Heyba fam, we did it. We're here. We are almost done with twenty twenty. But before we say goodbye to the Year of the Dumpster Fire, we first wanted to take a look back at some of our favorite conversations we had with guests this year on Brown Ambition. First up, we've got our conversation with Aman and Christina of our Rich Journey. First of all, if you guys do not subscribe to their YouTube channel and you are interested in getting your start in investing, you have got to go
to YouTube right now and subscribe. Honestly, there's a series of videos about wealth building and investing and saving for retirement. We're a game changer for the way that I personally approached my own retirement before the age of forty. Christina and Aman managed to not only retire, but move their entire family to Portugal, of all places, and start fresh.
They are truly living their best damn lives, and in this episode, they were here to spill the tea on how much they save to retire early, how they're making ends meet out there in Portugal right now, and what are their expenses really like. We hope you enjoy looking back on this episode of Brown ambition. So, without further ado, here's our conversation with a Moan and Christina of Our
Rich Journey. We are joined today by the fabulous Our Rich Journey, the brains behind Our Rich Journey, Christina and Amman Browning. Welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks for having us.
Yeah, thank you.
We have been looking forward to this. We were so excited about this call. So we are so glad to be speaking with you guys.
Now we're geeked. I'm like, ugh, I just know our audience is going to love you. Oh money too.
Let me brag on y'all for a little bit because your story is so inspirational and I know that our audience will love you. But as we mentioned, the come from the San Francisco Bay Area. You guys both worked for the federal government until your late thirties. You decided, let's just quit our jobs. Let's just retire. Now, how about that? With what a ten and a twelve year old at the time.
Yes, yeah, well so they're eleven and thirteen now, so yeah, they were about ten and twelve at the time.
What better not only quit your job?
Yeah? Very casually? Well, no, I mean, I'm kind of making it seem easier than it was. You guys plan for this. You joined the Fire movement before you even knew there was a Fire movement? Is that right?
Oh, that is totally right. I love how you said that too.
It's like we didn't even really know what we were doing as we were doing it in terms of classifying it as a Fire movement, because when we started, it wasn't.
Like this huge thing. It's not a huge thing now, I.
Would say, but it's much bigger than when we started. So Fire is really financial independence retiring early. And the concept is really that you save as much money as you can, you make as much money as you can, and then you invest that money, and then that money will grow enough to a point where you have enough money that you can reach financial independence and retire and never have.
To work again.
So that whole sort of introduction to Fire was we were sort of working on it and doing all these things towards Fire, but there wasn't really we didn't know the name of it at the time when we started.
We'll talk about I mean, so take us back to eight years ago. Was it eight or nine years ago when y'all decided as a couple, Was it was it one big conversation where y'all where you were both like, hey, we should retire early? How soon? Eight years? How's eight years? And then you put it like, how did that? How does it work as a couple? How do you decide
we are going to both strive for this goal? Get on the same page and talk about the steps that y'all took in your early thirties to be able to retire before forty.
Well, you know, it was a AHA moment for me at work. I was at work working for the federal government, and I was I was going through the motions every day in the race. And I was at work one day and I received an award for my length of service with the federal government for ten years. And at this awards assembly, there was another federal employee that had gotten an award for thirty years of service. And I just remember, at this assembly, my ten years was just insignificant.
They hurried me off the stage. It was nothing. And at that moment, I realized that I didn't want to be here thirty years just to get another piece of paper. And so I went home. I had this conversation with Christina, and you know, there were so many things that we wanted to do besides just spend the rest of our lives in our cubicle. And so we had this conversation and we didn't really know how we were going to do it, you know, we had it was just a goal.
A goal was to be able to develop enough passive income, either with real estate or with the stock market, to be able to quit our jobs and live off of that. And so when I went home and me and Christina had this conversation, what Christina did is what she always does. She was like all in for it. She said, let's do it. Let's figure out a way to get it done.
Well, it's your heart. I mean, my husband and I can't even ngram what to order on door Dash. I mean that's like a two hour conversation. Well, I think y'all's relationship, I mean it has to be so strong, such a foundation of trust, and I just and it comes across for me and your YouTube channel and your videos. You can really tell that y'all are all in with each other, and that's that's beautiful to see. Tiff, What do you want to ask now?
I just want to know, like what in your note so you have that initial excitement, But what were there things that made you nervous about about this journey that you were like, how were we going to handle these things? Because I'm sure there are certain people who are listening and they're like, I'd love to retire early, but I'm nervous about dot.
Dot dot, And how did you handle those things?
There was a list. I think I think the biggest thing on our list was the amount of money that it would take to retire to do it, you know, we we have this thing called a fire number, and it's a number that you calculate and it's based off of the amount of money that you would need in an investment portfolio in order to call yourself financially independent. And just calculating that number and seeing that number on paper, that was very intimidating. So that was one thing for sure.
Yeah, and I think you know it's for us.
It's really like when we have maybe these challenges, are we thinking, Okay, how much is it going to take in order to retire? Because I think one of the things that man forgot to say is when he came home and we were talking about it, he said, I want to retire before I'm forty and so for us, it was like, wow, that's not a huge amount of time, So what are the things that we need to do in order to make that happen. So I think the challenge for us too was at the time, like I said,
there wasn't a lot of information out there. There wasn't a lot of information in general in terms of how to pursue fire. And Aman and I also both came from backgrounds where we didn't learn about investing or even saving money, really making money extra money, how do you go about doing that? So we didn't have that type of background in terms of learning how to really deal
with our finances, So that was definitely a struggle. I mean, I think part of it is really becoming comfortable in how do you make these real estate transactions, how do you make these stock market investments, and really becoming financially literate and understanding how to try and grow our money. So I think a lot of people when they're on the fire journey, that can be a struggle because it
can seem sort of overwhelming. You have to make all this money, and then you have to figure out how do you grow your money because you can't just allow it to sit in a savings account. It's not going to happen. You're not going to get that type of money to retire early. So those were some of the challenges that I guess the biggest challenges that we had when we were pursuing fire.
And you had so you're in your early thirties. You have two girls at the time.
They're young, right, yes, so they were I think around three and five.
I've probably Christine.
Why didn't you just completed law school?
Yeah, I was. I actually started law school.
I went to law school at UCLA, and the girls were down in LA with me, and Aman was actually working at the time, but he was working in San Francisco, and so he was coming back and forth every weekend. I mean, I cannot even imagine, you know, I was there with the girls at law school, but every single weekend a mon was driving down or flying down from San Francisco to LA to be with us and support us.
It's like he didn't even skip a beat. And so for us, yeah, that was part of the journey, was really trying to manage to get in like two separate households, managing little kids on this journey of fire, and really trying to make everything work because at the same time we're supposed to be saving money and making money.
So yeah, that was another challenge.
Your thirties are like that decade, and I'm right where you guys were eight years ago. So I am listening with these big old yes, tell me what to do, because this is the time in your life where year of responsibilities get bigger. You have the baby, you get the house, maybe you get a dog, you get a you know, you move to the burbs or whatnot, and you start to I feel the pressure of it all, you know, the pressure of providing for my child, creating stability.
And what I love about you guys is that you said, yeah, we have it. I'm sure you guys had a decent life, I mean comfortable life. You both had great careers. Christina, you went to law school. You also work for the federal government, but you chose to like even aim higher at the time you when you started to think about retiring before forty, where were you at financially? Were you
just basic four when k investors? Had you guys already bought your properties, Had you had experience in the real estate or did y'all start from Okay, let's start getting into real estate, because I know that was a cornerstone of your investing strategy, right, Yeah, So you.
Know we were doing what most people well I don't want to see most people.
We were.
We had the fundamentals in place, so we had an emergency fund and we were putting away about ten to fifteen percent of our our income into our retirement accounts. But a lot of the pressures that you talked about, if we were to I guess get deeper into some of those pressures, we would have failed victim to lifestyle creep. And so what started to happen to us in our thirties was that we had to make a serious shift.
And it was good that we had this shift, and I had this moment at work when I did, because we were at that point where we were going to be starting to make more money. A lot of these pressures we're going to start to pop up with the kids and our with our friends, and you can really fall victim to those things like getting a bigger house,
like driving a nicer car. And so for us at that moment, breaking loose of this of this consumer culture and deciding to live in a smaller house, to drive an older car, and then take whatever extra money that we started to make and instead prioritize that money into our investments. It was definitely a crossroad for us, and we can definitely attribute our success to making that shift.
Yeah, and I love how you say, Mandy, that you know you're sort of at the stage that we were eight years ago, right, Because when you're in your thirties, you start to notice that you're.
Maybe potentially making more money.
Right.
You may have more responsibilities at your job, you may be starting a family, you may be buying a house. All of these things are sort of coming to fruition. Things that you may have wanted in your twenties, you're starting to get more and more of them in your thirties. And so that is one of the big things I think for people pursuing fire is really not getting attached to or not falling down that whole of lifestyle creep.
As you start to get more money. It's not this concept that, oh, you have more money so that you can spend more money. It's this idea that when you're making this more money, you were able to live off of less money before. When you make more money, it doesn't mean that you have to spend more money. The idea idea is that you can save that money and then invest that money, and then that is starting to grow during your fire journey. And you don't even have
to have the goal of retiring early. It could just be that you want to be financially independent so that when you get older, money is not going to be an issue for you. You can do whatever type of job makes you happy, and you don't have to think, I can't have this job because I'm not going to make enough money to.
You know, pay all the bills for my family and things like that. So if you have this idea when you're in the thirties.
Of not falling down that path of lifestyle creep, then you're way ahead of the game in terms of where other people are.
Yeah.
I just got to get my husband on board with that.
So there's an African proverb that my dad would say that you cut your coat according to your size. You know, that's so many people they're like, oh, I'm bigger, now I need a bigger coat, or.
Like I'm or they you know what I mean.
You keep increasing and so it just you're keeping the pace of the increase, not realizing like do I really need to continue to increase. I mean, I'm a cheapo, so I was like living my cheapest life when I was thirty.
So also I lost my job then.
But one thing I really want to know, because this is something that I struggled with when I was in my early thirties and I was starting my business, is like, what do you do for insurance? Because honestly, back then my insurance was yoga, water and prayer.
So what do you do for insurance? What do you do for insurance?
Was it in that order? Tiffany? First, I think you know that is one of the big things too.
You know, when you are accumulating more things, you have to understand that you need insurance in place to protect those things.
You know that you do not want.
To be in a worst case scenario where something happens and you're not insurance. It could be your house, it could be health insurance. It could be car insurance, it could be any of these. You know, for you, Tiffany, if you're starting a business having business insurance when you were in your thirties.
But the idea is that insurance is.
Supposed to prevent you from losing all of your assets, because how terrible would it be while you're gaining more money, you have more assets, and something happens and you're not properly insured and then you can lose everything. Like right before we fired a Mond, we were in the States and a mon got just this horrible, horrible food poisoning. And I'm not just saying like he was throwing up, he didn't feel well. He was hospitalized for a week.
It was it was awful.
It was really bad.
I mean, I don't even want to go to how bad it was. But it was worst case scenario. And thank god we were insured because the hospital bill was insane. It was an insane amount of money, and then we still had to pay our portion of it. But if we had not been insured, and this was right before we were firing too, if we would not have been insured, there would have been a huge impact on our wealth. And so I think, you know, a lot of people when they're younger, they want to hope for the best.
They think they're healthy. You know, they don't need to be insured because nothing's going to happen. But even here, COVID is a great example of things that can happen that are unpredictable, and so you have to make sure you're properly insured.
We have.
We mentioned the fact that y'all live in Portugal, yet can we just reiterate that a y'all didn't just quit your jobs and you know, kick back in the US. You were like, no, let's take on a whole new country, Portugal. Talk to me about especially when it comes to healthcare. I've watched this video already on your YouTube channel. I've watched them all, so I'm just trying to pretend like I haven't been stocking y'all for the past three weeks.
But anyway, talk about the cost of health care in Portugal and do you think that you could like, was Portugal the key element of why you were able to retire early because of the lower cost of living? I don't even know if there is a lower cost of living, But do you think you would have been able to retire early in the US or do you decide to
go out of the country for those financial reasons? And yeah, to Tiffany's question about health care costs, how are you covering your healthcare while in Lisbon?
Yeah, so I'll go back to kind of when we were first calculating our financial independence number, we based it off of the location that we planned on retiring in.
And when we did that calculation, we had identified a couple of different numbers based off of different areas in the world that we were interested in, but we had one big number that was based off of retiring in the San Francisco Bay Area because that's our hometown and we know that our children may eventually want to go back to the US, and so we wanted to base our number off of the highest number, and as a
part of that number definitely included healthcare. And I remember looking at healthcare plans, and that's one of the things that I think holds people back from leaving their jobs, especially government employees, is the good healthcare. And so for us, we had to break from those golden handcuffs by including the cost of healthcare in the US and our fire number.
And so we you know, we did that. But while we were on our journey, we stayed the course, even though we could have left a lot earlier and moved to a lower cost of living area. We met our San Francisco Bay Area number, but in the end, we chose we chose Lisbon, and it has been a pleasant surprise as far as the cost of healthcare because for our family of four, our health care is less than two thousand dollars a year.
A year, yes, isn't that crazy?
In California it would have been a month, right, like a.
You know families.
Yeah, hey, let me tell you this though. It's like we have been to the hospitals here already too. It's like we've gone for the girls have asthma, so they've had the minor asthma things that we have to go get treated at the hospital. We've even had dental work. Actually a mon was at the dentist earlier. Today Sanoa has braces.
But I might get me some braces just because.
But you know, we have had such an incredible experience with the healthcare here.
I mean there's nothing. We don't have any language barriers.
When we go to speak to the doctors, to the nurses, to the staff, everything is so smooth and we just show them our card and sometimes we have a very small copay and other times it's like, oh, we don't have anything at all. Just you walk in and you walk out. It is so simple.
Yes, wow, Like my husband works for the Mandy your husband works for the city, right, and so does mine and that.
Insurance for the federal government. Yeah.
So, and my husband works for the state. Well, he works for the city, but his pension and everything is through his state. And that's been the thing that's been like holding like a pension necessarily us because yes, well it's not the pension honestly, because I could get like, you know, we make more than enough that I'm not
worried about that the pension payout. It's more so his insurance is so amazing, especially in the United States, especially in the East Coast, because I live in Jersey and it's like, eh, he would love to leave any day now, but he's got about five more years. And it's like the cost of health insurance the United States, it's so much so that it's like, bruh, when.
Need to take that with us? Because you could take it with you. So I totally get it.
And yeah, but you know, I don't I wouldn't mind moving to Portugal, but I know he wouldn't want to do that.
But yeah, I know so many people have seen our channel and we have videos on Portugal now and everyone's like, I never.
Even thought about Portugal.
Now Portugal is at the top of my list and we're like man, Portugal is amazing. It's like this hidden secret and it's not so hidden anymore. I think more and more people are finding out about it. But just I mean the healthcare alone is something to think about because just moving here and having the lifestyle or the pace that they have here in Portugal, it's just amazing.
Well, talk to me about the key for me is I mean healthcare. And it's fascinating to hear what you guys are spending on healthcare and Portugal versus the US. But let's go back again to the early days. What were some of the and so when you described how y'all were saving back then, I think that really resonates with me because that's what I had been doing since in my early twenties, saving that ten to fifteen percent and my four oh one K and feeling very smart
about it. But what was the first step y'all took to ratchet up your investments? How did you start investing? Did you just max out your four one ks? When you max them out? Where did you go from there? Can you walk us through like laddering up your investments and build and really what it took to build and grow your wealth in your thirties.
Oh certainly. So you know, it started with having our fire number in place, and then so with that number, we were able to kind of figure out what we needed to get to as far as a savings rate in order to retire in ten years based off of the returns in the market or our returns in real estate. So with that number in mind, we just tried to get our safe rate up, and I'll say that our savings rate by the end was as high as seventy percent. So we went from saving ten to fifteen all the
way up to seventy percent. But we didn't do it overnight. We just got one percent better as much as we could and as soon as we could. So, you know, if we just were able to lower our bills and increase our salary, and then that gap grew our savings rate. And so with that additional money that we were saving and making, we were prioritizing our investments. And we have something called a pay yourself first budget, but it's really
heavy on paying yourself into your investment accounts. And so we started with our tax advantage accounts first and putting as much money into those accounts because those are the real accounts that you can really see wealth growth in because of all the tax incentives and tax advantages, and so that was a big priority was maxing out our tax advantage counts.
Now you're talking about your four oh one KR. I know you guys use an HSA, what have tax advantaged accounts?
So we talk about the basically the four accounts that we call the four pillars of fire. For us was the four oh one K, the HSA, and the roth IRA. So maxing those out at a minimum was really big for us. And then after that we moved to basically a regular brokerage account, so just investing in Vanguard and investing in low cost ETFs and index funds at the same time that we were also investing in the stock market.
We had read all of these books on real estate investing and really type people to read something and then to take action with it. So we had gotten all the real estate concepts down as much as we were going to get them down, and then we went to work.
So we took an FHA loan and we bought our first house in the San Fransco b area with three percent down and it was it was it was a fixer upper, and we did something called a live and flip where we lived in the house, fixed it up, got equity in that home, and then use that equity
to buy other properties and with an FHA loan. That's the that's the best way for someone to get started in real estate is doing something like a live and flip because after you've lived in that home for three years, you can sell that home and keep one hundred percent of your profits up to a certain amount depending on if you're married or single. And so that was that was a big game changer for us as well.
So I think, really, you know, there's there's different ways that you can reach financial independence or financial independence and retire early.
So you could do it through investing in the stock market.
So in the stock market, you know, if that is someone's plan, then they absolutely want to make sure that they're maxing out their tax advantage accounts first, because then you're protecting more of your money from it being taken away by taxes, and by protecting it more, then you can allow it to grow more. So the idea though is that you have to max out that account, but
you have to go beyond that. So once you max out your tax advantage accounts, then the idea is that you open up a traditional brokerage account and you start throwing money that there as well. So there's one way to reach financial independence. But then the other way is also through real estate. If you want to start investing in real estate and putting money into different real estate real estate properties and creating rentals and creating rental income,
that is another way. Or you can just invest in real estate and do like what a mon said is basically flipping the properties and then eventually selling them and taking the profit from that. Or you can do a combination of real estate and investing in the stock market. But it all comes down really to these fundamental pieces. When you're pursuing fire, is that the idea is that somehow you have to find ways to try and make
more money. And it can be through getting a more money through your salary, or it can be doing different side hustles, but then it's saving more money and then it's focusing on that investment piece as well.
Y'all side hustles. Literally, I get so many giggles out of hearing about how you guys found creative ways to build wealth. First of all, I'm like, where do you get the energy with two bait like two little girls, and y'all are like what building furniture out of wine crates and digging through ikeias reduced like returns bins and like selling flipping furniture online. Talk about how y'all brought in extra money and like what was the most meaningful source of extra income y'all created?
You know, we always talk about this because looking back on it, we laugh about some of the things that we did. But for us, it's weird. When you're on this journey, it's like your mind like produces income out out of nowhere. There's literally money in the streets and you just have to go pick it up. So, actually, someone sent us a message today because one of our side hustles was we had Christina was writing tooth fairy letters on Etsy did an Etsy store.
And it was my favorite.
It was like it was it was so funny and when she when she came up with this idea, I was like, people really people really buying letters like that, they're families that do that.
Yeah.
But but someone actually reached out to reached out to us today, which is so funny, asking us about, you know, the details of it, how do you do it? How are you sending it out? Are you sending it out already pre packaged? Do you send it out to the parent or to the child? So it was so interesting because you know, people are interested in finding these new ways to make money, and so I just thought, you know,
this is a creative thing. But like you said, we we uh, we're not too shy to go dumpster diving. We did that at one point, and I'll tell you the specific specifics of that. We were driving around in Oakland, which is in the San Francisco Bay area, and we drove past this huge dumpster and it had all of these I don't guess, not brand new wine crates, but it had all of these wine crates in them, and they were so beautiful.
It's like these wine boxes.
Yes, And there was a liquor store that had dumped them all out into this garb, into this dumpster getting rid of them. And we went into the to the liquor store and we said, are you dumping these? Are you you don't want these?
Can we have them? And so they said yes.
So we filled up our car with so many wine boxes and then we took them home. In our garage was just piled full of wine boxes and we ended up selling those. We got them for free, and we ended up selling them on like Facebook and Craigslist, and people were just it was so easy to sell because people thought they were really beautiful wine boxes and they couldn't find them anywhere, and people were willing to pay us for that.
Yeah.
I was like a bougie, broke hipster ten years ago living in Queens with my boyfriend at the time, my husband. Now, we were the dumb dumbs. Not the dumb dumbs. We were the ones buying wine, trying to find wine crates on Craigslist and begging liquor stores to give them to us. Y'all stumbled upon a little jackpot right there. I was like, oh, I would love that.
Yeah, we did that.
I mean we also, like Aman said, we had flipped our properties. So one of the things we found at Ikea, which is I feel like Ikea is everywhere. I mean there's even an Ikea. There's like five Ikeas in Portugal here, but in Ikea they have this as is section. So that was another one of our side hustles. We discovered this. I'm not saying like we're the only ones who've discovered it. But we discovered that you can buy these items in the as is section and they're anywhere.
I mean, you can get things for ninety percent off, yes, up to ninety percent off, or.
If they're you know, if they're no longer having a certain product, like an entire fridge or entire kitchen display, you can get for up to ninety percent off. So we started buying these really nice items in Ikea and reselling those all set.
Yes, but we had a niche. How our niche was kitchen. It was basically like kitchen construction material, so the cabinets, the countertops, refrigerators, hoods, all of these different things. When Ikea changes out its kitchens in the showroom, they would put their entire kitchen down into the as is section and we'd be waiting for it, pick it right up. It was ninety percent off and you can resell this stuff and make a lot of money. Were my kids hate Ikea now because I was taking them in there
all the time. And this is a side thing, but every Wednesday, kids eat free at Ikea, so we were there every Wednesday.
They're probably sick of those meatballs, but I know I lived up that furnished my whole first apartment was the Ikea as a section.
I was like, oh no, we will have cute things, but cute things on a budget.
So I feel, you I never thought about this. I am a victim of lifestyle creep. I'll fess up to it. We bought our house and it was West Elm all the way y'all, And I feel foolish, but it's true. We did West Elm and like Creighton Barrel, you want to have nice stuff. And I always considered myself to be you know, I mean, I've been doing personal finance for over a decade and you know, I know better.
But the allure of just being comfortable and having nice things, especially for Pea people who you know, for me personally, coming from family, we weren't like super poor, but we didn't have like really nice stuff. And you know, you want to, you want to like enjoy the fruits of your your hard work, and that felt like a way of acknowledging the hard work and about you know, investing
in our own comfort. But I'm a little surprised, you know, two years out from that renovation, where I'm thinking, you know, was that the best way to celebrate our you know, our success, like giving another company all this money, you know, like there's probably other ways. So I'm I'm thinking so much about some of the choices I've made and how emotions play into that, you know, especially as you're starting to build and build a family and earn more in your thirties.
Like y'all said, yeah, I know, I think definitely there's this idea that and Aman and I talk about it a lot. Actually, it's like you can make short term sacrifices for long term gains.
And that's really how we thought about it.
When we're thinking about or even if you're thinking about how much it.
Costs to do X, Y or z.
Converting that into hours of work, right, it's like, would you put that many hours of work so that you could have this or so that you could do something or do that. And so that's an interesting way to
start to think about it. But also realizing, you know, what is in your future, what do you look for, what do you look forward to the most in the future, and really thinking about it at that way, thinking that you know, if I if I maybe don't spend my money in this area, or if I cut back in this area, it may be a little hard initially, but if you're looking at the long term results, what you can get in return for maybe not buying the big TV or the new car or something like that, then
you can start really pursuing fire in a meaningful way where you're really focused on cutting out expenses, not buying big expenses, and really trying to make more in funnel it towards your investments.
Y'all didn't just focus on cutting cutting cutting it expenses. Y'all still took time and you invested in experiences that meant a lot to y'all. Could you talk about how you balanced experiences and things that you would continue to splurge on and then balance that with your mission to save as much as you could.
Yeah, I would say one of our biggest expenses in terms of what we cut that we really wanted to do that we're able to figure it out was traveling. Like we lived in Spain, we lived in Japan, we now live in Portugal.
We traveled to Hawaii a lot. Among's brother lives in Hawaii, so.
We were definitely a huge travel family and that was very important to us and we really didn't want to give that up. But it can be expensive for a family of four traveling abroad all the time or Hawaii.
And making these trips.
And so we figured out travel hacking where we would take out credit cards and we would use the bonus points for the credit cards by taking them out, and we would use them for hotel stays and for airfare, and we were able to start traveling for free. Now I would say though that this this travel hacking concept is absolutely not for everyone. I mean, you have to
understand how credit works. You have to start off with good credit and maintain good credit, and don't go in this rabbit hole where you're just trying to spend money on your credit card so that you can get the points. It doesn't work like that. There's a it's a bit more nuanced than that. So it's not for everyone, but for us. For Aman and I, we had excellent credit.
We never had any debt on our credit cards. We always paid our credit card off in full every single month, and so by figuring out travel hacking, we were able to continue to travel the world and still enjoy all of the different things we could by traveling, but we got to do it for free.
Oh yeah, tip and I love to talk about what how to not you know, fall into that, to that black hole of credit card spending just to get some points.
Yeah.
Absolutely, So the struggle that I have is not it's not the living for got that you know. And so but did you ever feel like are we over sacrificing because that is something that I struggle with that I sometimes struggle with the enjoying on the other side. And so do you ever feel like, you know, you were over sacrificing And if so, how did you manage that or if not, how did you avoid that?
Yeah?
I think that for us, we didn't feel like we were over sacrificing because we built in things on our journey so that we could enjoy things. So, like I said, we did traveling. We traveled quite a lot, and we also this is something that we didn't save any money on, but we still did it. We're from the We're from Oakland, like I said, and we went to a lot of warrior games and we didn't get the nosebleed seats. We were sitting you know, I wouldn't say on the floor,
but maybe five rows back off of the floor. So that was one of the expenses that we splurged on when we were in Oakland. But I like to tell people a lot that you should you should enjoy the journey. You should enjoy your journey towards fire, because sometimes it's not all just about that destination of being able to retire. Right If you're miserable on your journey, you're not spending a single time doing anything. You are are you know, not going out with your friends, or you're not doing
anything with anyone your family members. It's a miserable journey and it's not sustainable. So you have to you have to figure out what the right balance is for you.
So we're not I wouldn't.
Encourage everyone to just you know, count every single penny and live in a way where they're just not able to enjoy anything.
Yeah, And I think this is a this is a misconception about the Fire movement, is that the people that are on this journey are eating beans and sacrifice and they don't have cable or Netflix, you know, they don't go anywhere. That's that's absolutely not true. To do this, you have to just find creative ways to enjoy joy yourself and you have to figure out a way to make more money. That's the other side of the equation.
Preach on it.
Say it again that I wish the Fire movement talk more about is you have to get out there and if you're in your thirties, twenties, if you're forties, fifties, you have to get on the grind like pop would. People would say to us, how do you how are you able to do this with kids? You're in law school. It's like, we don't know anything else but this. So we didn't set a low bar. We set a high bar and that's all we knew. So for us, we don't define, you know, our journey in any particular way.
It's just it is what it is. That's why we called our YouTube channel our Rich Journey, because this is this is how we live our life. When people find out what our budget is here in Portugal, we live pretty luxuriously.
You know.
We spend four thousand dollars a month here in Portugal. And you know, for some people they say, oh my god, that's too much, or some people say, oh that's not enough. But it's relative and I think anyone that's on this journey they have to figure out a way to do it relatively well so that they enjoy themselves. Someone reached out to me today and they said, you know, we're on this journey and we're wondering whether or not we should start to cut some of the activities for our children.
And I immediately thought, no, why would you. No, don't do that. Don't sacrifice your child's childhood. You know, for this journey, figure out different ways to approach the problem, you know. So that's what we did on our journey. We would encounter a problem like childcare, like travel, like owning a home, and we would just figure out a way to get through the challenge or over or around it. But we never we never let it stop us.
Yeah, I mean, your girls were in basketball, you said they'd do swimming, like you've never You've always encouraged those hobbies. I mean, now they're YouTube stars, so can they're too happy. But before we let y'all go, we have I really want to talk to y'all about your investing philosophy and how you are weathering because your investments are mostly still in the US, right, yes, so talk to us about
because I know people listening right now. I mean, let's not let's let's not mince words here, like we are we're the US is being crippled by this current pandemic and economic crisis. I mean, we have what tens of millions of Americans out of work. My own father was has is still laid off. Congress can't get their act together with these stimulus checks and federal uh you know,
unemployment benefits are are in limbo right now. So there's people out there who are truly, truly hurting, and even infant people who have been doing it quote unquote the right way and investing in their four one k have seen their four one ks you know, take dips this year. So y'all y'all have retired. What what do you say to people who are feeling like, oh shit, like is this the right time to be putting money in the market, and how like, how can we trust that things will
work out? Talk to us about your approach to investing right now in this moment, you know, how you're weathering what's happening in the US, even though you're in Portugal now. And what do you say to people who are feeling a little gunshy about getting into the market now?
Yeah, well, you know, that's a great question. And I always tell people this, don't invest money that you that you need to live off of. Every day. So before you even buy your first investment, you should have the fundamentals in place. You should have your credit paid down and emergency fund in place, and then you can start investing in the stock market. Because when you invest in the stock market, you shouldn't need that money in the next five to ten years. This is this is long
term money. You shouldn't want this money for decades. So what's happening right now? It is. It is completely awful, you know, but if you have a plan in place, this should not distract you. If it's not taking away from your income, if you still have your come and you still have the ability to invest, you should be investing that money. Don't get don't get consumed by what's going on in the world. Yes you should should. You
should definitely be involved in it socially and politically. But if you have your investments on cruise control, then money should be the least of your worries right now. You should just let that money ride. So I always say that, you know, once you have those fundamental things in place and you have your investments on cruise control, then you can focus on everyday life.
Yeah, And I would also say, you know, when when you think about the stock market, it seems so backwards because when the stock market plummets, a lot of people are pulling their investments out because they're afraid that they're going to lose all of their money.
So it's like, let me get let me get my investments out.
I'm going to take the loss, but it's better than not having any money at all.
And then then the.
Stock market ultimately goes back up, and then if they would have just if their money in, they would have
been better off in the long run. It's almost like you sort of have to go against the herd mentality when it comes to the stock market, because once you learn more about the stock market and understand the history of the stock market, and this is not to stay that the history of the stock market will predict the future of the stock market, but historically, since forever, the stock market has always ultimately gone up.
And so when people are.
Thinking, I don't know if I should invest right now because the stock market just dropped something like that, or maybe I should pull my money out because I'm losing money and I don't want to lose it all, the idea should really be if the stock market has historically always gone up. Then when the stock market goes down
is an excellent time to invest. Is an excellent time if you have any money, to throw your money into the stock market when it's down, because when it ultimately goes up, then you are Then you're making money and you're getting a return on that.
And the same thing.
If your money is in there and you keep it in there rather than sell it and it ultimately goes up, then your stock market, your portfolio is worth more.
But I think, Mandy, you want to know what we're doing right. You want to know how we're weathering this storm, and I think I think a lot of people have that question. But when we first started our plan, we devised a plan that involved front loading our investments into very aggressive index funds, so technology and total stock market
index funds. And then as we got towards the latter half of our journey, we started to build up what's called the stock market Emergency Fund for dips like this that was over two years worth of living expenses in case the stock market were to drop and we would have to make that switch from not pulling from the stock market, because you don't want to pull from the stock market when to drop and instead pull from our
stock market emergency fund. And so when March hit and the stock market crashed, we thought, okay, are we going to have to make that switch? But two three months later, the stock market has fully recovered. So this is this is the the I mean, this is the thing about investing. When you have a plan in place, you already know what to do before it happens. But what we've found is that we haven't had to even rely on some of those contingencies because the stock market has always recovered.
And I always say this on our YouTube channel. You know, the stock market's going to go up and down, but in the end, it's going to go up. It always has.
And I will say also, you know, just to piggyback off of what Aman said. With that crash in March twenty March twenty twenty, there were a lot of people at that time they were selling out their portfolios because they didn't want to take any.
More of a loss.
And on our channel, we actually created a new portfolio, just sort of a very many portfolio to show people listen, if you invest now, it's a good it's a good thing. You can start growing your money by investing now. It doesn't matter that there was a huge crash. You can start investing now. And so many people were like, why would you invest now, it's a crash, it's the worst time to invest, and we're like, no, that's the very
opposite of how you should be thinking. You know, you should continuously be investing whether it's a good whether the market's doing well or whether it's doing bad. You should just be dollar cost averaging into the market. But when the market is doing bad, it is an excellent opportunity to grow your wealth. And so that's what we're really demonstrating with this portfolio to our followers is like, listen, when people are running and trying to cash out their
portfolios when there's a big crash, don't do that. Do the opposite. Do the opposite and start building your wealth.
I think y'all really illustrate beautifully the power the mindset when it comes to building wealth. Like you've got to really you've got to look at your emotions, as my lovely therapist always says, look at the thought or the feeling and just acknowledge that it exists and then just attack it with reason and logic. And I love that, y'all.
I've been following that series at y'all where you share your portfolio and how you invest at the bomb of the market or at least you know, you never know when it's the bottom, but how you guys invested in the spring and I and I love that lesson. I just think people have to be ready for it and really want to. I want to home in on the point that y'all made too about that emergency fund. And just to be clear, when you say it's a stock market emergency fund, you don't have the money in the
stock market. It's your emergency fund, so that you don't touch your money, yes, just cash right regular ole. Yeah, So that's key because you know, people think that like if you're if you're worried about losing everything when a market goes down, that you're probably not investing money that you're willing to put away for the long term, like your money that you want to hold with your money that you want to be able to access if an emergency happens. That should be really, it should be liquid,
It should be available to you. It should be enough for the you know, for whatever a period of time you feel comfortable with you guys, two years seems reasonable because y'all are you know, you're entirely without you know, well, you have your passive income, but you've left, you've left your jobs, and you're living your fire lifestyle. But for other people maybe at six months or year's worth of expenses.
And I love that y'all have that cushion because it helps you kind of like stamp down those emotional fears around when the market dips, like oh no, I've got to take my money out because I don't want to lose it, because we need to have food on the table.
With that emergency fund, y'all, you provide a cushion for yourself, and you provide the security that you can continue with your investing strategy, continue building your wealth, and you don't need to sacrifice that when your emotions start to take over. I think that's a really important point for people, and that's why we're always like, before y'all start asking about investing, I'm talking to my dad and my uncle Mark. People call me all the time, what about hurts? Would we invest in her.
Bankrupt?
Oh? Yeah, sure, jumping, Oh my god, I'm like, listen, if my uncle Mark is talking about it, do not just don't go to hurts, but my dad he still saves money in his coat closet. I'm like, you're trying to talk about investing in hurts. Can I get you to like put the money in the bank first? Like, what is this so backwards?
Go ahead, No, and no shade to the people who listen. But if you're willing to do the blessing loom, that's not a blessing. I think you can try this. That's a little shady because so many of my dream catchers are like, girl, I want to do a blessing loom. It's not a blessing loom.
No, I've not heard enough before.
You never heard of the blessing loom?
Quits quick sidebar?
What is done? No, we talked about it on the podcast.
Remember I said it's it's basically the pyramid scheme, but they keep renaming it blessing loom. Pyramid scheme when you bring more people in and they bring money, and then you move to the center or to the top and they see yeah, but they just keep calling in new things. But I did want to ask, like what because I want to get just a little nitty gritty, like what.
Percentage are you living off of?
Are you doing it where you're anticipating like on average is seven to eight percent return and you're living off four percent of your of what your investments yield or is it more so you're living off you if you have rental properties or is it? And then two, like what was your fire number? Because I know, like my financial advisor, my financial planner, you know, I mean, I guess technically I don't have.
To work now, I guess.
I mean, I just like I like doing budget Nista, but I my husband and I help out a lot of people. So what we spend a month is like half of what we spend actually goes to us and just the rest goes to helping family and friends.
But so like, what's that? What was that number for you?
Like, if we set aside this amount plus with the real estate coming in, we should be good.
I'm curious about that.
Yeah, so we don't have the real estate anymore. Okay, we sold our real estate and then we put that in the stock market. But our fire number was based off of living in the San Francisco Bay are So I'll caveat with that caveat that that our number was over two million, close to two and a half million. But again this is because we live in the sand Or. Our fire number was based off of living in the
San Francisco Bay area. So some people will probably think that that can be very high, or some people actually think like, maybe that's low.
So it's really relative to where.
You plan on retiring, where you live, what your family size is, and what type of stuff you plan on doing in retirement, and how much is that stuff going to cost. So ours was close to two and a half million dollars, but I will say because we moved to Portugal, we are living off of obviously not close to that. Because when you calculate your fire number, you the ideas that you can live off of four percent of your portfolio in order to cover your monthly expenses
and then in turn your annual expenses. So the idea is that you can pull four percent from your portfolio, and then your portfolio continue to grow so that you're only pulling from the gains in your portfolio, You're not actually pulling from the principal balance, so it continues to grow and you're able to continuously pull out four percent.
And that's based off of There's a study called the Trinity Study that really explains this concept of the four percent rule, how you can live off of your portfolio and the portfolio allocation that you have, whether it's stocks and bonds or one hundred percent stocks one hundred percent bonds. But the concept is, once you get your fire number, you're supposed to be able to live off of four percent of that and pull money from your portfolio, and
that pays for all of your expenses. But we are here in Portugal, and our expenses are much much lower, like we said, I mean, we gave you the example of the healthcare how much cheaper it is, or i'd say how much more affordable it is here in Portugal. So for us, we don't have to pull a full four percent. We pull under four percent. And if you ever are in a situation where you're pulling less than four percent, then it's even better because then your portfolio
can continue to grow even more. So the idea is if you're able to pull less than four percent, it can grow even more.
And so that's a perfect situation.
But I would say for people that have different locations in mind, like for example, like we said, we were thinking about the San Francisco Bay area and we were thinking about Portugal, for us, it was really important to not retire until we hit the mark for the higher cost of living, which is the San Francisco Bay Area.
And again that's because if we come here to Portugal and we decide, you know, four or five years down the road, we want to return to the Bay Area, or you know, our girls will be going away to school soon, not soon soon to me, but you know in another four and six years if they returned to the States, maybe at that time we'll think, oh, we should return with them, or maybe we want to live back in the States.
If we would have picked a fire.
Number associated with living in Portugal, then we would be stuck. We would be limit in terms of where we can go after that. So for people that have multiple areas in mind, I would I would recommend picking the higher cost of living area and then when you go live in a lower cost of area, you're pulling less than that four percent and your portfolio is able to grow even more because of it.
And when you're in retire. Did that answer your question? Tif?
No, it did.
I just said that was awesome here, Okay, So I just have so many questions now. I wanted to know because you guys have your YouTube channel. I know you have a course now in stock investing. When y'all were planning, you know, sources of income or planning your portfolio and hitting your fire number, did y'all think, Okay, we'll also bring in income from our YouTube and maybe we can
teach people and have a course. Was that part of your plan or was this just like a happenstance, Because it doesn't strike me that you guys set out, because that's honestly one of the things that kind of annoys me about some fire. I'll just be totally frank, as Christina knows I can be, but like, yeah, I mean I kind of roll my eyes sometimes because people are like, oh, yeah, I'm going to retire early and I'm going to teach people how to do it, and that's how I'm gonna
retire early by making money off of the courses. But y'all strike me as totally different, whereas it's kind of a you know, you did your fire thing and then people were asking you to start a channel, and you did it, and now you just happened to be YouTube stars.
Yeah.
I love that you asked that, because you know, right now we have we have almost three hundred thousand subscribers on our channel, but when we started, we started a little over two years ago and it was the lowest start ever and when when we actually retired, I don't think we had even hit fifty thousand subscribers at that point. And so for us, when we started the channel, it was more like a friend had mentioned it to us
because we were talking. We were always talking to family members and friends about listen, you guys should be doing this, you should save this money. I mean, we were sort of getting a little extra into people's business saying hey, why don't you invest in this?
You should save what are you doing?
But it just became something that we talked about so much that one of our friends said, hey, you should start this channel, and we thought, well, that is pretty cool because then we could tell people about fire, like like when we didn't know what fire was when we started. If someone was sort of guiding us and telling us about all these concepts, that would be really cool. So we started the channel, and we we absolutely did not think that our channel.
Would grow like it was.
So it was definitely not something where we're like, oh, yeah, we can we can rely on.
YouTube and just retire early and live off of YouTube or something like that. That was definitely not the case.
Oh yeah, and it became it became kind of like a gift that we couldn't give up. And when I say a gift is we have this ability to be able to really share and inspire people with our YouTube channel. So when we start our YouTube channel, we were doing it like two or three times a week, but since we retired, really do it once a week. But it's something that we want to keep doing because so many
people are getting getting value out of it. But what happened was because we made so many videos, people were asking us like questions that were there were very linear questions like how to get to a to z And we would say, oh, you got to go back to video one hundred or video fifty five, and so we were like, okay, we need to do like a course they walk someone from A to Z And so that's when we came up with the idea for the course.
But it was, you know, all of this was just it just it just kind of started to happen because we were being asked to do these things.
Yeah, but I will also say that you know, people have been asking us for a while to do the course, and we're like, yeah, you know, maybe maybe we'll get around to it. But what really prompted us to do the course was COVID. Yes, because we were stuck in the house for over, over and over a month.
Oh yes, if you see that course, my hair was looking raggedy the whole course.
I know it's not as bad compared to people some people in the States, right, but yeah, we were getting fidgety, like, oh my gosh, we cannot just sit in this house and do nothing. And we were we were telling people, you know, go out and exercise, go out and read or exercise in your home, read, write, do what you can to stay productive. Don't try and be busy, because busy is just sort of taking up time.
What can you do to be productive?
And then we thought, you know what, why don't we just sit down and really focus on creating this course? And I think, you know, because we had that extra time, it was it was really a fun project to be able to do.
I mean, y'all are so young, you're clearly incredibly intelligent. You guys have so much, so much energy, Like, so, what does retirement look like for y'all? Can you kind of paint the picture. You know, do you see yourselves kicking back on beaches? Like, what does your retirement look like? Do you think you'll be satisfied? You know with kicking obviously, you you know, sitting back in the house is not what you're excited about. I think those of us in corn or all just like, get us out of here.
But talk about how do y'all plan on spending your retirement with the next fifty years ahead of you.
Oh, we spend a lot of time at the beach, don't don't. Don't knock that. That's really nice. So uh, and that's one of the nice things about living here in Portugal is that we're near the water. The outdoors are really amazing, so we do spend a lot of time in the outdoors. We wanted to retire early. A big reason was so that we could spend more time
with our girls. You know, after your children leave your house, you have already spent ninety percent of the time you're going to spend with them while they're in your house. After that, they're gone and they're you know, they're going to live their lives. So that's a gift that we also have, is that we get to spend more time with our kids. We get to coach our daughters in sports. Christina swims with Malia, I play basketball with Sona. We
volunteer a lot. Recently, we've been doing calls with underserved kids talking about financial independence, talking about talking about money and financial literacy. And so what's really great is that we get to do whatever we want to do whenever we want to on Sunday nights. We don't have that anxiety that Monday morning is rolling around. So it's just it's really an unexplainable feeling to be able to have
this freedom. And it goes back to what we talked about earlier, making that short term sacrifice for the long term gain. And yes, we're we're young and we have you know, we have a lot of things that we're that we're working on, but they're all things that we're passionate about and that's what we didn't have the ability to do before when we were working forty hours a week. You know, now we have those forty hours back to do whatever we want to do with them.
And I really love that you asked that question too, Mandy, because I think when people are thinking about financial independence and retiring early.
You know, there's this split.
You could just do financial independence and you continue to do the job that you love, or you can.
Actually retire early.
And so I think when people are on that retire early path, if they ultimately want to retire early, they really need to envision what they think their life is going to be like when they retire, because I'll.
Tell you, if you're just sort of.
Running from something, if you're running from your job because you don't like your job, and so that's the reason you want to retire, your retirement may not feel very fulfilling because then you're in retirement and it's sort of like, well, what do I do now?
But if you really envision what your life can be like in retirement.
If you love to travel, if you love to cook, if you love to spend time with your kids and your family, if you love to work out, if you like to build things, those are all things that people can run towards versus running away from something. So they really have to think about if they want to pursue fire, what's the purpose behind that.
I love that you guys have inspired me to expand my own possibilities for what the next decade and beyond can look like. And I love that you guys have You've proven to I think so many people like don't even know how to imagine a world where they don't work for someone else, you know, like or and if they don't work for someone then it's like owning their
own business or whatever. But what about a world where you're just free to, you know, work on what you find fulfilling, be with your family, like it's really it's it's a little sad to me that this is such like an extraordinary mindset to have. But you guys truly are extraordinary because you have You've seen it, and you said this should be the normal, Like this should be the norm, This will be our normal. We are going
to create the life that we want. And I it really resonates with me, if you can't tell, because I feel like I am on this path toward this a good life, but a good life according to the you know, what's what's considered the norm in America and what's considered a good life according to I don't know what the mainstream idea of a good life is. And I'm starting to even challenge my own expectations and challenge some of the own some of my own ways of thinking about
the next couple of decades in my life. And I mean, even just being stuck in quarantine with my baby. You can probably hear me in the background. He's a very vocal eater. He gets really mad, he very angry. He's my child. But even just being in quarantine, I'm like, oh, so I could just work at home and be with the baby all the time. This isn't that bad anyway.
I just want to thank y'all because I'm so glad that you are sharing your story and I know that forget about you know you can, we can forget about race for a second. I mean, the show is called Brown Ambition, so it's always there. We acknowledge we are two black women speaking to an audience, and first and foremost we want to talk to other black women and how to build wealth because we understand that, you know, there's not a lot of people like us talking to them.
And I am you guys are like unicorns, you know, in the Fire Movement, a black couple with two daughters and your girls seeing them. And I even said this to Christina in the email. I really meant it. If only I had seen your two girls talking about financial financial Uh uh what am I thinking? Like, what are we talking about investing investing in all building at a young age when I was, you know, twelve or thirteen. Y'all are so important and your stories are so important.
And I and thank y'all for using your time when you could be doing anything else to educate and pour back into communities who may not be getting this kind of knowledge. I it just it's out shut up now. But it's just y'all are the best.
Thank you so much.
It's so nice. It's it's so nice. So you know, we wanted to talk to you guys anyway. So it was just like, oh, it's your baby that this is it right?
Like e pitome of brown ambition.
And I think that it's just good for people to see that life can be lived differently, you.
Know, and one hundred million less words than what I used.
No, So just just because Amandy and I are, the way we live.
Is so different, so they get to see different sides of like.
From both of us being bosses in our own right, but via the corporate side or owning your own business.
So this is just a nice we're pre from.
This is another way to live and people can find themselves in your journey, so we do really thank you, thank you.
Thank you guys. Yeah, I'm so glad we able to talk to you.
Well. Thank y'all, and and go live your fabulous life. You now on folks where they can find you. Your your our Rich Journey on YouTube, on Instagram, anything else y'all want to anything you'll want to promote.
Oh no, you know you mentioned our daughters too. They have their channel out so it's called Our Rich Journey Junior.
So the kids some love.
Yeah, check the girls out also.
Yeah, but that's really where you can find us is on YouTube or Instagram at Rich Journey and send us a message. We eventually get to all of the questions. I mean, we are retired, we have nothing else to do.
I love it.
Join the journey. That's how you always end your YouTube videos. Go join the journey. Thank y'all for sharing your story with us. I would love to have y'all on the show again sometime in the future. But be well, stay healthy. Yes, I mean honestly, y'all should be wishing us luck. I feel like we're the one I feel like y'all are on the right track in Portugal. But yeah, be well, stay healthy and thank y'all again for coming on the show.
Yes, thanks so much guys.
WHOA Okay, so did I embarrass myself? Was that too much of a fan girl? No, they were for Christina.
And mon Honestly, they were amazing and they I mean as much as I think that we're pretty fru gol, I mean, yes, I know, you know explorers, but you know you and I are pretty like to go with our finances and savvy with our finances. It just made me look at some of the choices that I'm you know, that I'm choosing for myself and my family a little bit differently. So it was so amazing. I'm totally going to stalk them on YouTube so just so they.
Know their channel is good. I know that, and it's worth a time too. I think I just turned on their channel and I just had it on for an entire weekend. They're They're truly really knowledgeable and if you hear things banging in the background, it's just the babies here. Hey see, hey everybody. Yeah, I think it's great to hear different perspectives. And they call it our rich journey because it's their journey, doesn't mean that it's the right
journey or the one that you need to take. But I think in so many ways, you need to see someone else living life by example so that you start to think about what's possible for yourself. And I think for you know, I've been pretty cynical about the whole Fire movement, and they have totally changed the way I think about it. And they have shown me that there's like if I was going to do fire, this is the way to do yes. And it's it's about freedom.
It's about freedom. It's the freedom that people have who are lucky enough to come from wealthy family or you know, to have inheritances or you know, things like that. It's creating a space for yourself where you can do whatever the f you want and you're not trapped in this cycle of you know, someone else's version of success just so you can get by.
No. I love that.
I just yeah, like I said, I'm going to totally stalk their page, rethink some of the things choices that we're making.
And do you think Supergirl will check out their junior the junior edition?
Maybe she certainly she's working now and she's making some money, and so entrepreneurship is something that she has been really interested in, and she's been doing that, Like you know, she has her own lip gloss line that's on Etsy, and what I know, she don't know, So I don't know if remember that she was, you know, like I told you, like a little while ago, she was hawking these rubber band bracelets that she made from a kit someone gave her for Christmas because she remember I told you,
she wanted my Superman and I to invest in her business. And she's like for the low rate of four hundred and fifty dollars.
I was like, oh, you.
Tried it, so we wait a second, we have not talked about So.
That's what she wanted because she wanted to start the lip gloss business. So she did this whole presentation where she was like, this is how much it's going to cost me to get all the materials and things I need And we were like, yeah, no, the most.
You're getting is fifty.
And even if you get fifty, that's because you have to earn fifty. That's the most you're squeezing out of us. So need let's just say she wasn't happy. But what she did do is somebody gave her this rubber band kit where you can make bracelet and rings out of these like cool, like brightly colored rubber bands. So she started making them, and she started selling them, and she made a few hundred bucks on her own.
She didn't even need our fifty, thank you very much.
And then graduation money kicked in and she was able to fund her own business. With graduation money and her rubber band business, it was like business to fund the business. And so now, I mean, she literally spends hours a day making her lip gloss kits and like putting them together. And I'm honestly really proud of her because I'm.
Like, look a supergirl, you know who.
She's trying to be like right as much as she tries to act like she don't want to be like me, but that's.
How it goes though, Like she can't let you know that you inspire her and that she loves you and wants to be just like you when she grows up.
But she's watching I know, so like no, but honestly it's really dope to like watch her navigate.
Yeah no, and I will say, like will this is like a little aside.
So I signed her up for Black Girls Lead, like the Summer the digital kind of like summer Camp, I guess for girls. That's hosted by Black Girls Rock and Michelle Obama did the opening speech, and then came Missy Copeland and then somebody else. So I think I was fourth, Like right after Michelle Obama geeked and the next day she was like, Tiffy, do you know that your session was top rated for yesterday? I'm like, what do you mean? She was like, we had to vote who our favorite was,
and you got twenty eight percent of the votes. I was like, not over, miss Michelle.
Yes, I was like these kids.
I mean not that I'm surprised, of course, I know that you're fabulous, but I was.
Like, but honestly, I'm like, these kids don't know no better, because don't.
Nobody beat Michelle.
But I take it.
She was like super Yeah, she was super excited because she was like because in it, I had pre recorded mine, I talked about her and used her as an example of how you can make money on your own. So for the girls to listen and watch, I could tell she felt really special, like it's me, she's talking about me, so we're friends again for now?
Right now? Amen to that listen Oh, that's amazing. I can't wait to see how Rio grows up. I'm I'm kind of obsessed with thinking about what he'll be. And I'm just I think as a parent, I'm afraid because you know how like your kids will do the opposite of what you want sometimes, like I don't want to, I don't like how much is too much? And should I go like all in on teaching him stuff? She let him find it on his own. I don't know.
That's why I'm so fascinated by Christina and i'm on because their girls seem to have such a healthy not just not only do they understand the different financial topics that their parents talk about, but they're all so curious and excited to do it themselves, Like how did they do that? I know I'm going to be studying them for I know everybody in a really creepy way just sending I'm just going to slide into their dms all the time. Well, I loved having them on the show.
And if y'all like, who else are we missing? Who else are y'all like? Who's on YouTube? Who's out there that who have fabulous stories that are inspiring y'all that y'all want to hear more from We'd love to get in touch with them and have more folks on the show.
We certainly would, We certainly would.
All Right, Well, thank y'all for another beautiful week of Brown Ambition.
We'll see y'all next week, next week,