Three attempts. One that finally worked.

It started in thrift stores

Jason grew up watching his parents clip coupons and shop at Goodwill — not because they enjoyed it, but because the math demanded it. They worked hard, earned decent wages, and still ended up with not a lot saved by retirement. No one had ever sat down with them to run the numbers. No one had ever explained that a small pension change at age 62 versus 65 could mean $180,000 over a lifetime.

That gap — between people who could afford a financial planner and people who couldn't — never left him.

Attempt one: become the CFP

Jason Hull, CFP® started an hourly planning firm, Hull Financial Planning, after selling his share of a startup he co-founded, OpenSource Connections — and became a CFP® while running it. The work was meaningful. He sat with real families, ran Monte Carlo simulations, modeled Social Security claiming strategies, and watched people light up when they finally understood their own situation.

He started putting the planning model into spreadsheets. Refining it. Documenting every assumption. What he didn't realize was he was building a deterministic engine — he just didn't have software to run it.

But the average engagement cost $1,500. The clients who most needed the analysis couldn't pay for it. And the ones who could often just wanted someone to validate what they'd already decided. Something felt backwards.

Attempt two: myFinancialAnswers

The second attempt had a name, a logo, and a domain. As the CTO of a startup co-founded with 4 others, he hired a development team, built an early web app, and launched myFinancialAnswers — a tool that would run a subset of the planning engine online.

The product worked decently, but it was not slick, and it definitely was not fast. The business failed to blossom like he had hoped. Acquiring users was harder than he expected. The app answered questions but didn't guide people in a way that would lead them to know what to do, and, because it was slow, clunky, and difficult to work with, had challenges in getting market adoption. It was far better as a tool for a CFP to use with their clients, not as a standalone product. Without the conversational layer that a live CFP provides, users filled in the fields wrong, got confusing outputs, and bounced. While the startup was eventually sold, it never reached market penetration, much less mass adoption.

The ChatGPT moment

He started to see people he knew asking ChatGPT for financial advice. AI is great as a large language model; it's good at explaining concepts. It is not a calculation engine, particularly with calculations as complex as what a person needs for a comprehensive financial plan.

In the meantime, he'd co-founded Broadtree Partners in 2016 — a lower middle-market private equity firm — and retired from it at the end of 2019. Its success later gave him the financial capability to self-fund building this platform the right way.

However, once he started seeing what the latest version of AI could do, he decided he would build something that enabled a vision he'd had for nearly two decades.

Attempt three: AI Financial Planner

The platform you're using today — with development started in February 2026 — is attempt three. It solves the problems that killed the first two: the calculations are automated (no human bottleneck), the AI guides collection without requiring a planner, and the price is accessible.

It is not a chatbot guessing at your financial future. It is a deterministic planning engine, meaning that rigorous math underlies everything presented, not some hallucinated chatbot answer — using the same 8-module framework used by CFPs, now available to anyone with a browser.

The families who couldn't pay $1,500 deserve to know whether their retirement is on track. They deserve a Social Security claiming strategy. They deserve someone to run the long-term care numbers before it's too late to act on them.

That's what this is for.

Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards Center for Financial Planning, Inc. owns and licenses the certification marks CFP®, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER®, and CFP® (with plaque design) in the United States to Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, Inc., which authorizes individuals who successfully complete the organization's initial and ongoing certification requirements to use the certification marks.

A note on what this is — and isn't

This platform provides financial education and analysis, not investment advice. The calculations are the same ones a CFP would run. The AI explains them in plain language. But the outputs are analysis — they help you understand your situation and the tradeoffs in front of you. For implementation decisions, consult a fee-only financial planner, tax professional, or estate attorney as appropriate. We tell you that not to disclaim responsibility, but because it's genuinely true that a good advisor earns their fee when you're ready to act on analysis like this.