Allegra & Jake: Financial Transparency & Becoming Millionaires
Allegra & Jake met during SXSW in 2017 at a crossroads in their own personal financial journeys. Since then they've been building their life and wealth together—and today they’re officially millionaires. In this episode they discuss:
What their earliest money conversations were about
How it feels to have crossed the million-dollar net worth mark
The financial decisions, sacrifices, and strategies that helped them get here in just 5 years
Why they value financial transparency and how they put it into practice
What they’re working towards next and their ultimate net worth goal
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Hi. 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 Factora, 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. I have my dear husband, Jake, on the pod with me today. Hey,
we want to know how you do
it. Unlike my football teams, right?
Oh, yeah. Now you have too many.
Jake is horrified that I am a fan of not one. But for football teams. He thinks that it is horrendous. And just like you are meant to marry only one person, you should have loyalty to only one football team. We're just gonna have to agree to disagree. I'm having
you make bandwagon fans look virtuous because you have like five of them.
Listen, I'm really upset that football is over. That's the that's the real problem here.
Those are Sundays. Love those.
All right. So what are we talking about on the pod today?
We're talking about love and money in our relationship on how it's changed over time and where we are to that?
Yes. And we're talking about how we're millionaires. But yeah,
that's it. That's how it's changed.
That's definitely been big change. But we wanted to record this podcast because the team thought that it would be interesting to share when you do cross the million dollar threshold, as partners, what changes. So in order to get you guys up to speed in case you have not listened to other episodes of loving money, which you're welcome to go back to, we should really just fill people in on how we got to where we are today. So I'll take us back quickly that we met six years ago, at Austin South by Southwest festival. I was living in New York at the time. I had just quit my job. So it was my favorite South by Southwest yet because I wasn't there to do business. And I just wanted to kind of hang and party and have a good time. And so I met you. You came to New York a month later, pursued me quite heavily. You were the one. He knew that I did not know that. The other way. I thought it was the child. Yeah, it was like Look at this cute little sales bro trying to hang out with me in New York when he lives in Austin. And now we've been married for almost three years. So well done you. Oh, yeah. I knew it. I did not I did not I I thought five years younger hasn't had a serious girlfriend never lived with a woman. No way. Talk to me and three girlfriends for now. But Jake, something that I love so much about you, baby is that you really make big bets and you go in with so much conviction. I do. In fact, I think that's a little bit part of your investing style, which I really respect. So before we get into our money now, I also just wanted to share what our money situation looked like when we got together because it was vastly different. So when we first got together, Jake had some credit card debt from taken out all the ladies or fancy cocktails. Yes. No, that's true. You shouldn't be where you used to take them and everything. And I had some business debt from a previous company that I was paying off. We both had about $20,000 in the stock market. His was primarily in employer sponsored retirement accounts. My was just in a betterment broke reached out. And mine was really new. And so was my whole money obsession, because I had been working in New York for basically my entire 20s, making little, very little money when I started at the Estee Lauder companies pay your people better, and then making a lot of money. By the time I was in my late 20s, but I had nothing to show for it. So I knew that something wasn't right. Even though I made good money. In the six figures, I had nothing in my savings and investment accounts, I didn't even know how to invest, I didn't even really understand what investment accounts I needed, or if I needed them, because I was at a company that didn't offer 401k. So I was a bit of a shitshow, as many of us are no shame in that game, we don't get taught this stuff. And so I actually had left my fashion technology job to start working with a company that was all about financial wellness, because I knew I needed that. So I was really attracted to it. I was learning a lot. And when Jake and I got together, I was just vomiting all of what I knew. You. So maybe tell people what it was like when we first got together just in terms of how quickly we started to talk about money or even prioritize money goals together.
Yeah. So like, right when we got together, and we're still dating, whatnot, Allegra was still very much working for that other company being involved in the personal finance space. And I wasn't necessarily in the best place, not a good place. Not a bad place. But she definitely was always talking about money all the time. And I wasn't afraid of talking about money, but she kind of would take it to the next level. And it was everything from you know how it should be better expense managers when we go out, you know, going into the right Happy Hour whenever I'm going out to expensive dinners, and even to the point where as we started talking more seriously, more and more. I had this really annoying car that I had just gotten it was too expensive. It was kind of like a luxury purchase for something I didn't I thought I could afford but it was it would just brought me out of whack. And she was like, why you got this ugly car either way, so you should totally get rid of it. And and by the way, this is all happening while we're still long distance relationship. So it's not like she walked in some I can't really Oh, yeah. Like, this isn't that you should get rid of it. We were just just talking about it on. No, I didn't
even know that was ugly yet. I just knew all the numbers. And I said, Well, I'm sure. Until I said if you don't like that financial decision, why don't you undo it? Yeah.
Yeah. And then I remember we did like a whole kind of soft plan together with not just that, but just in general, like, what are some things that you could do. And I think like a month or so later, I started implementing a lot of those. And I would be like, hey, like surprised I did X, Y and Z I automated, even higher credit card monthly payments, got really car in a couple of months. And I think that level of trust. And that level of interest in a specific shared idea was really important to us because like I think both of us felt like we were on the right track for certainly a startup job, really living in a really awesome city friends this and this and that. But yet, we still felt like there was something like a piece that was missing. And there was something more to be had. And at the time, I don't think we could really put our finger on what that was but we knew this this was the general direction. And then obviously a relationship kind of took off and then I can mentioned we're here to Austin and I think the light bulb clicked for you to say hey a lot of these ideas that I have for myself and for us you can achieve them way more easily and more effectively. In in an Austin compared to New York, and it's a cold miserable place. So it was it was a win.
Okay, a few things one, in case listeners want to know what that god awful car was. It was a Volkswagen Golf You know the ones with the hot but
GTI manual transmission. It was a rocket.
It was so ugly. I cannot believe he thought that this was a cool guys par and that chicks were gonna go crazy. It sounds
black on the outside racing interior on the inside leather. It was slick. I did not like that.
It was terrible. But I do like where you replaced it with. That is what started our love for Volvo's. Okay, and then the other thing I wanted to say is that, yeah, we were living and I was in New York, he was in Austin. And we really are committed to making these big changes with our financial lives. I was already a little ahead and I was telling him everything that I was doing and he was jumping on it, getting the credit card paid off, getting out of the car situation, figuring out how he can make his monthly expenses. Just being a little bit better of a fix. Ben's manager there. But ultimately what we did realize is that when we were talking about moving together, and I obviously tried to convince him to New York because I thought my job was so important. And I was an executive at startup, and he needed to come to me. Ps were in Austin. So Jake one. What really got me in his negotiation was how much further our money and how much faster our financial goals could happen and a lower cost of living city. So just to give you all an idea, when I was living in New York, before I moved here, I was paying $2,000 a month for a teeny tiny bedroom. And when I moved here, we started paying $1,800 A month together for a swanky downtown one bedroom apartment and had all the bells and whistles, marble countertops, a washer and dryer, I've never had a washer and dryer in New York, I was bringing the light up cool, hot tub, a gem, the the works. So great deal. It was. And then we started doing a bunch of house hacking where we actually bought houses. And our goal was to have nicer places to live and pay less each move, which I showed that in another podcast. So back to today, now that you all kind of have our backstory. Jake, what are our numbers now? What is our monthly income? And what sources does it come from?
Yeah, so net, we're making about 13k a month. And that's coming from various places do traditional w two income, we have several rental properties, as you mentioned before, and then on the smaller end with some stock market dividends that we're just reinvesting back into the portfolio. Cool.
So that's what we make. And then our monthly investing rate, we take 28% of that, that was the net number, by the way, not our gross income, but our net, and we invest 28% of it. So drumroll, our current net worth is a little over a million dollars. It's been fluctuating if y'all been looking at all the asset prices, both in the real estate market, which we have good amount of real estate and in the stock market, but we crossed that million dollar threshold last year, and we're still past it, and it feels awesome. How does it feel for you once we became, quote unquote, millionaires?
Yeah, I mean, a one in a lot of ways it feels I guess it feels the same in a sense that we I've never really felt overextended. I think we've always tried to make sure that we don't feel that way from the beginning. Because we have various passive income streams and real and being that we lose, you know, we'll get into some of the specifics of what were things we care about what our spending and whatnot. But the way it does feel different is that there's certainly a lot more going on right we have more properties that that's our net worth for that's more rental properties he got manages a bigger dividend and stock market portfolio. So that needs tending to rather than just a target date fund, right. So as it grows, and things like that. We'll talk about this part a little later. But with our current setup, that was a good amount of maintenance. So it feels like there's still a lot going on other than our day to day lives with our job. And that obviously we have a new daughter. So that's that's a new. That's a new thing we have to be dealing with on a day to day basis. That's crazy,
expensive already.
And it's going to get worse. So. So yeah, that's where we're at.
Yeah, I would, I would say for me, it doesn't feel anything other than normal. I always knew we'd be millionaires. I want I was very targeted and our goal for when we become millionaires. And I mean, we plan to be multi millionaires. Yeah, plenty do we want in our lifetime did.
I mean I think we've talked about different numbers, but it's like there's like that the end of the day, like later on in life and like the 30s. But the like, what's the walkaway number? Right? That's like today, if you get eight, you're it's like the game over?
Yeah, we can be really effective, extremely efficient and live very well on $8 million. But I think that we will be more like 30 billionaires
who they efficient and we have to try very hard to not make that work.
Okay, so let's talk about some of the choices that we've made. To help us get to this mark. Yeah.
I would definitely say obviously you going all in on Factorio versus us just working two jobs. I think that was a really big change our lives.
interject there to say anyone who's either taking the wall circle or interested in taking the wall circle. We talked about how one of the three asset classes if the business asset class and if you stop and think about it, probably In your life, the wealthiest person you know, is a business owner, or the wealthiest family, you now are wealthy from some sort of business that was either shouted two generations up or recently, it doesn't matter. But basically, if you work a regular job, you have a cap on how much you can earn. And there's no ceiling when you own your own business. So when I moved to Austin, I knew I wanted to start my own company, I knew I wanted to help women with wealth building as I was growing Marie, so quickly, and then even faster once Jake and I, really we became financial partners, before we came, became life partners. In terms of official marriage documentation, we had already bought three houses together, we had all the combined finances, but we were we had the same accounts at different institutions. If anything, it was great. When we got married, we could consolidate a bunch of things. But me going all in on doc Torah was not easy. I didn't take a paycheck for about 15 months. And Jake had to agree. But she did so willingly, Dave, and I always stopped to say like, I can't believe this guy who was just my boyfriend was willing to support my dreams by effectively affording our life for that whole time, we literally figured out how we could budget to just live off of Jake salary for the foreseeable future, because we didn't know if and when that Torah would be profitable. Hip ahead to today, we both work at fact, Torah, we have built a family business, and we're not the only people who work at Factory, we have additional employees. So I just wanted to point out that that really has been the biggest financial move we've made to help us get to millionaire status.
And just to add, I mean, those were initially Leaney years and kind of uncertain times. But that that first part is kind of the flashy part, right, as you're going back to our full time it worked out. That's like the romanticized part. But the other side of that those lean years, I mean, we said no to a lot of stuff, and to still say no to a lot of things, right? It's, you know, for a year and a half or so you're not taking a salary, even when you did, it was basically a very small salary just to start being able to help put together as we wanted to do more things, but we just simulate a lot of things, a lot of weddings, a lot of trips, I mean, even before and during COVID. And we basically said, we're really not going to travel. So for everyone at that's going to be something different right values based spending,
we also chose not to have a real wedding, you know, their afford and what our wedding we spent $1,000 on it, we basically went to lunch with my best friend who married us and hired a photographer,
they were we've been a one car family our entire time, and that we buy old cars for over 100,000 miles. And I thought to say you don't have to do this exact same thing. It just what those
three also, even with our house strategy, so we did the buy a primary, flip it into a rental a few times. And that's a load, you know, it's a load to move in, upgrade, move out, get tenants in. But that was how we were able to do it strategically and creatively and with less money. And one thing we always talk about our caution is the phrase house poor, we could have bought nicer houses, as in more expensive houses. But we chose not to because we didn't want to be stretched. So we've done a lot of different things.
Well, lenders were pushing us like, oh, you only want to spend this much your house.
Oh, yeah. And they're like, but we can approve you for 1,000,005. And we're like, no, no, we want to spend 600.
Yeah, I mean, we want
to get into how wild that is. But lenders and real estate agents are not necessarily financially minded. They're probably just like you and me. They didn't get any formal education classes and they are people helping you make some of the most expensive decisions of your life. And there's no there's no real training their understanding. And remember, at the end of the day, it's your life. So thank you, mortgage broker and real estate agent, but we need to do what's right for our family and not over buy or have a monthly net that's too hard and stressful. So Okay, those are the things we did to get to millionaire status, acquire a bunch of creative real estate build Factoria keep our investment rate high and consistent and just DCA baby dollar cost average in the market a portion of our incomes every month, month in month out even when there was the crash in the beginning of COVID Even when there was, you know, the wild situation that was going on at the end of last year. Is there anything you would have done differently? As we were building our, our wealth? And you regrets, so to speak?
I mean, we definitely went slim on the cars. I think even with a kid and, and a dog. It's basically everyone's really jammed. But I mean, I think realistically, we, as we've had so many properties, and things like that, we've always had a lot of cash, because there's always been a lot of emergency houses or vacancies, I think maybe I would have wished it would have put a little bit more actively in the market, rather, having a little pot of cash in a savings account, you know, easy to say in a bull run. But last year, s&p went down 25 26%. So, you know, they just depends, but in hindsight, I think that would probably wouldn't know, the better.
Yeah, and I guess my I have two regrets. The one is, you know, it's probably easy to listen to us and take off, you just get really frugal for a few years. Look how much productivity and success you can have. But I think that we've both talked about, there are times where we got a little too aggressive. With saying no to things, for instance, my family is from Brazil, and my uncle is the best host in the world. And I never got a chance to take Jake to that family home and experience that before he's now sold it. And it's pretty much out of Brazil. So I think things like that, you know, those are once in a lifetime trips, we solution as to. And then the other thing would be with this property that Jake's in his home office, I've down the hall, about three doors down in my home office, I was so devoted to being in this one little circumference around Austin, that if I had opened that up by even point a quarter of a mile, I would have found this house for 40 to $60,000, cheaper, six months before we've been looking that whole time. So you know, there is being very clear on the things you want, and prioritizing those, but you got to be flexible, too. Because we knew we needed a new home for the bed. And we paid a little one and two for this one. In fact, this house didn't even appraise for four what we bought it for, so we had to bring an extra $38,000 to closing to cover that difference. So there's that. Okay, let's see. What else? What about now that we have crossed that threshold? What have we changed in our financial life? If anything?
Yeah, I think for me, since I am the one managing all the rental properties, and overall just primary home maintenance. I used to do everything myself for the most part unless it was a really critical, difficult thing to do. Now I'm much more much more on the perspective of giving my time is valuable. And unless I can solve it in five minutes, I'm just gonna pay the trusted book of service providers that I have. And to be fair, I have that trusted. Let me know contactless because I did so much a way out. And then I leaned on certain people to help me when it was needed. But that's, that's part of the the final product, do let yourself and then as you build your wealth, and you start to try to scale this and save more time, start leaning on people who can do better.
And finally, I would say the exact same thing, basically now I am so much more into paying for convenience
with specific kind of convenience, not I think we also try not to solve you UberEATS every meal, right? It's like various Muscat.
But for ours, we made a choice that we wanted to have in home childcare, because we both work from home, and we wanted to be near our child as much as possible in our early life. And so yeah, it'd be a lot more affordable to drop her off at a daycare, but we pay for nanny, and we value that and that is extremely convenient to leave a meeting and go kiss my daughter and they go back into a meeting. We also built a home gym for convenience. Austin is really hot, and it's really annoying to get a car when it's 100 degrees and try and get yourself to the gym. So we have a home gym. We also have a virtual trainer that trains us in the home gym. There's I think a lot of things that we wouldn't have even considered back in the day that were like now. Works for our value set. We're gonna spend money on it. Okay, well What about any lessons that you've learned either as an individual or a couple? When it comes to building our wealth?
Yeah, I mean, I would say while it was painstaking to like, actually merge all the finances all the accounts that took like a little bit over a month, and it's just annoying discouraging with financial institutions, it has made pretty much every conversation and every strategy meeting, so to speak way easier, because it's all on one dashboard. Or if you don't know, you have the same login, you see the same accounts, it makes all of this stuff a lot easier. And the way I see it is that, you know, we're life partners and to say, or to be at arm's length, oh, but not with finances. That just the scenes just strange to me. And so we I think even I was surprised by how much easier it was not everything was combined, I thought it'd be easier, but it's actually so much better.
And for anyone who's interested or cares, Viator is 100% agnostic about where you bank or what brokerage account you use. I mean, there's obviously fat for fan favorites that people are constantly talking about in our Slack community. But we do primarily all of our banking with Capital One, we then have our high yield savings account separately, and broken out a different buckets with Ally Bank, and then we have our brokerages with Charles Schwab just to try and simplify and we used to have so much more than that. I think I mentioned initially I had Betterment when I started my first brokerage with a robo advisor. I'd had Titan, I'd had Vanguard, we had all these accounts, because we wanted to try everything. And so we just consolidated to make things a lot simpler and easier for us to see. And I'd say the big the big lesson I've learned and it's not just from us, but from other people who and couples who are observed have financial issues is that financial transparency when you're in a partnership means a lot like I do think that there is something such as financial infidelity, if you are doing something that your partner doesn't know about. Even if they don't find out. It's nefarious. You know, like there is so much trust when it comes to money and what you're doing with yours. And so I just watched so many people be like, Oh, my partner will tell me how much debt they have. It makes me concerned whether or not I should marry them. Blah, blah, blah. We tell each other everything. Unless it's an under 200 ollar expense. Like if it's above that we are communicating. Otherwise, don't tell me about? Yeah, what weird thing you're getting for one of our properties don't care or kitchen item. We're gonna appreciate it when you cook food for me in it. But you know, don't care about your pants. Okay, babe. So what's up next for us? What are our next financial goals?
Yeah. Well, I think we want well, I don't think I know, we want to have many more children. I think even both of us have been pleasantly surprised by how much we've just loved having our first daughter, I always knew I wanted to be a dad. And we want to have war. So I at least two ideally, three total. And so that means in the short term, just gotta save enough cash to put a good down payment on the next house. I think previously, when we've bought houses, we've especially bought a house for the next two to three years. Basically, we call it the stair step. So first place was a two bedroom condo had stairs. So like a townhome, basically, you know, and then we've kept progressing along and now it's like, okay, well, probably the next house we need to say a little bit more so that we can have the house yeah, the family house. House,
which I never grew up in a family house, my mom and I moved all the time, I probably lived in no lie 20 houses before I went to boarding school at 14. So that's, you know, not even a year sometimes in certain houses. But Jake grew up in a family home and they have a lot of memories about being there young and just the look of the house and the den and all that I think both of us really want kind of that grounded family space. And like you said we won a bunch of Bambinos. So we used to joke that our first house that we would have our kid in was called bam, terrorists. That's what we're in now. Now we want them a state. So stay tuned for next. I know my first short term goal is to get back Hell out of Austin this summer, because I'm not going to be pregnant like I was last summer. And then I would say our other really important goal is just to keep working through factory's mission mean, our mission is a million women to Emily network, we've had so many women, including myself, frost bow marker, which is awesome. But a million is a lot. So we have a long way to go. And we want to just keep making Factoria. Incredible. And then I would say, for the mid to long term stuff. We've always talked about having a ranch, maybe making some of our own olive oil on set ranch. And yeah, I think I would be very into sending our kids to boarding school, I went to an all girl boarding school in Virginia, Jake went to a private high school that was practically like a boarding school, very close knit in Puerto Rico. And we both really enjoyed our high school experiences, not so much our college experiences. So I think that's something that's pretty important to us too. Sure. Okay. Well, I think that this has been a really fun episode. Sweet has of mine. Is there any final thing you would like to get off your chest? That's a loaded question. Keep it the game about millionaires or personal finances as a couple anything we may have missed that would be worthy of sharing.
Yeah, I mean, again, I would, I would, I would just take your time just to react to that. I love being married you and I love being completely combined to the hip and including the financial side. I know there's a lot of money advice out there that say Oh, kind of be together, but have some of the stuff to yourself. And at the end of the day, it's a very personal decision. But I think if you really do find that right partner, and you are starting a family and all this stuff, I know a big part of factors is helping women take their share of the financial conversation with men where they have traditionally kind of own those spaces, even if they're involved. They're not really involved. And so I think really, the best way to do that is to make sure that if you're on even footing with the financial situation, even if you make more than your husband, or you make the same or whatever it is, if you're both involved with all the information stored in the same bank account with the same brokerages. Yeah, I think that will go a long way to effectively making as many women as possible on the same footing as men. Because at that point in time, it doesn't matter if you make more or less, what matters is being involved in day to day, year to year decisions about the money. If you're not in control of that you're not you could make 10x more than the man but if he's managing it all, you're not really involved.
And you wouldn't believe how often we see that we see a lot of women come into fact Tora, who some are even getting divorced. And they're like, I need a lot of money. But I let him be in control of all the investment decisions. And I'm not really sure where the money is or whether it was invested appropriately. And now we're trying to untangle things, and I just don't want that for any woman. So I would agree with you babe. It is a personal decision and everyone needs to do what feels right for them. But at least for you and I I love being partners 100% And to me, that means partners and love partners in finances partners in business partners in parenthood, like all the way all on why
I agree. That's why we're such great partners are one of the many reasons why I think
well, should we wrap up this episode and then I'll meet you in the hall for a belly hug. Sure. All right, lender name. If you enjoyed this episode, come join us in a well 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 factorial wealth.com forward slash wealth circle. See you in the next episode.
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