Hey everyone, I'm Mandy.
Hey, Hey hey, It's Tiphany and this is Brown Ambition.
I've been a reporter in New York City for five years. Right now, I'm a writer at Yahoo Finance. I write about money, business, career, basically anything to do with the world and.
How it impacts your wallet.
And I am Tiffany but much better known as the Budget Lista and I'm a financial educator, best selling author, speaker, teacher, all things personal finance. Basically, on this podcast, we're going to be talking about career, relationships, life and living in this brown skin.
We work, we start businesses, we help one another. We do everything we can to make a better life for ourselves. And that's what Brown Ambition is all about. So here are some topics you might hear us talk about on the podcast.
How to deal with office bullies and microaggressions.
Coping with being the only one in the office.
Yes, how to get money for a new business even when you have no idea what you're doing. Should you care if people think you have resting bitch base guilty?
What to do when by earns less.
Than you guilty guilty?
Whether or not we should use the word bay in everyday conversation.
I have a lot of thoughts about this. Well, thank you so much for joining us.
Guys. We're going to start off the podcast by talking about some buzzworthy headlines that are cropping up in our lives, and we want to talk.
More about.
This week's buzzworthy.
Yes, I'm excited about this one.
I think, I know I'm excited to have a lot of opinions about this, and so does the rest of America. Yes, so many opinions on how a young woman today decides the right time to step into motherhood. Yes, baby limbo, baby limbo this you know, I kind of came up with this terminology for a story I did on young people millennials eighteen up to their mid thirties who are stuck between.
Do I have this college debt or do.
You know, pay that off and focus on my career or do I also have a baby or you know, what should come first? And honestly, it's such a difficult question because mother nature doesn't wait for you to pay off your student loved debt, and I think that women have to recognize that fact. And it's maybe not so comfortable because you know, obviously, we want to talk about how much control we should have over our own bodies, which is absolutely true. You should, you know, be your
own body's boss. But at the end of the day, like that clock is ticking.
Yeah, it's true.
So I'm thirty five and I turned thirty six in October, which is not far away, and I mean, I've been thinking about it a lot because I am in a serious relationship, me and my boyfriend Superman.
He already has a daughter. She's eight. She's great.
Day a man with a daughter. That's some grown up dating.
Yes, but I love it honestly, because one, I'm at an age now and because I work for myself, I realize I don't necessarily want a huge family. I came from a family there was five girls. My mom and dad raised all five of us, and I don't know that I want a big family, but I at least think I'm pretty sure I want at least one kid of my own. I mean, according to my mom, I really need to get on it. And I kind of
feel like that too. My best friend just had a baby, and my sister just had a baby, and so their babies are all under a year old, and so I've been like, yeah, a little bit, but sometimes you're over more so that I'm like, oh, I'm gonna be thirty six, so when are you gonna make a choice. A friend of mine had she made her choice at thirty six and had her baby at thirty seven, and she said, I wish I would have started sooner.
That's what I hear. I'm afraid, yeah, sooner would be.
I'm twenty eight right now, and I feel like, am I going to regret not having a baby now?
I don't know, but it seems like I just don't want to do it.
The her reason for saying she wished she would have started sooner is that she wished She really wants to have a second, and she doesn't know if she can't. Yeah, she can, So that's why I don't know that I want to have a second. I mean, I would want to have two kids, but between his one and my one, I'm like, well then it goes one plus one mixed
two for three. Yes, she's the bonus kid and so and plus I do so much work and I really want to and I know this might sound a little selfish, but I want to maintain my individual personality and maintaince is okay, you know, as long as you know. I mean, I think selfish would be more so having ten kids and still wanting to fly around the country and speak and teach, and you don't have enough time for your children. So I don't want to spread myself super thin, right m hm.
Well, hopefully you just have one kid to start.
I know, Well, my boyfriend's are twins, so he is, oh g I'm like, yo, he told me. I already likes so I'm aiming for this.
Does that gene come from the mail line or that I don't which is more likely to go somebody?
Somebody email us at Brown Ambition Podcasts, yes and tell us how exactly are twins formulated? Does that come from the male line the female line?
Is that? Yeah?
Is it hereditary or is that like some sort of random I.
Do think it skips a generation. So you might be good. Okay, maybe you're If you have a daughter, then she's got to worry.
But you're good, So so you say, And so I come back to the next podcast and I'm like, so, y'all, I'm having twins.
Thanks Manny, I can talk well, you know, I'm twenty eight and I don't necessarily feel pressure to have a baby. Okay, but I feel I guess that's not true. I don't feel pressure for myself, Okay, I don't. I look at puppies and I feel my my ovaries twins, like I really want a puppy very badly. Babies not so much, but they're cute. What I do feel is intense pressure
from you know, I'm dating. I've been dating my partner boyfriend for through over three years now, which is my longest relationship, and you know, we live together and we're kind of we're kind of playing it as we you know by ear. His family, however, is not waiting, especially his mother. He comes from a very traditional, close knit community and family. I guess it's not giving away too much if I say. He's Dominican, so I'm in a
mixed race relationship. And his mother is very Catholic and very old school, and she is like the mother of mothers. She lives to nurture her son's two sons. They are schooled rotten. But you know, I feel her looking at me and wondering. Not just feel, but I hear it because she tells me, Mandy, Amanda, why why no baby yet?
Why? Her English isn't very good? But she can.
She gets her point.
Where's the baby yet? Where it's been three years?
I asked her, you know, uh, don't she want us to get married first and get married and do all that and you know, the right order of events.
And she's like, no, just have a baby. Wow?
Would this be her first grandchild?
This will be her first grandchild? There's so much pressure.
I know, what how about you come from a family of five girls and no one has kids. My mother every day on the phone, so my my Nigerian name is Adochia and my mother would call me and say it's so she's still not mad. It still no baby, And I'm like, good old no second oldest.
So they're just like so somebody.
The oldest is married and she's working on it, and I'm the second. The third is not married, the fourth is married and she just had a baby. So we're like whoo. And but just watching her. She's literally like the milk machine. So she's only allowed to take ten paces away from the baby before the milk machine has to return and dispense milk.
You mean, it's not glamorous and she's not like Blake Lively taking selfies of herself, you know, breastfeeding and a field of sunflowers.
That is a straight beacuse. Honestly, She's like, I'm so tired. Her feet are swollen, and she's just like, how can I My mom is like, my mom is a nurse and her my mom was telling her you need to put your feet up.
She's like, oh, when when I'm being the milk machine.
I work for a company, and obviously Y'allhoo has very generous maternity and paternity benefit programs, which isn't the norm nationwide. It's actually America's one of the only developing nations that doesn't have a federally mandated paid maternity or paternity lead law. But I'm lucky enough to work for Yahoo and we have sixteen weeks off. That's awesome, and dads get eight weeks off, and at least I know I have that yeah, sort of if I'm still working, you're gonna have a baby,
have that kind of cushion. But can you talk about like, I'm curious as an entrepreneur's self, you know, you own your own business, how are you going to plan your leave?
So I've been like, honestly like kind of like planning now because I'm going to be thirty six, like I said, and I mentioned, and my boyfriend and I have been talking about marriage and kids. So right now, the way my business is is that I start off at zero basically like every month, meaning like my income, I never know what's going to come in. People would just email me and call me and say we want you to speak or teach or whatever. And so as a month
rolls on, I make money. I cannot do that and the kid because one, you know, I'm gonna have to be home. I do a lot of speaking around the country, you know, So that's a worry for me. So I thought, well, how am I going to make this work. So one of the things I'm implementing is I'm looking for other ways to make passive income.
So I have two books that do fairly well.
I'm coming out with a children's book hopefully that will boost up my income. In two I'm launching this academy called the Live Richer Academy, where it's going to be like a monthly fee and you can take classes on investing and business and all this kind of stuff. And so the Live Richer Academy will definitely help to put regular income into my stream. Without me having to leave the house because I'm not going to be able to, at least not for a while. So I'd love to
hear what the BA audience has to say. Tweet us at the BA Podcast. You can find us on Facebook at Brown Ambition and you can email us at Brownambitionpodcast at gmail dot com.
Let us know. Are you and Baby Limbo? What is your story? We'd love to hear it, maybe share it next time we're on.
So next up, this is one of my favorite segments. It is is brown break, brown break?
Some music?
Yes, like.
Mandy's gonna really how about you share? Like what what is a brown bak?
Many?
A brown break is just something in your life that you are tired of having to deal with or explain as a person of color.
And this week, my brown break is white feminism.
This is a very uncomfortable issue and I we like to keep things light and fun as much as we can, but white feminism is something that I'm starting to learn a little bit more about and just to give some background on what brought me to this necessary break in my life. So two of my favorite authors, for very different reasons. These authors couldn't be more different. Erica Jong, amazing author, very popular in the seventies and popular even now.
She's a new book coming out. She was seen as sort of like one of the first female writer to really embrace women's sexuality, writing about a woman who's having sex and saying curse words and sleeping around with no apology. And she did a talk recently at the Decatur Book Festival Shout Out to Atlanta, my hometown, with Rox Sane Gay, another one of my favorite authors. She's the author of
Bad Feminist. And someone asks Erica Jong how she feels about white feminism and the concept of white women generally speaking about feminists in a way that can sometimes exclude women of color. And this is not a new issue.
It's been around since the seventies, when the first or not even the seventies, but you know, when women were trying to get the right to vote, cut to the seventies, when women were fighting for equal pay and things like that, and generally white women would speak of feminism as if it only applied from their point of view, and we
weren't hearing so much from black and brown women. So this is something that I care a lot about, and I have to say as someone who really respects Erica John, Erica John from the bottom of my heart, and I love her writing.
The way that she.
Handled it wasn't I think the best way she could have handled things. She got really defensive, and I can understand why you'd be defensive, because if you identify as a feminist. And I give her so much respect. She has done so much for the cause for feminism in America and supported so many women, but she immediately was discounting the whole white feminism thing. Oh no, of course not. You know, Oh, We've done so much for all women
of color, all women of color. You know, everything I've done has been through this lens of you know, all women, all women. And it just seemed like a second iteration of the whole all lives matter thing. And you know, we kind of saw this play out with the whole Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift beef on Twitter, where Nikki's trying to make a statement about how black women are treated in the music industry, and then Taylor comes in and talks about, why are you trying.
To make it about you?
All women in music industry are marginalized and you know, sexualized in different ways and disenfranchised. But no, Taylor, No, and women of color are way more likely to be marginalized in the music industry. And not just there. Let's talk about in terms of like the wage gap. That's a huge cornerstone of the feminist movement today is the fact that women are still earning less than eight eighty
cents on the dollar for a man. What gets lost when you stop the conversation there is the fact that Latina and black women are much more likely to make less than that. And yeah, I'm just over I'm over people stopping the conversation at here's what it looks like for all women, because all women don't have the same stait exactly.
So you need a brown break for the white So my brown break is this whole debate of perm versus natural apage.
So I am sitting with my fed up like my half perm, half relaxed awkward transition face.
So many's half and half right, And here I am fully natural. I have locks for the last like seven years. But honestly, I've been natural since I want to say, two thousand and one. I don't math good, so don't know how many years I does.
Fifteen years.
Yeah, I was honestly natural. For the majority of my life I had a perm. Yeah, I was like totally like the natural girl before it became cool when I went natural. At first I had honestly here's where I went natural. So all throughout high school I had I had a natural hair. I had braids, the Brandy braids for those of you who can remember Brandy Norwood. M h, I want to be down. So I had the braids because I played sports. I played tennis, and so it didn't make sense for me to have a PERM and
have permed hair and played sports. And so I was natural mostly all my life. And then when I went away to college, I was like, oh, I want a PERM. I felt like perm was like the next level of like womanhood for black women, and so I got a PERM and two years in my hair started to fall out, like I had alopecia. So alopecia is really weird.
Putting a very toxic coming your hair wasn't good.
For it, I know, And so my stylist was like, you know what, Tiffany, your texture of hair, It's just like I have really really tightly coiled hair and it
just was not blending well with the perm. So literally the side started good go first, and then the back and the front, and then finally she was like, you're just gonna have to let the perm go, and so I cut off all of the perm and I was left with this spiky fro, and I realized it was too short to get braided, so I was kind of forced to walk around with spike fro and I had so.
It started to grow out and I kind of liked the fro. It was cute.
It was a cute little afro mini afro. But women and older black women started stopping me in the street and literally saying, why would.
You do that to yourself?
My my wasn't my mother and my father either, one of them. One of them said to me, so you don't plan to, Maddie. I'll translate, so you never want to get married. I was like, excuse me, So you don't want to, Maddie. That's what this hair is seen, that's what this.
Is what my so you're putting out there, Yes, so this is what I was.
So I couldn't believe how. I don't know, just like how politicized my hair was. I literally just stopped getting a perm because I was going bald. I wasn't trying to make a statement. I wasn't trying to I don't know, trying to like prove my blackness. It was, hey, I'd like not to be bald. Let me go back to the where.
My hair was.
Yeah, very practical.
But what I found was with time, as time went on, I found that people were politicizing it. For me.
I would go to like Harlem or New York and people would.
Say, hey, sister, like they would treat me differently than my friends who I was walking with who had a perm You know, I wasn't When men even would approach me, it wasn't the same like hey, shorty, what up? You know? It was like Hi, I just want to tell you that you're so beautiful. And it was different, and I thought that was so yeah, so strange, And but now what's happened. At first it was like I was so happy to see that people were embracing their natural hair,
and I was like, yeah, yeah, yay. But now what's happened. It's like there's two camps. There's the perm camp and there's their natural camp. And sometimes I find that each camp is like looking down on each other, right, And I'm like, to me, it's just hair. It's just a choice like a dress or pants or shoes, and you should be able to make your choice. And you shouldn't be shamed for having a perm. You shouldn't be shamed
for being natural. When to me, it should just be an expression of like just how you want to look today, yeah, you know, or even if you want to make it, if you want to make it pull, that's fine, But that's just not me. And we're here and we're back and we are going to give you some tips brand ambition tips for today.
So what are your tips for today? Tips?
So my main tip for today really is for those of you who are starting a business. If this is a very first kind of stage of your business, you have to make a decision of whether or not you want to.
Be a business or look like a business. Right, so this is a business.
There's a fourteen year old girl on your block who babysits and she gets paid to She has a business, you know, very informal, but a business nonetheless, because a business is just when you have a product or service that somebody.
Wants to buy and they do.
Now, if you look like a business, looks all fancy, you have your business cards and pens and everything, but haven't made a sale.
The fourteen year old has a business. You do not.
So here's how I can help you get to a place where you can actually make money on your business. First, you want to make sure that that your return on there's a direct return on investments in the things that you buy. So what that means is this that anything that you're buying in the beginning stages of your business should directly make you money. So let's just say you want to be a baker. If you want to be a baker, getting a bakery is not going to directly
make you money. Having business cards is not going to directly make you money. That looks like a business. That's not a business. Eggs, flour, sugar shortening, vanilla seasoning, whatever, those things will directly make you money because you can bake them, to make bake goods and sell them.
So in the beginning I.
Really urge new entrepreneurs to really only put your money into things that you can directly repackage and make you money.
You're speaking to my dad right now. I think, Hey, Manny's big al who also does photography.
Matt Alton Wodriff Dot com excellent.
Thank you. That's a great tip.
Thanks.
So I want to talk about how to save on rent and make rent more affordable, and these are tried and true tips that I've actually done to lower my rent. In fact, I moved into a new place about a year and a half ago and I managed to save It will be twelve it'll be two four hundred dollars once we hit our two year mark, because I got them to shape one hundred bucks off their asking price for the rent, which I was really proud of. And again it's just like I said, those little asks. Just
ask for the little stuff. You never know what they're gonna say. My first tip to save on rent is obviously, don't be afraid to negotiate, especially if you know that maybe you're moving to a place where there's not as much demand for rental places.
Ask your landlord.
You know, let's say you know, for example, your rent is sixteen hundred dollars a month, you have excellent credit, you have references, you come correct with references, and you're ready to show your landlord what a responsible tenant you are. If you can show them how responsible you are, then ask them for one hundred dollars or ten percent dedunction in the rent. It can work, but again you have to come prepared with those references and with that good credit.
A tenant of mine did that once.
Oh really Yeah, she was twenty six years old, and I remember I was like, I don't know, but because she came so prepared with everything, and she actually pre wrote the checks a year in advance to me, so when she asked for less, I was ahead, but she was like, amazing, No, but that works because I'm a I used to be a landlord, and her coming so prepared, I was willing to offer her less just to have a good tenant in there.
Offering months in advance rent payments. That's a good tip, a good strategy. And I don't know if it's so common outside of New York, but a lot of landlords asked for first and last month's rent plus security, to which I know is hard to come up with. But if you can, if you can offer to pay two or three months, maybe even half a year's rent in advance upfront, they'll be willing to shave money off your
rent if you ask them. They might be at the end of the day, a landlord has a product that he's trying to sell and he wants someone who's going to be living there and be responsible and not going to move out, you know, and break your lease early. And if you show that kind of commitment, paying in advance can really help you. Another strategy that I've used
is picking a good time of year to rent. Studies show and my experience shows that the winter, winter and early spring are some of the more dry seasons, and as a landlord, there's less competition out there, which means that they're more desperate to rent their place out. And I think that's probably a lot of the reason why I was able to negotiate my rent.
On top of having when was it you good credit?
I moved in.
We were looking for an apartment in February, moved in March first, so it was a great time. It's way more difficult to negotiate a rent because there's so many people for places in May and in September, end of college and beginning of the school year exactly definitely, So think about your timing and if you can time it around winter time. It sucks to move in the cold, but money keeps me.
I was gonna say that what I wear a money jackets.
And my last tip would be protect your belongings. This is like please eat your vinum, meet your vitamins, and like eat your vegetables and stuff. But seriously, renters insurance is no joke. You need to have it. It costs like ten to fifteen dollars a month. You can easily get a policy. If you have car insurance, call your I'm sure your insurance company probably offers a renter's insurance policy.
You can go through your bank.
You can go to just a random bank and ask them like USAA has a great RENTERSS policy and get Renter's insurance. Here is why if something were to happen to your apartments, say a fire or a flood or the spring you know, someone's bathtub overflows up above, which has happened to people before that I know, and it drips down and ruins all your firm. Sure your landlord is going to definitely pay to repair the structure and
to repair the floor in the ceiling. But he has or she has no obligation to take care of your stuff, which is why you have to have renter's insurance. And one of the perks of renters insurance is that it won't just cover the stuff in your apartment. If you take your laptop computer, you leave it at a friend's place or in your car and it gelts stolen.
Really it'll still cover it.
Oh yeah, awesome. Yeah, and it's not even all that expenses.
It's literally ten to twelve dollars. You can do estimates online. You can go to Traveler's Insurance. They have a cool tool that you can use. Bank Rate has a cool I think rent as insurance calculator you can use just call and.
Get a quote.
All you have to do is go through your apartments, start with your closet and work you through each room and get a rough estimate of how much you think. Like I think for our place, I have a policy for fifteen thousand dollars. Okay, you know, just something that'll cover your stuff. Yeah, in the event of an accident renchest of insurance excellent return on the best.
Yes, I like that tip.
So hopefully if you like our tips, you will let us know. Tweet us the BA podcast at the BA Podcast at the BA Podcast, Facebook.
Brown Ambition and Email Ambition podcast at Gail.
We should be a Singing Girl.
So we are closing out this week's podcast with Our Winds.
All I do is win, win, win, no matter what. Do you like that one?
Right, let's save that for every every single segment we do of the Winds.
Oh, we should let me practice my notes first, but you know what's good? So this wind is near and dear to my heart. We talked about baby Limbo. I am a first time auntie and we have a little boy and a family full of women who are ready to spoil.
She told me, she told me before the baby came.
You know, I'm not buying anything, right, and true to form, she didn't have to, not with four aunties who are just doting on this little baby. He's the cutest and I love my little peanut, that's my nickname for him.
And yeah, so that's my win for the week.
Good for her, good for you. New babies are great.
Yes, if you're ready for that, Yes, okay, my win of the week. I need to call out Ah. I would say this associate to mine.
We went to college together.
And you know how you go to school with someone you know them well, and then you leave school and then you kind of drift apart and you go do your own thing, and but you still follow each other on social media, Like I still kind of social media stock her and have been following her career, and I'm really proud of her. I think she's doing our school proud. Her name is Macy Peterson and she has this app
which is pretty genius. It's called on Second Thought. It's for Android users, and this is going to solve one. It pretty much solves the problem all of us have faith with our texting. It allows you to take back a text. Really yeah, not take it back in the sense that you send it and you can get it back. But I think how it works is that you send a text through the app and then you have like an hour delay or a twenty four hour delay, like
if you think you might regret sending it in the morning. Okay, let's say you had a couple glasses of wine. You're not toasted, but like you're just needing. Maybe I'll send it to second and like a five second delay. Nice feeling nice and you feel like you feel some kind of way about your what your mom said to you about you know, your hair last week, and you want
to let her know how you feel. You can send it to on Second on Second Thought the app and have a day or an hour delay before the app the text actually gets sent.
Okay, pretty smart idees.
So she presented this at I think it started at south By Southwest last year, and in just a year's time, she's raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and she's moving the app and her startup from DC to Silicon Valley.
She's like living the entrepreneur's dream.
She's a brown girl, and she's a brown girl in tech, which is so rare and so necessary, and it's awesome to see her doing so well.
So I just want to give Macy a shout out.
Yes, Macey Color, Yeah right.
Maybe I'll stop just stalking her, let her know.
How I really feel. Now, that's awesome, Macy.
We should have her on one day. I'm sure she has lots of tips to share.
Yeah, I'd love to hear that.
So hope you enjoyed this week show Me and Mandy enjoyed being here with you. If you'd like to find us, where can they find us?
You can find us on Twitter at the BA podcast, on Facebook at Brown Ambition, or please send us emails, compliments, complaints, send us your wins of the weeks, your brown breaks. So email us at Brown Ambition Podcast at gmail dot com.
See you soon.