Interview with Wealth Noir Founder: How People of Color Can Achieve Financial Freedom

The racial wealth gap is one of many systemic challenges that the Black community and people of color face when working to secure their financial futures. But there are many resources available to help you along your way and groups of people who have similar goals, including at Wealth Noir.

In this Motley Fool Live video recorded on July 23, Fool.com editor Desiree Jones interviews Wealth Noir founder Damien Peters about everything investors should know about getting started buying stocks, tips for people thinking about buying their first home, and an analogy about building wealth that includes taking a bath.

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Desiree Jones: Hi there Fools and welcome to Fool Live. I’m Dez Jones, a Fool on the editorial team and I’m so excited to welcome Damien Peters, the founder of Wealth Noir. Damien, how are you doing today?

Damien Peters: I’m doing pretty good. A little small cold from my son, but surviving.

Jones: That’s good to hear. Welcome, and we’re going to go ahead and get started. Tell us more about yourself and the mission of Wealth Noir.

Peters: My name is Damien Peters, I founded Wealth Noir back in 2018. Our mission really is we focus on high-income millennials, in particular African-American millennials. We’re really focused on building wealth, so increasing net worth. The reason I started Wealth Noir and story behind it was I was a product manager at Facebook, I was working there, enjoying my job. I found out that I was having a child and I decided I wanted to take a little bit of time off, I wanted to take a year off to be with my son. Everyone at work they were like, “How can you afford this?” When I talked to people outside of work, they were also shocked. My personal thought was I was very well compensated, I had been investing in real estate at the time, so at this time I had two rental properties, I had six figures in stocks, taxable on my own, in addition to the same in my retirement account. I just felt that there were more people who are in this income bracket, they had solved one problem, but they weren’t building wealth and net worth and they still felt trapped financially. At Wealth Noir, we really focus on bringing content, services, programming that really focuses on helping people transform salary into net worth. We have a heavy emphasis on real estate investing and also for accredited investors.

Jones: That’s awesome. That is amazing to know that there’s something like Wealth Noir to help uplift the black community. Of course, we’re going to talk more about the impacts of the black community and financial literacy. For starters, what is the racial wealth gap and why does it matter?

Peters: The racial wealth gap. I think everyone, or there’s many different ways to define it or think about it, and the way I think about it really is, when you tease out salary and other impacts, when you look at net worth between African-American and the majority races or medium net worth, you see a gap. Given that you’re earning the same amount of money we’re not accumulating or building net worth at the same rate. For example, there was a study by the Institute of Policy Studies that showed at above $93,000, so given that you’re earning more than $93,000, a white family had about 2.2 times more net worth, $320,000 versus $142,000 of Black families. We see this pronounced in many different aspects where it impacts the ability for African-American families to participate in the economy and in wealth building compared to our counterparts.

Jones: The importance of generational wealth is very key and understanding that there are different factors that come into that financial aspect of literacy. My next question is, what can someone do to build and earn wealth for themselves given the challenges they may face?

Peters: If we think about the wealth gap, there’s two aspects I think really show themselves and are pronounced. One is that you have an income gap, so on average African-Americans tend to earn less, and that’s pronounced, so your ability to save and build net worth is going to be slowed because you fundamentally will be earning less, and have less to save and contribute. The second really big factor is generational wealth. Unfortunately, we have just been oftentimes kept out of the economic and wealth-building system for years through redlining, through certain discriminatory practices, and even in certain points where being a wealthy African-American was a risk if you look at atrocities like Tulsa and other places. That ability for my grandparents to have bought a home and then that could be given to my parents to have grown, appreciated, and then for that to pay for my college tuition is just something missing, and that is one of the huge contributors to the wealth gap. When it comes to really beating the wealth gap, we’re trying to change things, there’s a couple of things that anyone can do, and it’s the same way that everyone builds wealth, but it really is embracing them and utilizing them within our communities. The first thing I always tell people is start investing and start investing yesterday. Even if you’re not good at it, even if you lose some money, your ability to invest and participate in the capital markets that build wealth is going to be the key to you being able to build wealth. If you don’t invest in stocks, you will never see any benefits from stock investing, if you don’t invest in real estate, you’ll never see any benefits from real estate, and there’s a slew of other types of investments. I always say people investing is, they call it personal finance for a reason, you should find out what you feel comfortable with. But I think there are a lot of reasons and it’s way easier from your phone, you can be investing within minutes. The second thing is really just learning and understanding money. I still think it’s a bit of a travesty that they don’t teach more about personal finances in school. My undergrad was in economics and just in computer science, and then went on and got a Masters in business. I learned a lot about how money works, debt, investing, rate of returns, things like that, and a lot of people that we talked to, a lot of people that we engage in Wealth Noir will be oftentimes making a quarter or half a million per year and still don’t understand some of the basics about investing in a retirement account versus non-retirement account, avoiding large tax bills by correctly allocating your money or simple things like portfolio diversification so that they are not completely wiped out when there’s bad move in the market. Another thing too is to talk about money. I think this does hamper our communities more but in general, a lot of people just aren’t comfortable talking about what they are investing in and not investing in. They don’t want to talk about their salary, and I think this hurts us a lot. We don’t understand how to price ourselves going into a new job, and we don’t understand how much people are saving or what they are investing in, and we don’t get excited about it. I can have a three-hour conversation about the draft picks for the Washington Football Team, but no one wants to go deep into Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) versus some of the new entrance into the EV (electric vehicles) market, or overall, what the economies look like as it pertains to the current health situation. Then last thing is just watch out for common traps for misguided information, and this goes back to learning and understanding money. Everyone wants to get rich quick. No one wants to work. The truth is wealth building is typically slow and it’s boring. Most of my money is held in broad ETFs that cover the market and they grow over time. I continue to put more money into them. I buy rental properties. I’m planning to hold for decades. It’s not sexy as making $100,000 in a day doing option trading, but it’s a more consistent plan and path. By really investing in what’s worked for people with wealth over the last decades, hundreds of years, that’s what people should be thinking about as opposed to what they read on the screen.

Jones: That is all so real, especially for me because I’m just now learning about investing and talking about money. For me when I was raised, my parents didn’t tell me anything about investing. I have to learn myself about investing, which is why I’m glad I’m a part of The Fool because I’m able to learn and grow. Talking about money in the Black community is very important, especially right now during the pandemic. I will be trying to stay there with you. I’m still new. I’m new to investing and honestly and truly, I personally don’t think I can afford to invest right now because I’m working on my personal finances and all of that, so let’s talk about what are some budgeting practices do you think can help with when it comes to money.

Peters: Ironically, outside of budgeting one thing actually I always tell people is to make more money. This can be as simple as asking for a raise or getting very intelligent about your own compensation and whether you should change jobs or not. But one big way I have built money and we oftentimes talk about a corporate job being bad or holding you back, but the truth is, it has funded a lot of my ability to build wealth. I focused on my career and I was able to do that. But in addition, I have always had more than one job. I’ve always had a side hustle. I’ve always built something on the side. In addition to wealth where I work, I have two other jobs that I work, so making more money, there’s a lot of options out there and people should feel comfortable using these tools and skills and what they have available to increase the income that they make. Some of the other stuff is things that you’ll hear all the time from anyone who talks about personal finance. Spend less than you make. Save and increase your savings rate. Even one thing I would say to you is you feel as if I can’t afford to save, but even if you were to start at $1 per month, something very, very small, the point is you participating in investing will increase your knowledge. It will increase the amount of attention that you pay in there, and when you are comfortable to put more money in, you won’t be trying to figure out what to do with this $10,000. You’ll be like, “Oh, great. I’ve been working with $1 per month, then $10 per month,” whatever it may be. Participate in the market, start investing and increase, and I always tell people either start with what you know or just start with something really boring. Invest in the entire U.S. stock market with one ticker symbol, and there are great sources like The Fool which really help give you the due diligence and some information about specific companies that you may not have considered or a place that you may not have thought about. Living below your means falls into that. It’s very, very easy to earn $500,000 and spend $550,000. Lifestyle creep is very consistent. It was something I worked on very much in my life between 2012 and 2015, so when I graduated grad school to when I was working at Facebook, my income had quadrupled over the course of the year along with my wife’s, but we still lived on approximately the same budget at the beginning. What I found was I had all this extra income coming in and that I could deploy the capital and put it into other places. One thing that I was able to do with that capital and wealth was take some time off from working and actually move to Spain for two years, so I was able to enjoy that. Understanding the amount of money coming in, understanding your expenses, and managing that, and being smart about investing the difference really makes sense. Really matters, and then some of the other stuff, which is hopefully everyone has heard about before about having an emergency fund. The truth is, even when it comes to your investments you don’t want to be pulling from them because your car broke down or something along those lines. If there’s a large downturn, you don’t want to feel overtly nervous because you really live off or need that money, so having an emergency fund, three to six months, just in case there is a downturn. In case there is a health situation that shuts down everything, is really important, and then prioritizing high-interest debt in particular. Credit cards, number one up there. Typically, I say if the percentage you’re paying on your debt is low, 3% to 4%, things like that. It may not be the most important thing to prioritize that as opposed to investing that money, but if you’re paying 15%, 20%, 25%, 30% on any type of debt, get rid of that because that is a drag on your entire portfolio that needs to be made up somewhere.

Jones: Wow, this is awesome. These are really great tips. Especially for me, so I appreciate that. The next question, what is the difference between income and wealth. We already talked a little bit about it, but why is it important to build wealth?

Peters: The loose analogy I always use is a bathtub. Your income or your salary or where you get your money from is water going into the tub and your expenses is water leaving the tub. You can’t take a bath if all the water going in is immediately being left. Wealth is the water in the tub. It’s a pool there that you can bathe in, you can take a sip from it if you want to. You can turn off the spigot for a little bit, and as long as you control the money flowing out, it will be there. Wealth is measured by your net worth, and your net worth is simply all the assets that you have; house, stocks, bonds, money in the bank, subtracted by all the money that you owe; mortgage, car loan, car note, money that you owe your mom, all that counts against it, and your net worth is the difference. By increasing your net worth over time that is where you will have both the ability to unlock financial freedom, so if you have enough money, if you have a large bathtub full of water, it’s hard to die of thirst because you have water sitting there. Also when it comes to generational wealth. If you have kids and if we really start talking about breaking this wealth gap over multiple generations, you can’t give your kids something that you don’t have. You can’t leave it for them. Yes, it may seem like, “Why would I not spend money during my lifetime?” But the truth is, oftentimes, money loses its value the more you make. Spending your first $100,000 is super fun, the next $100,000 is not as fun as the first because the first you’re buying all the stuff that you really wanted. The second, you’re stretching. Generational wealth, unlocking financial freedom is really two of the key benefits that wealth really brings along. Changing your context, not think just about salary and income coming in and your expenses, but what are you building in terms of wealth. Then the last most important thing I would say is that money makes money. Whether it’s interest in the bank account, which is next to nothing right now, but whether its returns in the stock markets or it’s the cash flow that you’re getting from a rental property. The more wealth that you have, it actually grows itself. One thing with that bathtub analogy that it doesn’t talk about is, the water actually multiplies on its own. The water being in the bathtub will increase on its own. Going back to that point of retirement or financial freedom, if you turn off the spigot of salary, if you have a large body of money or a large pool of water that’s growing itself, you can live just off of that passively without having to go out and actively participate work for money.

Jones: Wow, this is great. The bathtub analogy is something that now is going to stick with me forever — a great analogy. Unlike a shower, the bathtub, water coming in, stays in. Now we’re talking about more about wealth. Of course, we talked about what’s an income. What are some ways to improve your income and improve that top line?

Peters: There’s like three buckets, three areas that I think about, that, I think, everyone should think about, when they think about the money coming in, and how to pour into your tub, how to build that bucket. First, you have work and your salary. Second, you have side hustles. These will fall into active income. You work, you make money. You stop doing them, you don’t make them. Then lastly, you have passive income. This goes back to that it’s money making money for its own self. When it starts with the active salary income at work, understand how to negotiate a salary. That’s something they don’t teach you in school and will make you a lot of money over time. Understand your worth. Understand that if a job is giving you an offer, is it above market salary, is it below market salary, should you be asking for twice as much, should we ask for 10% more? One core thing, anytime you get a job offer, ask for more money. The worst they will say is no, typically no one is going to be so offended, but they’re going to retract their job offer. But understanding your salary is one of the biggest sources of income and maintaining and mention that up-leveling your skills, moving into industries that pay you well, super important. The second one, part of active income is side hustles. Again, I’ve been well-compensated and people are always shocked that I still work on the side. I consult, I actually do some interview coaching, I do things on the outside because I like the idea of one having multiple streams of income that I can turn up when the other one goes down. Then secondly, again, add some more money to that pool that it allows me to build my wealth quicker. In today’s world with the gig economy, it is easier than ever to write on the side, to drive Uber. If you want pets, there are sites that you can go on. It’s very easy to add on some additional income. It can oftentimes be hugely transformational, because oftentimes we view this as extra income. Then lastly is passive income. For me, that’s been the real estate investing into rental properties, I get checks that come in every single month. I don’t actively work for that, I had to work to buy the property and get someone in there. I had to find my property manager. In addition, my stocks, investments, they grow over time. I open the account, I’m like, “Oh, there’s more money in it today than there was three months ago.” or a year ago, and I have a long-term outlook. But focusing on passive income, thinking about ways that you can have your money work for you will reduce your need to actively work for money. Again, it will really help accelerate that growth and wealth and net worth.

Jones: Awesome. At the Motley Fool, we are all about empowering all people to invest for long term. What’s should Millennials and people of color know about getting started with investing?

Peters: Going back to something that you said is get started. It’s way easier now to start with small sums of money. Many companies offer fractional shares, you don’t have to buy a whole share if you can’t buy the whole thing. There’s online apps to make it very easy to invest and understand. You can take a small amount of money and get started if you don’t know what to invest in, invest in everything and buy ETFs, index funds again for the whole market. But you can also deal with staples that you know and love. People invest in Nike (NYSE: NKE) because they love Nike, people invest in Coca-Cola (NASDAQ: COKE) because they drink Coca-Cola. For the most part, if you invest and you continue with it and you have a long-term outlook, it’s relatively hard to truly lose your money or lose money investing in good companies for a long-term period. Automate your investments, you don’t want to have to think about it. Have your retirement investments come directly out of your paycheck, have the money that hits your bank account, have a portion go directly to your brokerage account or to your investment account or to your emergency fund, and then move from emergency funds to somewhere else. But there are many ways to get started. Stocks are a very, very easy way. A lot of people I’ll talk to, they really want to invest in real estate, want a rental property, but they need to save $30,000 to $40,000 or $10,000 to get in or they need to learn a lot. In the meantime, I tell them, “Invest in stocks, use a robo-advisor, buy index funds.” Put your money to work so that when you’re ready for the next move or your next investment, that it has been growing and working actively in the background. Especially now in the time of uncertainty, with a lot of things happening. Now is a good time, as anytime is. Now is always the best time to start investing or yesterday, I should say. As the old adage goes, “Time in the market almost always beats timing the market.” By investing early and staying and participating, that’s how you really unlock wealth as opposed to trying to find the hot swing trade.

Jones: Those are great tips. Then let’s also talk about the different types of challenges that those people may face when they are getting started. What do you think are some challenges and solutions when they encounter those challenges? How are they able to, I guess, combat those challenges when starting investing?

Peters: Yeah. One is getting past the fear of getting started. One the first challenges is like, I don’t know what to do, and everything seems so complicated, and again, I always say you’re better off downloading a random app – not a random app – but one of the trusted brokerages that are out there, and investing something because once you start, you’ve started, and delaying that is only going to hurt you. If you started doing nothing for a year and it’s still better off than having started a year later. There’s a lot of complexity oftentimes that can come with investing. Should I open my own account, should I do a 401(k), what should I do? Oftentimes, the easiest way to get started too is if you’re not already doing it, start with your 401(k) from employer. One of the best investments you can ever make is your employer match if your employer offers it because it’s guaranteed 50% to 100% returns on your money. You put into $100, they put in $50. People will be concerned it’s going into retirement account, can I use it, can I touch it, things along those lines. One is you should be saving for your retirement, you should allow the money to grow long term. There are several tax benefits about doing an account like this. Then lastly, two, if you are blessed to be in a problem where you have I think $10 or $12 billion in the IRA, like Petersfield, there are ways that you will be able to access and use that money to either purchase a house for addressing other assets. There’s a few different ways to do that. Then sometimes, some of the other challenges is your friends and family. I don’t know this, I lost money in the stocks, I’m afraid, and the truth is you can’t let the fear of other people truly dictate what you do. Sometimes you’re watching the news, you hear there’s a crash coming, everything is bad, which you’ll hesitate, it will stop you from going to the market, but the truth is consistently buying into the market, consistently investing has been time-tested and proven over hundreds of years to build capital and return for people. Those are some of the challenges that they might come across in ways to really take a punch and get started when it comes to building wealth.

Jones: Thank you so much for the tip. This is again, great, great, great advice. Let’s say someone wants for work more toward homeownership today. What should they know about the market and any tips for first time home buyers, especially those from underrepresented communities?

Peters: Yeah. I actually just purchased my own personal home for the first time in 10 years. I always joke that I’ve been buying, I owned houses, and not live in any of them. I finally purchased one of mine earlier this year. Right now, it’s a difficult time to buy a house. Prices are very, very high. We are seeing some changes, like this month where we’re starting to see maybe a little bit of cooling, things may become a little bit easier, but it’s really unclear. Mortgage rates are super low, there’s a lot of demand. Lumber prices and core materials are high so it can be complicated. Houses that would have sat on the market for a month before and now have 18 offers within a weekend and people are literally promising their right foot and first-born children to get into these houses. One thing is to understand the market, understand the areas. Do as much research you can do. Come to the table prepared. Don’t go to your realtor and say like, “I want a house, what should I do?” Google or watch YouTube, or this many resources where you can find out more about the homebuying process. What does it look like, what should I expect, what do lenders look like, what did I need to do to be qualified? One area to really start with is understanding the financing. It’s going to be a waste of everyone’s time to look at million-dollar houses when you’ll only be qualified for a $500,000 house. You want $1 million houses or $10 million houses, but reality. Talking with mortgage lenders upfront, understanding what you’ll qualify for, having them pre-approve you and actually look at your debt, your income so that you can go to the market armed. Now, once you’re searching, be very on top of your search. Getting an app or get several apps that you like such as Zillow (NASDAQ: ZG), Redfin (NASDAQ: RDFN), Homesnap, look at the market constantly, identify the areas that you’re looking into, be unafraid to tell your realtor like, “Hey, I saw a property pop up, we need to go look at it now. Can you call the realtor, you can figure out what’s going on with them? I was actually lucky enough to find my house by looking at a house across the street, I saw a sign but the house wasn’t listed. I asked my realtor to go call that realtor and see what was going on. We then were able to make an offer on the house before it even hit the market and we’re able to negotiate certain terms that we weren’t able to do have we not done that process. Understanding how the home inspection, financial contingencies come into play can really help you craft the best offer for your house to really be competitive compared to other peers. We submitted a letter, for example, with our offer, and I understood the person who was renting the house. I was able to talk to her and her needs about selling the house and really help explain why we would be the people to work with because I was a landlord myself, I’ve done several deals, I could guarantee that I would close quickly. In other cases, I would send pictures of my baby and say like, “Hey, we’re a loving family, we’re going to make this home our own.” These are the things that will help your offer standout against the other 18 offers there. Some things to understand to, especially for African-Americans when you’re going to the housing market. Many of the cities that we live in or that we would target or have communities are oftentimes going be undervalued. The appraisals, and it’s been a problem that’s been highlighted and talked about over the decades. Actually, certain states and counties that have legislation actually aimed to try and help this with coming up, filling in the gap between appraisals. What I mean by this is if you’re going to buy a house for $500,000, at some point someone’s going to appraise the house for a value. If that value comes in under $500,000, typically the bank is going to look at you to make up that difference. And unfortunately, for many African-Americans, the chance of our appraisals coming in lower than the purchase price or coming in lower than what we think or what the market would say is sadly more common to impact us. Being able to look at the recent sales in your neighborhood, understanding what goes into an appraisal and how to negotiate. This may sound bad, but I always tell people, “don’t trust anyone.” It’s not that they necessarily are trying to get you, but oftentimes they don’t know any better, simply following protocols. These things have been baked into the system for a long period of time. Push back on the appraisal if you think it’s unfair. Question the fees on your HUD, the estimated fees that coming through your home share for your home purchase. Talk to your realtor about what are the neighborhoods, what they should be paying for. Also work with the realtor and have them really negotiate and represent you in the process. Unfortunately, some realtors will be really interested in getting the deal done quickly because that’s how they’re paid. They may not be incentivized to sit there and negotiate and argue for the next two weeks to get $15,000, which technically would get them a lower payday and delay the sale. You need to be an advocate for yourself, you need to understand what you’re getting into, and understand the market and be able to navigate these waters because it’s going to be probably the largest purchase that you ever make, it’s going to be something that you’re going to live in for a long period of time, and it has a huge impact on your ability to build net worth and wealth overtime by participating in real estate, the housing market. That was some tips and tricks, it’s a very competitive time. I think things may slow down, maybe become a little bit easier over the next couple of months, but I have no crystal ball and neither does anyone else, so it’s very hard to tell. But by being competitive, being on top of your game, it can really give yourself the best chance.

Jones: Thank you so much, Damien. The final question we’re going to ask, what are some tips for people thinking about planning for their family’s financial futures? You already talked about home ownership, but what are some other financial planning that people should look into when it comes to their families?

Peters: Generational wealth is very big for me. I’ll be honest, during college there was a time where part of my tuition was paid by my mom taking some money out of our rental properties that we owned at the time, and this, literally generational wealth. I was able to graduate undergrad without student loans, I did have a scholarship for most of it. But for the part that I didn’t, both of my parents had assets that they could take from and utilize. There’s a couple of different ways to invest for your children that make sense and I think are good options. 529 accounts, so these are specific accounts, say, very different but with some attributes similar to a retirement account around tax savings. For example, in my state here in Maryland, you can contribute money to a 529 account that you can actually use for private school in addition to college, and you receive a tax write-off for any money that I can contribute. If you imagine, if I want to send my kid to college, I can essentially pay for that and get a huge tax write-off because college is super expensive. It’s only going to be more expressive for investing in that. Each state is different, but 529 accounts are really good vehicles for education particularly. For more complex tactics that you’ll see the wealthy use are you can create an IRA or retirement account for your child if you have your own LLC, there are some rules. You should really talk to a tax attorney about this, this is not financial advice. But you can create a retirement account for your child under your company as long as they perform some meaningful work for you. For example, they can be a model for advertising material, they can shred papers for you, they can do this. This allows you to contribute money to their account, that again, will grow tax-free. It will not come into play when they apply for college, it doesn’t count against their financial aid package. If they decide not to go to college or if we get a full ride the Harvard or MIT, somewhere else, they can use that money to later on buy a house, they can use it for their retirement. It sets them up to a very good position. Understanding the estate laws and how your own different accounts will be taxed differently, an IRA, or a Roth IRA, or 401K for example, has different rules when being handed to a child, when being inherited as opposed to a traditional 401K or IRA. Understanding where to put money and where to draw for money in the future. Having an estate plan in place, so who’s going to get the money, how are they going to get the money. It’s easy to say, “Well, I put their name on the beneficiary, they’re going to get it all.” What people don’t understand is that probate court or the ability to actually access their inheritance can take months to years depending if it was not properly planned for in the first place, so having an estate plan, thinking about how you want to give your children your assets, for example. I have rental properties if I were to pass tomorrow, my four-year-old son probably can’t manage those. I have an estate plan that indicates who will take those over, who will control the money, at what point, in what age he will actually have access to all of this. This is all structured, put into place in a locked box somewhere so that God forbid something happens, I know that my next generation is taken care of. Actually a common slogan we use at Wealth Noir is
“I want to pay for my grandchildren’s college education and I don’t know my grandchildren.” I may never meet them, to be honest, but I can still make changes now to plan for them. Then one good thing, especially when you have children is having good insurance policies. Ensure that you have a life insurance policy that will cover any outstanding debts, that you won’t be passing a lot of debt or burden onto your children, onto those around you. And another big, big thing is talk to your kids about money, talk to everyone about money, but talk to your wife, talk to your significant other, have a plan so that they understand what they need to do if you pass and vice versa. Talk to your kids, have them understand the importance of saving and not spending all their money if they were to get $2 million inheritance that they shouldn’t buy Lamborghinis and pop bottles that maybe they should buy some rental properties or invest in the stock market or think about things long term. But knowledge and financial literacy is one of the key things, especially when you start looking at the wealth gap and other areas like that isn’t passed down. In addition to the capital, but the education so that they understand what to do with it and that they can pass that onto future generation is really how you ensure that your current family, your future family that you may not know about or ever meet are all taken care of. I believe all the Fords, for example, are doing quite well because of one entrepreneurial individual who had the foresight to think in a way to plan for several generations down. That’s something that I think is really important for everyone, especially important in our communities and has multiplicative effects over time.

Jones: Damien, where can our viewers find more from Wealth Noir?

Peters: Yes. Wealth Noir is everywhere. Wealthnoir.com is where you can go to our site, and you can see the articles that we’ve been putting out about various topics. We love to interview people who are doing great things, personal stories so people can find inspiration there. You can also sign up for our community. We have a community where we take like-minded individuals that really focus on building wealth. We have webinars, special events, summits, different things, offers that come out from there. Then across social media, we’re @WealthNoir wherever you go to, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Type in Wealth Noir, you will see us because we think getting that information out to you, out to everyone in a medium and in a way that makes sense for them is how we really change this view and the mentality about money and building wealth, and how we really have a long-term impact on the wealth gap.

Jones: Awesome. Well, thank you so much Damien for joining us and sharing about your organization’s mission. We will definitely keep in touch and Fool on!

Peters: Fool on. Thanks again for having me. I love what you guys are doing. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me more and hear a little bit more about Wealth Noir.

Jones: Awesome. Thank you.

Peters: Bye.

Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A shares), Alphabet (C shares), Facebook, Nike, Pinterest, Redfin, Tesla, Twitter, Zillow Group (A shares), and Zillow Group (C shares). The Motley Fool recommends the following options: short August 2021 $65 puts on Redfin. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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