Read an Excerpt
Introduction
The American Dream Remixed
The American Dream is a lie.
For too many people in Black and Brown communities, hard work alone isn’t enough to land a house with a white picket fence or the financial security it symbolizes.
For too many of us, dreaming is all we can do.
We’ve followed the rules, played the game—clock in, work hard, clock out, repeat—in the pursuit of a dream that remains just out of reach. We’ve listened to the elders we love tell us to get a good job and not lose it. And we’ve watched as those same elders worked until their bodies broke down, robbing them of the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Even though they fought it, the money made them do it. The need to work, sometimes harder and longer than others in order to take home the same paycheck, took more from them than they realized or were willing to admit. There was little to no room for luxuries such as brand-new cars, furniture, or vacations. Money was solely for the purpose of taking care of the basic necessities, and we knew better than to complain. On some level, we knew our elders wanted more for us, even if they couldn’t always articulate what “more” looked like. They wanted us to be gainfully employed, able to provide for our families and the generations coming after us. But they also hoped we’d be able to thrive in ways they couldn’t.
Everyone, no matter where they’re from, wants the safety and comfort of knowing they can take care of themselves and their families. For so many in our community and those who are reading this book, the stress of not having enough money is suffocating. Living paycheck to paycheck, wondering if you have enough to rob Peter so you can pay Paul, is not financial freedom. Many would say it is its own kind of prison, consuming all of your energy—physical and mental. Once you make it through one week, the only thing you can do is focus on the next week. The nonstop money stress can push you into all kinds of debt traps and jobs that crush your soul, just to keep the lights on. Battling all that—the uncertainty, the indignity, the shame—takes a toll on you, throwing your nervous system off-kilter, messing with your sleep, and breeding constant anxiety, always wary because the game feels fixed.
These kinds of wounds cut deep across generations—the direct result of systems taking so much more than they give back. Discriminatory housing policies have kept Black families from getting the credit and loans that serve as the backbone of financial stability, one reason the average Black family today owns just 10% as much wealth as its White counterparts. Then those same institutions and systems turn around and label our financial challenges the result of “poor decisions,” as if the game weren’t rigged from the start.
A lot of the knowledge about finance taught to MBA students and the White middle class is never taught in many working-class communities of color. This disparity leaves many Black parents without the means to educate their children about critical financial tools such as stock options, real estate investments, debt management, and the significance of homeownership and life insurance, depriving us of economic resources that are readily available to others. But too often, that lack of resources is framed as ignorance or irresponsibility instead of the outcome of discrimination.
When we look back at our lives, we were always in pursuit of the kind of financial freedom our elders wanted for us. As Black men, we have always been keenly aware of how vital freedom is to our people. Many Black and Brown people can trace our collective histories back to a moment when the desire for freedom was so potent that the only thing to do was to fight for it. We are able to enjoy many liberties and opportunities because someone else fought on our behalf. And our mission as the founders of the educational platform Earn Your Leisure has always been to level the playing field for our community. That means fighting for the freedoms denied to us and highlighting the need for policy interventions, from increasing access to capital in underserved communities to granting reparations to Black people to atone for slavery and systemic discrimination, while also providing Black and Brown communities with financial knowledge. Because applied knowledge is power.
We were both born in the Bronx and grew up in Westchester County, New York, playing basketball together since grade school. From an early age, both of us were fascinated by finance, curious about the stock market and how money moves among systems and pockets. After high school, Troy went into education, spending a decade working in the public school system, while Rashad became a financial adviser. Both of us became passionate about spreading financial literacy. One summer, we teamed up on a six-week program for high schoolers to educate them on how to “earn their leisure,” the very thing we believed our elders were pushing us toward. Like Whitney Houston, we believe that children are our future and that teaching them economic principles will reshape the financial habits of a generation. We started using clips from the classroom to share on social media—mini-lessons on credit, stocks, student loans, and more—and noticed that people of all ages were watching and commenting on them.
But we couldn’t shake the feeling that we could do more.
One day, we grabbed an iPhone and a few shotgun mics. Why not start a podcast that brought together two of our favorite things: long talks about personal finance, investing, passive income streams, and the kinds of business opportunities you can pursue outside a nine-to-five alongside barbershop-style conversations about hip hop, sports, and entertainment? We dug deep into barriers to wealth within communities of color, the fact that White households hold significantly more of their wealth in equities, which is a huge contributor to the racial wealth gap, and gave advice on how people could start making their money work harder for them, no matter the status of their bank account.
The next few years were some of the most gratifying and exciting of our lives. A slow trickle of attention turned into a torrent. Within two years, tens of millions of listeners propelled our podcast to the number one spot on the Apple charts. We heard countless stories of people getting out of huge financial debt, investing for the first time, and finally being able to extricate themselves from exploitative corporate and service work jobs. Our little podcast turned into a financial revolution for the culture, a larger platform that provides tangible and digestible information on building wealth to the overlooked, underserved, and underrepresented.
When we are given the proper tools and allowed to build the careers and lives we want with those tools, the impossible becomes standard operating procedure.
