A father’s spreadsheet, a twin who skipped college, and a financial industry that didn’t have a good answer for either.
Jon DeVries spent eighteen years following all the traditional advice for his kids’ college funds. Then real life didn’t follow the plan, and he built the solution he wished had existed 18 years ago.
Kiddos Capital didn’t start in a boardroom. It started at a kitchen table.
Jon DeVries founded Kiddos after living through the experience of saving for college for his twins firsthand. Like many parents, he spent eighteen years following the traditional playbook – opening 529 plans, investing in a target date fund, purchasing life insurance, and following the advice of friends, family, colleagues, and the finance industry. That playbook left him short when the first college bill arrived – just like so many other families.
Then life took a turn. One of his twins decided college wasn’t for her. That moment exposed how little flexibility traditional college savings plans actually offer, and it planted the idea for something different.
The realization came down to leverage and a plan. Parents have almost none of it compared to a multi trillion dollar college finance industry.
A single family borrowing $50,000 for college has very little negotiating power with a bank or lenders. A community of 10,000 families borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars together has real leverage. Jon saw the same pattern that built Costco and AARP: pool enough families together, and you can unlock sophisticated investments, lower interest rates, and lower insurance premiums that no individual family could get on their own. That insight became Kiddos Capital.
Jon DeVries
Founder and CEO, Kiddos Capital
Founder & CEO, Kiddos Capital
Jon brings an unusual mix of physics, AI, private equity, healthcare, entrepreneurship, and a blue collar sensibility to Kiddos Capital.
Before founding Kiddos, Jon built and grew companies in healthcare and AI, and led IBM Watson Health Imaging’s global business. He holds patents, has worked inside private equity firms, and helped launch an insurance business.
In his career, Jon saw financial tools available to corporations and the wealthy, tools that were essentially out of reach for the average families. His question was simple: why not them too? Kiddos is the answer.
We believe every family should be able to afford to send their kid to college. And if life changes, the same plan should flex with it, whether that means trade school, starting a business, a down payment on a house, retirement, or an addition on the house so the grandkids have somewhere to stay.
Kiddos Capital was built on a foundation of established, regulated partners to protect your family and your money. We have leveraged the group buying power of the community with these world-class financial institutions to power your Kiddos plan.
To keep your family’s money safe, we partner with Altruist Financial LLC as our primary custodian. Altruist is a modern, digital-first custodian built specifically for independent financial advisors and their clients. They safely hold your money, execute trades, and provides the secure portal where you can track your family’s financial progress. By combining our personalized financial guidance with Altruist’s cutting-edge platform, we built Kiddos Capital so that your family’s financial foundation is secure, efficient, and ready for the future.
To support your family’s plan in the event of a tragedy and you aren’t around, we will partner with a leading insurance company to provide integrated group term life insurance. Our insurance partner acts as our critical support for your plan:
By design, we pair life insurance with your investment to help keep your children’s future funded, protected from life’s tragedies.
Kiddos uses the leverage of the membership to hold an annual competition to select our lending partner to make sure we are offering the best, most current lending options to our members.
Our goal is to obtain the best lending terms so that your Kiddos fund can grow over decades to give you the financial options you want.
We believe families shouldn’t have to choose between a child’s degree and their own financial security. The goal is a debt-free graduation: a student who enters the world unburdened, and parents who come out ahead with a growing asset instead of an empty account.
Kiddos exists to give every family access to the collective buying power, smarter financial tools, and sophisticated strategies that used to be reserved for institutions and the wealthy, so every kid can start life on solid ground without their parents having to sacrifice their own.
A fiduciary financial advisor is legally required to act in your best interest, not their own, at all times. “Fee-Only” means that the advisor is paid by you and does not receive any compensation from 3rd parties, e.g. investment firms, insurance companies, lenders, or others. No Conflicts of Interest
This is a meaningful distinction from commissioned advisors, who earn commissions from the financial products you purchase. This creates an inherent conflict of interest compared to a fee-only fiduciary.
A Fee-Only fiduciary advisor at Kiddos Capital is legally required to act in your family’s best interest — with no commissions, no conflicts of interest, and a compensation model that aligns the advisor’s success directly with yours.
Your personalized Kiddos plan is developed by a Fee-Only fiduciary based on data driven college costs and includes an institutional-grade personal index fund with tax-loss harvesting, term life insurance, community, access to community-negotiated loans, and ongoing financial and college advisory support as your child grows from birth to graduation.
Every recommendation in the plan is made by a Fee-Only advisor who is legally required to put your family’s interests first, with no commissions, no sales incentives, and no conflicts of interest. The fiduciary commitment means the plan is built around what actually works for your family, without any potential conflicts of interest.
The plan evolves with your family from the first contribution through post-graduation loan repayment. Importantly, your Kiddos membership means you will get monthly report cards on your progress towards achieving your financial goals so that you can make changes over time.
A Kiddos Capital Fee-Only fiduciary-advised plan includes institutional-grade investing, group insurance protection, community-negotiated loans, and ongoing guidance, all delivered by an advisor legally required to put your family’s interests first.
In a traditional savings plan, you save for up to 18 years, spend it in 4, and end up where you started. And now you are 50ish and you need to start saving for a retirement that is only 15 years way.
Kiddos is designed to create a long-term asset while paying for college along the way. We do this by
Kiddos Capital is different from every other college savings plan because it combines institutional investing, group insurance, community-negotiated loans, and fiduciary planning in one membership, designed so your family pays for college and still has a growing asset at the end.
