Davos crowd. We don’t get [00:31:00] access to these big, giant firms.” The whole point of the UpLink structure, and it’s been around for a few years and a lot of companies have used it well, is to open doors for people to have the bigger conversations. Now, I don’t have a speaking spot at Davos. That didn’t come with it. But you get the opportunity to be at those tables, to be one of those speakers ideally. You can go network, you can go through with the big guys, like the folks. And if I go back to Steph, and she’s probably gonna yell at me for talking about her, but that’s okay. When we sat down one night and, we had just heard about both UpLink and TIME, and I said to her, I said, “Look, no matter what happens with Childfree Trust®, we have changed things.” We are now at the table of saying Childfree stuff is a social impact in TIME and on the world economic stage. Not literally yet, but we’ll get there. And that’s huge. That is a [00:32:00] cultural shift that we can say was ours. I sometimes have trouble owning things and look, the concept of Childfree financial planning, I created in 2021. If you’ve heard about it, it’s from me. I’m not saying that to brag, that just is. If we get more of this TIME stuff, the World Economic Forum, we’re now at a point where like, okay, I’ve gotta be the person talking about this Childfree shift in the world. Now, Bri, you’ve been around me long enough. I’ll get on stage, but I don’t know that I wanna be the Childfree cheerleader. You’ve heard me say this before. I don’t know that I want that’s the right role. But if that’s what we gotta do, we gotta do it, and we’ve got the platform now. What do you think, Bri?

Bri Conn, CFP®: It’s funny to hear you say that on a podcast because it’s very true. You are like, “Hey, I’m gonna go talk. I’ll be on a stage. I’ll be on a podcast.” And then you are introvert. And I’m talk, talk, talk, talk, talk basically all the time. So just the differences in the personality, but it’s [00:33:00] important link. It’s no longer us talking about this on a podcast and then us working through the edits together and putting it out. It’s, no, we’ve got a team now, and this is something real, and people are saying what you’re doing matters. It’s not the going to conferences and having people go, “Ooh, Childfree?” I remember the first conference we went together, and I was in the elevator, and I had my badge on that said Childfree, and it was an finfluencer that I know, who happens to be a mom, has that as part of her handle. I remember her looking very clearly at me and looking at my badge and giving me a not very kind look, not knowing that I followed her for years. And so that’s fun to hear because now it’s people going, “Hey, I’m not Childfree, but I really like what you’re doing, and I think it’s important to discuss it.” To hear that change over the past few years feels like we’re in a good direction. And even in clients too sometimes I see, they feel more comfortable and confident talking about it and being willing to say, “I wanna [00:34:00] be part of Childfree groups and be friends with other Childfree people and not have to feel like I have to hide that.” It’s slowly but surely becoming less of a thing to hide.

Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®: I was at a conference last week called Venture Atlanta begging for money, and I wore my shirt that says, “I’m proudly Childfree and wealthy.” And I break out this shirt only at conferences, ’cause I live down in the South, I can’t wear this out publicly. And it’s interesting. So I’m thinking about that same conference, I think it was that same one. I was wearing it at the conference, and in the elevator these three women come in, and they look at my shirt and laugh. And I’m like, “Oh, boy.” One of them says to me, “Well, between the three of us, we have 12 kids. You picked the right path.” I was like, “Okay.” ‘Cause there’s something jarring about saying, “I’m proudly Childfree and I’m proudly wealthy.” Those freak people out. But you know what? This concept of Childfree Wealth® and Childfree Trust® and Childfree finances is growing. We’re working with the marketing group, and they’ve been watching, you [00:35:00] know, Google searches and all that. About June of last year, there was a huge uptick in search for the term Childfree financial planning. That was 2025. Four years after I started talking about the term, there was a uptick in the search terms. That’s what it takes. So when we get on, like, these big stages and we’re talking about this stuff, we have an opportunity to shift the way people think about it. In the financial world, just this year, Maddy, who you’ve seen on the podcast, started talking about this. Just this year is the first year we’re seeing the financial conferences that people are starting to come up to us and go, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard about you. Yeah, I’ve got Childfree clients. I wanna figure this out.” We just had a large partnership with one of the RIAs announced, and that’s a separate thing. But, where they’re saying, “Hey, I wanna embrace this audience,” that’s huge. So while we talk about our Childfree Wealth® service, we talk about our Childfree Trust® service and what we actually do for Childfree people, the long-term impact is so much bigger. [00:36:00] Now, if you’re listening to this and you’re from Canada, which by the way, we have a decent amount of listeners outside the US. I get emails almost every day of people like, “Hey, is there a service like yours in my country?” Fill in the blank. We’re not coming to Canada tomorrow, okay? We need to finish the US, but we’re on the stage and have access to now look at bringing this to other countries. That’s huge. The stuff that Bri and I were up late nights talking about and trying to find partners, now we can leverage the World Economic Forum to help find those partners. That’s huge. Now, the thing I do have to say is for Childfree Trust®, we have raised some money. We did a, what’s called a pre-seed round, and we raised about $1.6 million to have Childfree Trust® exist. All but one of those investors came out of our Childfree community itself. So if you’re listening to me and you’re one of those investors, I gotta say thank you. And I gotta say thank you again, and again, and again, and again, because we need people that believe in us. [00:37:00] Many of our investors actually put in an initial amount of money and then upgraded it later, seeing what we’re doing. Like, they’ve really committed to us, and it couldn’t happen without them. It also couldn’t happen without our team. So Bri talked about we actually have a team. It was Bri and I for the longest time. We now have a team of people. Those team of people are working day and night to get this happen. Some of the stuff they had to get done immediately to get this TIME thing, oh, the time crunch, I feel bad. I hate being that boss that’s like, “Hey, we’ve gotta get this done.” It got done. I can’t do it without the team. And I gotta talk about the team and the investors because that’s how we actually make this happen. If you’re out there listening to this and you’re like, how can you help?” We’re still looking for investors. You can reach out to me. Happy to have the conversation if you’re a credit investor, because we think the community itself is gonna support this idea. ‘Cause I don’t know that I’m gonna get people on the outside to support it until it’s big. Once it’s really big and we prove it works, everybody’s willing to throw us money. It’s kinda how it works. But when we’re talking about, [00:38:00] “Hey, we wanna serve these Childfree people,” the answer is we’ve gotta get that support from the community. We’ve also had a lot of folks ask us about working with us. Yep, you can go to our website. We have open positions. We’re not hiring right today, but if you want to throw your resume in, we’re always listening. ‘Cause Bri didn’t apply for a position. Bri just messaged me one day and was like, “Hey, can we talk?” A lot of our team comes from that. They come from our community, come from that. So in addition to thanking our team, in addition to thanking our investors, I just have to thank you as a community. So we won the award, but we won it for you. I don’t actually have the award sitting behind me, you know, but we’ll get it eventually and you can see it and you can say you were part of that, because that is what’s happened. We’ve got really loyal listeners, really loyal folks on socials. Spread the word. Tell other folks, tell your peers, tell whatever, but realize that the world is listening. That’s what this month showed me. The world is listening. And what’s gonna happen with that? I have no [00:39:00] freaking clue. You’re gonna listen to this podcast three years from now, it’s gonna sound completely different. We’re doing something completely different. I don’t know what I learned or whatever. I don’t know what’s gonna work or not, but we’re gonna have figured it out because we wake up each morning knowing we can serve you, and that’s what we do. And if you haven’t checked out Childfree Trust®, haven’t checked out Childfree Wealth®, what the heck? You’re listening to our stuff. You really should. But, we’re there for you. We’re doing this research. If you wanna be part of the research study, you can do that. This is something we can all do together. We can support each other and make a difference. And yeah, we might be yelling at the sky randomly, but you know what? TIME, National Institute of Aging, and World Economic Forum all said, “I’ll back you.”

Outro: You’ve been listening to Childfree Life by Design. Make sure you follow the show, leave a rating or review, and connect with us on social @Childfreeinsights. For more resources, guides, or upcoming events, visit [00:40:00] childfreeinsights.com.