From -$18K to $1.1M: How to Create Money Systems that Build Wealth
It's our favorite time of year because the Spring Wealth Circle is OPEN for enrollment, which means hundreds of women are getting ready to join the Factora community and make some serious financial changes—we can't wait!
In this episode, Allegra talks about why creating systems is the KEY to short and long-term financial success and the tools needed to build those systems from the ground up.
If you're ready to transform your financial life and join a community of action-oriented, supportive women investors, then you have just a few days left to join the Spring Wealth Circle.
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This is Allegra Moet Brantley and you're listening to the coffee and coin podcast where women talk wealth. I'm the founder and CEO of Factoria of a company on a mission to leave 1 million women to 1 million in net worth. Because when women have more money, we'll have more power to be the change we want to see in the world. If you're ready to hear real women share their real numbers and investment journeys and have a sneaky feeling you should be doing a little more with your money, you are in the right place, just sit back, relax and turn me up.
All opinions expressed by Team Factoria and podcast guests are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Factorio Incorporated. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be used as the basis for investment decisions. Team Factoria. And podcast guests may maintain positions in the securities or investments discussed in this podcast.
Welcome back to another episode of Coffee and coin. It is a rainy, foggy day in Austin as I record this, but that's just what the weather looks like outside. Inside, it is a very exciting day at Factoria. Because our wealth circle is already 75% full, probably more because the sales channel is popping off. And I'm not going to look at it until after
I record this episode. So it's the best time of the year. It comes around twice a year, which is nice. Well circle season. This is when we load a bunch of women who've been following the brand into the next wall circle cohort and go through a 12 week live online course with a curriculum that is going to take women from unclear, unsure, confused, frustrated, concerned all of these not so great feelings when it comes to their money to full clarity, autonomy, excitement, control, invigorated, basically we're going to be replacing all of your money stress with money, excitement. And that is why I absolutely love what I get to do here at the helm effect aura. Because you all know my mission. If you listen to this podcast, I say it all the time, it's to lead 1 million women to 1 million in net worth. And why that matters is because I want more women to have financial freedom, and why I want them to have financial freedom so that they can live lives that they dream of, in actuality, not just hopeful, swirling dreams in their head, but what their day to day life looks like. I'm already living mine. So I know it's possible for you because I was in $18,000 of debt just five years ago. And now I have over a million dollar net worth, which I love to openly transparently share with you. And I want to say this too. If you are already investing, especially in the stock market, it's a down market right now we are not seeing tech stocks skyrocketing like they were last year when everyone looked like so smart for for making selections. But really, they were just writing the highs of a pumped up macroeconomic system trying to keep us all okay during a world pandemic. And by the way, that's great. It worked, right, we got to see all of our stock values sore. And so now even though those are suppressed, just a reminder that it's only the value that's fallen, it's not the actual money that you might make or lose from an investment until you actually go in withdrawal your money from it. So I just wanted to start by saying
it's my favorite season. It's well circle time, we're going to have hundreds of women joining this spring while circle who are just tired. They're tired of not fully knowing what they should be doing with their money, or having a plan of action that they can implement for their money or feeling like they don't have the ability to take part in investment conversations with different friend groups. Probably some more male dominated friend groups, because I know that's where all the financial conversations were held in my life back when I actually used to go into an office and
Listen to the dudes talk about their stock portfolios. And now I can be one of them better not not the dude that's trading in and out of stuff, but actually the woman who is building long term wealth and understands what is in my investment portfolio and how to keep adding to it. So, in today's podcast, we're going to talk about how to create money systems that actually achieve your goals. Because
we know the start of the year is all about coming up with resolutions, many of which are financially based. And we've got goals that we want to achieve. The issue is, if you don't actually have systems in place to help you achieve those goals, you might be having the same goal year in year out. And I'm human, I have this happen to me to not with my money goals, because those are a way to systemize at this point. But just with my personal goals, I've had learned piano on my docket since
I don't know probably the last decade. And I haven't gotten to it. But it's because I haven't taken the time to get a keyboard app or hire a piano instructor or put even the time on my calendar to start working on this. So I don't have a system in place to make the goal happen. And I'm not surprised at all that it hasn't happened for me yet. But I don't want that to be the case with your money. So let's kind of just back up for a second and talk about how it went with your money last year. If you're listening to this podcast right now, are you someone that takes the time to stop and reflect and review the year prior for whatever it is you want to see if you had quality results in so we're talking about money? Do you actually sit down and do a financial review of what you did in the year prior?
I hope so. But I also know that a lot of people don't really know how to structure this. So it's easy to just kind of skip. But what isn't measured isn't manage. So if you don't take the time to self reflect on how you behaved with your money, how you spent it, how you earned it, how you invested it, if your savings grew to where you want them to, then it's gonna be really difficult to move forward, when you don't even measure what your progress has been so far. So I know for me, at the end of the year, my husband and I like to get together and personally reflect on your ear. There are four questions we answered, what I learned, how I healed, how I grew, and what I want to do better. And actually, we ask these same questions specific to our money, as well. Because there's a lot of qualitative emotions and feelings that are involved with our money. There's just no negating that, right? It's not all spreadsheets and quantitative.
Numbers, there's more to money than just the dollars and cents. There's what you make it mean, right? We had a daughter this year. And so how did we want to change our budget around our now increased spending for our daughter what things were important to us what weren't? Do we feel like this was the right choice, or it wasn't and there's so many feelings involved beyond just the actual price we pay for the new thing we're doing for our daughter. So we also take the time to look over our portfolio of investments. We have a lot of real estate, we have Factoria the business, we have
different income streams, and we obviously have our stock and bond portfolio. So we review all that. We also review our cash on hand, our total net worth, and then after reviewing that reflecting on whether we liked what we did with our money this year, or not, or what we want to do different we start to shift into
this coming year. So 2023 What do we want to do now with our money? An easy way to get started with undersea
and where your money is today is to use some sort of free app. The one that we tend to really like is called Personal Capital. I know a lot of fact, who are women after their wealth circle, go ahead and plug into Personal Capital, it's basically going to allow you to see your net worth at a glance by hooking up all of your different financial accounts. So you can connect, we connect all of our mortgages, we connect all of our home property values, we connect all of our different brokerage accounts, we connect all of our credit cards. So it's basically totaling up your assets, subtracting your liabilities and showing you your net worth at a glance, I'll just pause there and say, we do this in the beginning of a while circle in beautiful spreadsheet. And a lot of women just redo that every quarter, some do it, some redo it monthly, some do it for just themselves, some do it for themselves and their husbands separately, or partners, excuse me, some do it for just their household only. It depends on how you are
syncing your money if you are in a partnership. But I always recommend that people get something like a Personal Capital, there's different options that a lot of wall circle, women used to go ahead and just have that running in the background at all times. Because like I said, what isn't measured isn't managed. And while it's really nice to go and collect all of this information on your own, and put it into the net worth spreadsheet, which is the first assignment you're going to do in the while circle, it's also really nice to not have to go back and do it all manually again. So this is just an automated way to see your net worth and your portfolio at a glance. And Personal Capital is what we use. There's some alternatives, there's many, there's a few. Okay, now we've looked at where we're at, we know how to continue to look at where we're at. And then we need to put together our financial goals for the year. So one of the questions we ask women, when they come into the wall circle in their money evaluation, which is the second assignment that a wall circle woman will encounter is now that you understand what your net worth is, let's talk about where you are in your financial journey to date. So we are basically going to get a snapshot of where you're starting from not just the numbers, but also more of those qualitative feeling things. Do you feel like you're in the right career? Do you feel like you're making as much money as you could be for your career? I mean, we're going to turn we're going to turn over some some stones and ask you questions you may not have even been asking yourself, but the reason that we're doing this is so that you can start to figure out what are my big financial goals? And what are the ones I want to accomplish, at least in this upcoming year? Because every financial goal is going to fall into a near term, medium term or long term bucket. Right? So the easiest way to think about this is if you're considering retirement investing, you're obviously talking about the long term goal bucket. But maybe you want to start a family. Well, do you want to do it this year? Or do you want to do it in three to five years, because that's how you're going to decipher what you should be doing now Vers, preparing for down the road. So we also ask women in this money evaluation, if they have their financial goals outlined and written down coming into a wall circle.
And let me tell you,
it is about 90% that do not some might have their financial goals in mind. But pretty much the smallest amount of us actually had those goals structured and physically written down somewhere. Well, by the time you leave the wall circle, those are going to be in a spreadsheet, those are going to have a plan attached to them, you're going to implement a system to make sure that the plan goes accordingly and that you can reach those goals. But so many people skip this and I cannot tell you how important it is to not just have something in mind, right like I talked about with the I want to play the piano, but actually have something basically written down and outlined. Okay, now we need to go put those financial systems in place. So you may have heard of the book atomic atomic habits by James clear. He has a great quote. You do not rise to the level of your goals, but rather fall to the level of your systems.
So, if you're having trouble changing, the problem is most likely that you don't have a system in place to allow for that change. So bad habits are going to repeat themselves again. And again, whatever it is, maybe you're someone who has a gym membership, but you don't go to it. Or you feel like you spend a lot on groceries, but you waste a lot of that money, or the opposite. Maybe you are someone who doesn't want to be ordering and food, but you find yourself doing it again. And again, change needs systems, change needs, accountability, and change, especially with money needs, those financial systems put in place, and an accountability partner to make sure that you're actioning them. The first place to start when it comes to making sure you're doing the right things financially, is to go back and listen to our series of six financial foundation episodes, I literally go one by one through the six foundational things you can do to work towards financial freedom. And a lot of times this acts as financial goals for people who don't even really know what their financial goals are, maybe they are just the lovely, I want to make more money this year, or I want to invest more money this year. Well, this is going to help you actually frame those into smart goals. But starting with the bottom of the Factoria financial framework, which is a pyramid I talked about nonstop. And I put six episodes together that walks you through this. So this is how to really get going with your financial life. And it's it's out there, it's free content, I want you to consume it, I want you to do it, we talk about how to make a plan to get out of and eliminate any high interest debt, how to create values based spending system because I think budgets are bullshit and they don't work, how to build an emergency fund and place that in a high yield savings account, how to structure near term goals and put automations on so you're automatically saving to the towards the savings goals, and then how to set up your mid and long term investments by also having automatic contributions on and that inside of those investment accounts. Or excuse me inside of that investment bucket that you want to not just have tax advantaged retirement accounts. But you also need at least one taxable brokerage account that's going to allow you to access your money between now and the 59 and a half retirement age number where you can start making withdrawals from your retirement accounts without any sort of penalties or withdrawal restrictions. That was very quick summary of those six episodes. But we teach this in a deep dive in the wall circle. And not only do we teach it to you, but we give you assignments and spreadsheets to go fill in so that you're not just hearing about what can be done. But you actually start doing what can be done and setting up the system. So if you don't have a certain account, you're going to go open it, if you don't have an automation on, you're going to turn it on. If you don't know how much you should be contributing per month from your income, you're going to calculate it and then you're going to set that to be your contribution amount. And so these are all things that we deep dive in the wealth circle. And what actually makes them happen is not just the assignments. It's the accountability. So not only are you going through this with a live cohort of hundreds of other women who are all there to do the same thing as you and learn about financial management investment and building wealth that they're doing it so it's so inspirational to see oh shoot, I don't have a high yield savings account set up I need to do that. Oh, I'm interested in opening up a robo advisor which ones are you all looking at I mean, women in their Slack channel gets crazy after each class because people are even sharing different access links to get a discount on opening this account or that account. This is not something Factorio takes any part in by the way we want you guys to get the best right account for you. So in all regards, we are agnostic, we
We're here to simply educate you and give you the community and the support it takes to actually implement these systems. So that you see the change, and you hit the goals. The last thing I want to say about making sure that 2023 is a bang up financial year for you, where you do not have what's on your financial to do list. Next year, what you have on it to do this year, is why a financial community is so important. Well, let's just say it this way, here's some shitty stats, only 26% of women are actively meaning on the regular investing in the stock market. Why don't I believe that three quarters of women aren't doing that, I think they don't really feel confident in making decisions or allocations or how to construct a stock portfolio. So they just keep adding to their 401 K, or maybe they have an IRA, in addition, and they just leave whatever got invested into initially in there and call it a day. Please don't do this. All women are such capable investors, you just need to learn some of the fundamentals of how the stock market works and what securities are in it, and how asset allocation and diversification work. And then you can put this together and you can actively be doing it time and time again,
another stat for you women hold an average of 71% of their assets in cash. This pains me to no end. Because if you have the majority of your money in cash, that money cannot be earning you additional money, because it's not invested. Sure your high yield savings account right now they're up at about 3.3%. But last year, they were down closer to zero. So you have your money in an account, that's not earning anything. But last year, if your money had been in the stock market, and a lot of people had money in tech stocks, you would have seen the value of that flying. And that's because you're invested in actual companies that go out sell their products to customers, and make that company more and more valuable, and then you with ownership in that company. As a stockholder, your investment in them becomes more and more valuable to so you have to put capital at risk to have a potential role reward that is the basis of investing, I'm not going to sit here and tell you right now that investing is risk free. Of course it's not. But life isn't risk free. either. You have to put yourself out there to get the next job, you have to put yourself at risk to receive reward that is just the relationship that it requires sure you can play it safe, and just keep your money in your savings account. But that money is not going to grow and compound in the way that it could if it weren't properly invested. And then for the last and final, terrible stat that I'm going to share on this podcast today. 59% of women ages 20 to 34 defer their investing decisions and their financial management over to male counterparts. Here's why that is such a bad idea. One, not everyone's gonna stay married. There's a lot of divorce. I know you all know this. I know you all know someone who's divorced. So that is not a good bet. Right? We want to understand and have autonomy over our financial lives in case something goes wrong. First and foremost. But second, I just told y'all that women are really capable investors. So why would we not take the time to learn and understand and be able to invest our money personally investing is personal, your profile is different than your partner's. So your investments should be tailored to you. Not then. And also when it comes to financial management of a household. It is so empowering and impactful to know where your money is, what it's doing and what it can be doing. I don't want that to be given away to someone else to manage for you. You should be a seat pulled up to the table with a lot to say on that right like you've got a dog in this fight. It is about you
and your future what your money is doing now and in the future. So how do we get inspired to build systems make change hit goals. I believe it's not just understanding the goals, writing them down, creating the systems and working them. But the actual motivation comes from inspiration and seeing people around us do it. There is nothing more exciting than watching hundreds of women at the same time. open new accounts, make these different contribution amounts, choose their securities for the first time, figure out that their 401 K is over invested in one category and go ahead and rebalance it to fit their profile. Now, once you've done it, you'll feel more comfortable doing it a second time, a third time and forevermore because truly wealth building is a marathon and not a sprint. So if you want to join a mile circle, it is filling up quick. I would love to see you in the spring. Well circle. You know where to find us. That is it for today. Thanks my friends. If you enjoyed this episode, come join us in a wealth circle. It's our live online 12 week course and community where we teach you how to create a personalized financial plan alongside hundreds of other women building wealth. It will change your life and your money for good. You can apply at factorial wealth.com forward slash wealth circle. That's factorawealth.com/wealth-circle. See you in the next episode
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