We should all be Wealth Seekers

The concept of building wealth is one that is not often discussed within our households. Wealth is the value  assets already owned by you ( Dr. Jake Taylor). It is something that we all should be striving for. In this episode of wealth talks I share my personal story around building wealth. 

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Hello, welcome to Wealth Talks, a podcast for single moms by a single mom. It's your girl Sam here, and I am super excited to be here today. If you're wondering where I'm at, for those who are watching via YouTube, I am on a mini mommy and me vacation. I took my oldest with me, and we are in LA to celebrate one of my dance teachers' birthdays. My old dance teacher, she moved to LA um last year. So we came here to give a little celebration. But um yeah, I took a mental break that is so important for anyone. Doesn't even matter if you're a single mom, everybody needs a mental break, regardless if you're a single mom, if you're not even a parent, you need some time to yourself. That is so important. And although I'm not solely alone, I am able to do move freely without my two youngest. Um, which, you know, when they're younger, they need um a lot more attention, even though my oldest needs a lot of attention. But we're not gonna talk about that. Um, so I am super excited to be here today to be able to film another episode of Wealth Talks. Um, April was so busy for me with just um, besides my day job, with me just speaking, because as you all know, April was financial literacy month. So I got to do some really cool things. I got to speak um for the church again. I did a retirement planning class. I also did an estate planning class, which is um actually on the estate planning is on my YouTube channel where I teamed up with a representative from Legal Shield, which um, if you don't or if you aren't too familiar with Legal Shield, they offer um a comprehensive legal plan um at a very, very affordable rate. It's actually I am a member of Legal Shield, so I definitely highly suggest that you get that, especially for those estate planning documents, um, as such, you know, our will, a living will and testament, our um power of attorney, our healthcare proxy. Um, and then they give you a discount on a trust, um, which is what I'm moving towards next um to protect my children and our assets. But um, this is something that I feel like we skip over this. So I am gonna do another episode dedicated to just speaking about um estate planning, especially if you are um, I'm not even gonna say a single mom, but if you're if you are a parent, um you need to have an estate plan in in order. Um, and then the highlight of my month was I got to speak for Amazon. Um, in the Amazon that is um chapter that's in Canada. I was on a panel speaking about generational wealth in the black community. Um it was a very great panel, um, not because I was on it, but because it was a lot of information that I was able to share with people. Um attendees had really great questions, and I was super excited and honored, um, more importantly, to be able to speak on that panel um to talk about something that is so dear to my heart, which is generational wealth, uh, which le brings me to today's topic, um, which is about um becoming wealth seekers. And as um as a single mom, well, as not even a single mom, as someone growing up in the Bronx and you know, lower um income family, wealth was not something that we usually spoke about. Um, it was just get a job, pay bills. When you get older, you want to get a job to be able to pay your bills. And the conversation of um building wealth or acquiring wealth was one that was not discussed in my household. And um as I grew up, I noticed some things that you know my family struggled with when it came to finances. And as I um became an adult, I was like, you know what? These are the things I'm gonna focus on so that I won't have these problems when I have children. And one of the big things was education funding because I took out so much money and student loans my first year, just for my first two years of college, that it really had an impact on me so that I had it in my mind that I was not gonna have my children have to go through what I went through. And so all along, I've always had the discipline and the um the knowledge about bills and wealth. I just didn't have the language. And now that I'm older and I'm studying more, um, and you know, I'm in the study for my CFP. So I'm I'm learning these terms, I'm learning the lingo, I'm learning the plays or the strategies, as you may call it, and I'm understanding more how more than ever, right now at this moment, it's important for us to concentrate on building wealth. And for most people, they're like, well, Shakira, what what really is constitutes wealth? Well, wealth is a value is the value is what you have after you do your um you find out your net income. So your net income is your assets, which is what you own, minus your liabilities is what you owe. And that becomes your net worth. And that net worth signifies your amount of wealth that you have accumulated. And as you become older, the goal is to accumulate more wealth. Um, that's what we think, but we can start that process right now with our young children as early as 14 days, getting them set up to be wealth seekers. And this is something that is um that is not often spoken about within our community. The idea of setting our children up early with the ability to create wealth, to grow their wealth, and having the knowledge, not just the resources or just like the money, but having the knowledge to understand what is next, what do they have to do so that they can continue this wealth-building journey? Um, there's a statistic that says 6.7 million of the jobs that black people own, 43% of it is going to be obsolete by the year 2030. And that's because of the automation, because of technology. Technology is going to take away a lot of our jobs. So, this is why right now um, you know, we have to have these conversations about how do we build wealth? Um, how do we preserve our wealth? How do we keep our wealth growing? And the most simplest way for us to start, if you're on your journey brand new, and even if you're not brand new to this, because this is something that I'm using right now, so I can increase my ability, my my wealth, my assets that I'm I'm working on, is I'm looking at my budget. And um, I know a lot of people are like, I don't like the word budget, get over it. Your budget is going to be your best friend because from your budget, it tells you exactly what you're spending your money on and what you can afford to buy. So, for instance, um, for the last two months, um, I moved. I moved in April. I had a um a rough um move, um, a little bit of housing discrimination. I don't know if I spoke about that before, but it was a really trying moment. And at that moment, I was like, if I had to get up and move across the country with my family, what was I going to do? Like, what would my um what would my net worth look like with that big move like that? Because we know just moving locally is expensive. So moving across the country to a different state can be even more expensive. Like, what how would I be able to um sustain my family until I was able to secure employment? So these are things that came across my mind. And as I was in those moments, I was like, I need to figure out how to get more, do more investing because now I have to grow my capital so that I have enough money so that if that was to happen, I will be able to safely, uh, securely take my family and move and not be stressed out, be able to find something, take my time, find something to work, and and continue on raising my children. So I went through all my statements. I printed out, and don't tell my boss this because I use his printer, but I printed out all my credit card statements, I printed out my bank statements for my different accounts, and I looked through what I was spending my money on. And can you believe I found almost $200 worth of subscriptions that I did not need anymore? Now, sad to the Pete, the companies that I cancel with, but I'm not giving away any free money if I'm not using it, if I'm I don't find enough value of use anymore. And with that extra $200 that I found, I met with my advisor. I'm able to put that more money towards our investment plan that he has set up for me. So this is why I say a budget is so powerful. Um, and it's going to help you on your journey to building wealth, to becoming a wealth seeker, because it lets you look at the whole picture to see, okay, what am I spending my money on? What can I pull back on? And what can I use in another way to acquire more assets to build more wealth? So as we're um as we're becoming older, because every day, not older, but wiser, as we're becoming wiser, we need to understand that we have to shift our mindset to be focused now more on what can we what can we do to acquire more wealth, not necessarily for us right now, but for our children and for our future generations. Um, like I said, growing up, income and wealth to me were like this. And as I became, as I'm older now, I'm like, wait a minute, hold on, it's something different. Now I need to focus heavily on my wealth building strategies. Now I I have an income coming in from for my day job, and I'm work still working on that to get that up, get that up as I build up my wealth because I'm I'm I'm a I'm a nine to five person, you know. Well, nine to well, nine to seven if you want to be honest. But I understand that how important it is to have my income fun and um and fund my wealth building strategies. You know, I can't, I I can't just get up and leave my job. So in the meantime, I'm using that income that I'm making, and I'm still letting that income grow because we're not gonna stop that income from growing just to do wealth. We're gonna have both going at the same time. So this episode is all about helping you to open up your eyes if it's not already open. Um and if it is to go to the next level when it comes to building wealth. Because at the end of the day, the whole game is to make the next generation set them up. Um, we're playing catch up. I said I said that plenty of times. Like we're playing catch up with this whole thing, and now we have to start really, while we're securing our financial foundation, we have to make sure that our children's financial foundation is secure as well because we need our legacy to carry on and to continue on. So it's your girl Sam here. Thanks for tapping in. Just a friendly reminder that my new book is available on Amazon. I'm gonna have the link in the description. You can get a digital copy from Amazon. Amazon rated my book number one bestseller in over five categories. One that I'm really proud of is the credit credit repair. Um, I poured a lot of heart and soul into helping people to understand their credit because I firmly believe that everyone can have a great credit score if they understand how credit actually works. So you can head over to Amazon, you can grab that copy there, or if you would like an autograph copy from your girl personally, I do have the link there that you can get an autograph copy from me, a print version, which will be delivered to you. And if you purchase that hard copy version, I also throw in two bonuses a retirement planning guide that you can have to make sure that you're on target for retirement, and then also an additional resource for credit built in. So it's your girl Sam here. Great seeing everyone. Well, everyone, great seeing you, and I hope you guys have a great day till the next episode. Bye.