When I retired I started attacking my bucket list. One of my top 3 items was a pilgrimage to Tulsa Oklahoma – home of Black Wall Street.
I didn’t learn about Black Wall Street until I started studying finance at San Francisco State College. Imagine my surprise that this display of financial excellence was just hours away from me when I was stationed at the army base at Fort Riley Kansas and I never knew it.
I was determined to go back to the mid-west and immerse myself in this example of financial excellence.
But the Robert Frost poem that spoke of “how way leads to way doubted if one ever makes it back” seemed to be looming.
But I did make it back to the mid-west, and did I get an education! A fortuitous meeting with someone in Emeryville, CA while having lunch with my wife, lead me to a walking tour guide in Tulsa.
When I made it to Tulsa I learned more in the 1st 15 minutes of meeting my tour guide than all the years of reading and watching documentaries.
The immense wealth that was created on Black Wall Street was incredible.
This level of prosperity reminded me of what Malcolm Gladwell stated in his book Outliers. Gladwell stated that the single, greatest predictor of wealth today was whether or not your ancestors owned land after emancipation.
If your ancestors did not own land as Gladwell pointed out, you can be the change that you want to see in your family history.
Start with stock ownership. The barrier to getting started is zero. With financial apps you can get started with as little as $5.
Start with real estate and learn to use leverage. There are banks and community organizations that will literally hold your hand through the ownership process and point you to the resources to help you accomplish it.
Start with insurance to protect and grow your assets and to make sure you leave your heirs something other than debt.
I made my pilgrimage to Black Wall Street for education but I left with inspiration.
-Monk
We spend 12 – 20 years in school learning about every subject, except for money. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how to make money or how to grow the money we have.
My approach to financial literacy is to teach it in a way that makes the complexities of finance so simple that your investing actions become instinctive.
To the youth, young adults, and the mothers who raise them,
Financial Literacy: Monk Says… Learn the Game
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