Vishal Garg feels duped.

“He hoodwinked me,” the just-ousted Better Home & Finance CEO said about Daniel Lewis, the man who replaced him last week. “He said he liked the company’s strategy. He praised us on X and used that to get on our board and win our confidences.”

Garg, who made headlines for laying off 900 employees on a company Zoom just before the 2021 holiday season, says he was fired on August 3 just as he brought the company to the precipice of success.

Better has been through a lot with Garg at the helm over the past several years. During the pandemic-fueled refinancing boom when mortgage rates were below 3%, the company held an $8 billion valuation. Today, with an imploded refi business and rates closing in on 7%, the AI mortgage company’s market value stands at just $300 million.

Toss in a leave of absence after the embarrassing Zoom layoff fiasco, a whistleblower lawsuit (it was dropped), an investigation from the Securities and Exchange Commission (nothing came of it), a disastrous 2023 SPAC merger that sent the company’s stock cratering 93% and years of mounting losses … it’s a minor miracle that Garg lasted this long as CEO.

But Garg says he was just about to deliver on the company’s unlikely turnaround.

After its core refinancing business went belly up, Better’s annual sales plummeted from $1.5 billion in 2021 to $70 million in 2023. This year, the company is on pace to deliver $200 million in sales, he said.

It bounced back by training AI models to quickly process mortgages — a task that would normally take dozens of people several days to accomplish. It partnered with Neo Home Loans, which doubled productivity and reduced loan origination costs by 50%, Garg claims. Impressed with the results, Intuit, Coinbase and OpenAI partnered with Better this year to power their mortgage services. The company also developed a strong home equity line of credit business.

“We’re winning. We’ve tripled loan volume. We’re close to profitability,” Garg said. “We were at the 5-yard line after taking the ball all the way down the field from the other side.”

Garg acknowledges he’s “hard-nosed” and the famous Zoom layoffs severely damaged the company’s reputation — a mistake he knows will continue to haunt him. But as criticized as Garg has been for placing near-impossible demands on the company and its employees, he said Lewis convinced the board he didn’t push hard enough.

Better and Lewis did not respond to a request for comment. On August 4, Lewis posted on X, “There was never a $BETR without @vishal_better. That demands respect.”

‘It’s not about me’

Lewis, a hedge fund manager with a mixed track record of success, approached Garg six months ago with thoughts about cost savings and good ideas about delivering profitability, Garg says.

“(Lewis’) thoughts about cost savings were good. His ideas about innovation were not,” Garg argued. “It’s so much easier when we’re this close for someone to come in and say that they could have done better.”

Lewis was brought on to the board on July 27. A week later, he had convinced the other directors to oust Garg as CEO and name himself as Garg’s replacement.

“It’s not about me,” Garg said. “I care about delivering savings to people and helping them live the American Dream. So when shareholders said, ‘You need to take a back seat,’ I complied.”

But Garg says he believes Lewis hadn’t been forthcoming about his intentions over the past several months, as he advised Garg and convinced him to give him a board seat.

“I suspect he always wanted to become CEO,” said Garg. “The board made a mistake.”

Investors appear to agree with Garg. The stock has fallen 45% since Lewis took over as CEO. (The stock had been down more than 16% this year before Garg’s departure was announced.)

In the week since Garg stepped aside (but remained on the board) he says a number of horrified investors reached out to plead with him to take his CEO job back. Armed with Class B shares with special voting powers — his own and from a group of committed early investors — Garg says he has the votes to win.

He has retained high-powered lawyer Alex Spiro, partner at Quinn Emanuel, to represent him, and he sent a letter to the board on Monday demanding it return him as CEO. He says he’ll work for $1 a year until he returns the company to profitability, and he’ll transition out of the CEO role afterward.

“It’s an acknowledgment that I’ve been doing this for 10 years, but execution hasn’t been perfect,” Garg said. “I hope it gets resolved. I think the future still remains very bright for Better.”

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Before launching The Savvy Couple in 2016, Kelan Kline had reached a breaking point.

He and his wife, Brittany, had recently married, bought a starter home, and begun paying down roughly $40,000 in student loans. Brittany was an elementary school teacher, while Kelan worked as a jail deputy.

The couple, who grew up in Rochester, New York and began dating in ninth grade, had little control over their schedules. Their shifts rarely overlapped, leaving them with little time together.

“We were working opposite shifts,” Kelan told Business Insider. “We never got to see each other.”

One night, they sat down at their dinner table and tried to define their “ideal lifestyle.” Their vision looked little like their current lives: It centered on family, flexibility, and control over their time.

“I was after time freedom,” Kelan said. “I was so sick and tired of someone else telling me when to come to work, forced overtime, and denying my vacation.”

Turning a $2.95-a-month blog into a 7-figure business

With a clearer picture of the life they wanted, the Klines began reverse-engineering it. Inspired by two personal finance blogs they followed, Making Sense of Cents and Millennial Money Man, they decided to build an online business focused on money.

The subject fit their experience: They had spent years budgeting and paying down debt, and the income reports published by the bloggers they followed suggested that the model could scale. For Kelan, the biggest appeal was the possibility of becoming his own boss and controlling his schedule.

The startup costs were minimal — they launched The Savvy Couple in 2016 with a web-hosting plan that cost $2.95 a month — but the low cost didn’t eliminate the learning curve.

For nine months, the blog generated no revenue. Then they earned $50 for a sponsored post.

That first payment convinced Kelan the site had potential. Two weeks later, he proposed leaving his day job to focus on the business full time — and Brittany signed off. They still had tens of thousands of dollars in debt, but about six months of living expenses in savings gave them a cushion.

Even with the cash runway, giving up predictable income was stressful.

“There were probably 100 times I considered going back to work and getting a 9-to-5,” Kelan said. “Business goes up and down. It’s a roller coaster.”

With Kelan focused on the business full time, it gained traction. In 2019, the business generated enough income to cover Brittany’s teaching salary, allowing her to leave the classroom. The couple made their final student-loan payment that December.

The company later expanded to include The Savvy Mama, a brand focused on household finances, meal planning, and family routines. Across their businesses, the Klines earn revenue from display advertising, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, and their own digital products and services.

Their revenue peaked in 2023 and 2024. BI reviewed profit-and-loss statements from Savvy Media Marketing reporting a total income of $1.3 million in 2023 and $1.1 million in 2024.

Their revenue has dropped over the past couple of years. Kelan attributed the decline largely to changes in Google search, which he said cut traffic to their blogs by 80% to 90%. In response, the couple shifted their attention more toward YouTube, memberships, digital products, and marketing services for local businesses.

They still believe online businesses can offer low startup costs, flexibility, and room to scale, but if they were starting from scratch today, a traditional blog dependent on Google traffic wouldn’t be their first choice.

Investing the difference between income and spending

As their income climbed, the Klines prevented their lifestyle from rising at the same pace. They stayed in their starter home for seven years, drove used cars, rarely ate out, and spent about five years as a one-car household.

Rather than treating higher revenue as permission to spend more, they directed much of the difference between their income and expenses into investments.

Kelan describes their portfolio as “super boring.” It includes Vanguard’s VTSAX, the technology-focused VGT, retirement accounts, and taxable brokerage accounts. Over the past two years, they have also added rental real estate near Rochester, New York.

The couple said their household net worth — including the estimated value of their businesses, investments, and primary residence — surpassed $1 million in 2020. Business Insider reviewed a screenshot from their Rocket Money account showing a seven-figure net worth.

For them, the clearest payoff has been the ability to organize work around their two daughters. Brittany spent the past school year homeschooling their oldest, while Kelan said he typically works from about 9 a.m. until noon or 1 p.m.

“We protect our time like crazy,” he said. “It’s night and day having complete time freedom.”