8 Online Platforms To Build Wealth & Get Your Money Right By 2022
Last year brought financial challenges for many, as some were displaced from their jobs while others started new side hustles. But this year, we are set to turn things around! These eight online platforms led by Black women aim to teach us how to get our money right. From budgeting to investing to paying off student loans and beyond, these women will help us all move toward finding financial freedom.
It's time to hit the reset button to learn essential tips, so let's check out a few top personal finance websites and platforms that will help you do just that:
Brown Ambition
Founders Tiffany "The Budgetnista" Aliche and Mandi Woodruff are both long-time powerhouse personal finance experts. They've partnered up to launch the Brown Ambition Podcast, a weekly show to help you live your best financial and professional life. Tiffany and Mandi give it to you to straight, no chaser. They take their individual experiences and add them to interviews with bomb guests to give you an entertaining and informative experience. They're the friends-in-your-head that everyone needs to help make the best financial decisions.
Hello Seven
Hello Seven was founded in 2017 by Rachel Rodgers, an intellectual property attorney and business coach. Her philosophy is "We should all be millionaires," and the tagline is the name of the book she recently wrote. Through her podcast, website, and club, she has helped women scale their businesses to seven figures, build personal wealth, and gain economic power.
Journey to Launch
Jamila Souffrant created Journey to Launch, documenting her journey to financial independence. She went from traveling for more than three hours to work every day to finding financial freedom by working for herself. The platform's podcast features guests that share financial tips as well as their own personal journeys toward financial freedom.
Finances Demystified
Finances Demystified was founded in 2012 by Dominique Broadway. After working at a brokerage firm that focused on high net-worth individuals, she learned how the wealthy successfully managed their money. Noticing a gap in the industry that made wealth building inaccessible to many, she decided to educate individuals about personal finance and show them how they, too, can become high net-worth earners.
Trade and Travel
Trade and Travel was founded in 2017 by Teri Ijeoma, a self-taught stock and options enthusiast. She has educated hundreds of people on how to invest in stocks and make money via the stock market. She teaches people how to navigate investing to make it work for them and is an avid traveler who promotes the beauty of what financial freedom can mean for women.
The Finance Bar
Marsha Barnes founded The Finance Bar in 2014. She's a financial expert with a decade of experience, and her platform helps women and couples achieve financial wellness through coaching, education, and an innovative learning hub.
Frugal Feminista
Kara Stevens is the founder of Frugal Feminista, a personal finance and personal development company launched in 2014. She is committed to helping women heal their relationships with money and with themselves and help women to become happy, wealthy, and brave so they can unapologetically live life on their terms.
The Student Loan Doctor
Too many people are buried underneath student loan debt, watching interest accumulate astronomically over time. Sonia Lewis, AKA "The Student Loan Doctor," launched her platform to provide coaching and consumer advocacy services, and she's helped more than 20,000 clients nationwide to eliminate federal student loan debt.
We hope these eight online platforms will help you get prepped for success in 2022. Check them out and let us know what you think!
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Beyond Burnout: Nicole Walters' Blueprint For Achieving Career Success On Your Own Terms
Nicole Walters has always been known for two things: her ambition and her ability to recognize when life’s challenges can also double as an inspiring, lucrative brand.
This was first evident more than a decade ago when she quit her job as the corporate executive of a Fortune 500 company during a Periscope livestream. “I’m not sure if there’s an alignment of [our] future trajectory. I’m going to work for myself. I'm promoting myself to work for myself,” she said at the time before flashing a smile at the viewing audience. As she resigned on camera, a constant stream of encouraging messages floated upwards on the screen.
By 2021, she’d fashioned her work as a corporate consultant and her personal life with her husband and three adopted daughters into a reality show, She’s The Boss, for USA Network. This year, she released the New York Times bestselling memoir Nothing Is Missing, written as she was in the process of getting a divorce and dealing with her eldest daughter’s struggles with substance use.
Convinced that there’s no way the 39-year-old has achieved all of this without intentional strategic planning, I asked her about it when we spoke less than a week before Christmas. I’d seen videos on social media of her working on 2024 planning for other brands, and I wanted to know what that looked like following her own year of success.
She listed a number of goals, including ensuring that the projects she takes on in the new year align with her identity “as a Black woman, as an African woman, as a mother, as someone who has lived a [rebuilding] season and is now trying to live boldly and entirely as themselves.” But, I was shocked by how much of her business planning also prioritized rest.
Despite the bestselling book, a self-titled podcast, and working with numerous corporations, Walters said she’s been taking Fridays off. This year, she doesn’t want to work on Mondays, either.
“A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement,” she said, noting that she’ll check in with herself around March to see how successful this plan has been. The goal, Walters said, is to only be working on Tuesdays and Thursdays by sometime in 2025. “It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to have happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change.”
"A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement... It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change."
Walters said the decision to progressively work less was partially in response to her previously held notions about her career, especially as an entrepreneur. “When I first started, I thought burnout was a part of it,” she said. “What I didn’t realize is that even if you’re able to bounce out of burnout or get back to it, there’s a cumulative impact on your body. If you think of your body as a tree and every time you go through burnout, you are taking a hack out of your trunk, yes, that trunk will heal over, and the tree will continue to grow, but it doesn't mean that you don’t have a weakened stem.”
But, the desire for increased rest was also in response to the major shifts that occurred three years ago when she was experiencing major changes in her family and realized her metaphorical tree was “bending all the way over.”
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“One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity,” she added. “That is some language that I think is just now starting to really get unpacked.” In recent years, there’s been an increased awareness of achieving balance in life, with Tricia Hersey’s “The Nap Ministry” gaining attention based on the idea that rest, especially for Black women, is a form of resistance. Even online phrases such as “soft life” and “quiet quitting” have hinted at a cultural shift in prioritizing leisure over professional ambition.
"One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity."
If companies are lining up to consult with Walters about their brands and products, then women have been looking to her for guidance on starting over since she invited them to livestream her resignation 12 years ago. As viewers continue to demand more from content creators in the form of intimate, personal details, Walters has navigated her personal brand with a sense of transparency without oversharing the vulnerable details about her life, especially when it comes to her family.
The entrepreneur said she’d been approached to write a book for several years and was initially convinced she was finally ready to write one about business. “I started to do that, and then I went through my divorce. When that happened, I said, why would I write a book telling people to get the life that I have when I’m not sure about the life that I have,” she said.
Instead, she decided to write Nothing Is Missing and provide a closer look at her life, starting with being born to immigrant Ghanaian parents (“You need to know my childhood to know why I’m passionate about entrepreneurship.”) through the adoption of her three daughters and eventual divorce. Despite her desire to share, however, she said she felt protective of the privacy of her family, including her ex-husband.
When discussing this with me, Walters said she was reminded of a lesson she learned from actress Kerry Washington, who released her own memoir, Thicker Than Water, just a week before Walters’ book release. Washington’s memoir grapples with family secrets, too, specifically the fact that she was conceived using a sperm donor and didn’t learn about it until she was already a successful TV star. While Washington reflects on how the decision and subsequent deception impacted her, she’s also careful to hold space for her parents’ experiences, too. “A lot of things she said was that she had to recognize where she was the supporting character and where she was the main character,” Walter said.
This is something Walter worked to do in Nothing Is Missing when discussing her daughter’s struggles with addiction. “I was very intentional about making sure that I did not reveal more than what was required,” she said. “If I say something about someone’s addiction, I don’t need to go into the list of the substances they used, how they used them, what I found. [I don’t need to] walk into a room and paint a picture of what it looked like for people to understand.”
Walters said some of the most vulnerable moments in the book barely made a ripple once it was released. She was extremely nervous to write about getting an abortion, she said. But no one has asked her about this in the months since the book was released. Instead, people have been more interested in quirkier revelations, such as the fact that she once appeared on Wheel of Fortune.
“I have bared my soul about this thing I went through in my youth that has changed me for people, and people are like, ‘So how heavy was the wheel when you spun it?’” she said, chuckling. “It just goes to show that people never worry about the thing that you worry about.”
With the success of Nothing Is Missing, Walters said she still isn’t planning to release a business book at the moment. But, as she navigates parenting a teenager and two adult children while also navigating a relationship with her new fiancé, Walters said she believes she has at least one or two more books to write about her personal journey. “There is sort of an arc of where my life has gone that I know I’ve got something more to say about this that I think is important, relevant and necessary,” she said.
In just three years, Walters’ life has undergone a major transformation. There’s no telling what the next three years will have in store for her, but it seems likely she’ll retain an inspired audience wherever life takes her.
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According to my mother, she had a full hysterectomy at 29. On this side of life, I can’t even wrap my head around how absolutely insane that sounds because 29 is just a few years from when someone’s brain has fully developed. Yet the reality of how much Western medicine tends to be so…recklessly apathetic when it comes to our people is another message for another time. The reason why I’m leading with that part of her story is because that happening is how I know so much about supplements like evening primrose oil, black cohosh, and what we’re going to discuss today: wild yam.
Something that all of these have in common is they are an all-natural approach for women who may have imbalanced hormones, have a difficult time with their cycle, or need some help getting through menopause. And because wild yam is a plant that has a solid reputation for containing a property known as diosgenin, which is oftentimes used to create estrogen and DHEA in laboratories — that’s why we’re going to dive into why, if you’re looking for a natural alternative to get your hormone levels right, wild yam is something that you might want to consider adding to your overall health regimen. Because it can do that and so many other things for you.
I’ve got 10 reasons to consider wild yam right here.
10 Reasons To Add Wild Yam to Your Health Regimen
1. Wild Yam Is a Solid Protein Alternative for Vegetarians and Vegans
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If you happen to be vegetarian or vegan and you’re looking for some protein alternatives to meat (check out “Vegetarian Or Vegan? Check Out These High Protein Foods.”), wild yam qualifies. That’s because it contains around two grams of protein per serving, not to mention the fact that it’s also a good source of copper, potassium, manganese, and fiber. Just a word of caution, though: if you’re someone who has a protein S deficiency, run wild yam by your healthcare provider before taking it. Since you tend to blood clot easier than others, the estrogen-like effect of wild yam could intensify this particular health issue for you.
2. Wild Yam Can Be “Taken in” in Several Different Forms
Since some people like to make soup that consists of wild yam, stir fry wild yam, or even create a wild yam soufflé, of course, one way that you can get wild yam into your system is by cooking with it. However, there are other ways to benefit from it, too, from tablets and capsules to teas, creams, and powders. I like to use a homemade cream that I found by referral. Anyway, do some research into what you think would be the most comfortable and convenient for you. Since there are many, that’s another reason to consider adding it to your life.
3. Wild Yam Regulates Blood Sugar Levels
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If getting your blood sugar levels to where they need to be is one of your current health-related goals, wild yam may be able to help you out. There are more and more studies coming out indicating that there are properties in wild yam that can help manage blood sugar thanks to the chemical dioscoretine that is in it.
4. Wild Yam Can Balance Out Your Hormone Levels
Again, don’t get me started on how quickly Westernized medicine is willing to cosign on a drug that can come with more side effects than the issue you’re using the drug for, and yet they want to frown on alternative methods (eye roll). That’s my intro to saying that as far as wild yam being able to help balance your hormones, a lot of medical sites say there is no solid evidence to support it. I’ll just say that I know women who use it topically during PMS to reduce bloating during their cycle to reduce discomfort, and during menopause to reduce hot flashes. Do with that what you will; in the meantime, you can read more about how wild yam is potentially beneficial in the hormone department by clicking here.
5. Wild Yam Is Used As an All-Natural Fertility Treatment
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Speaking of hormone levels, if you’re currently trying to get pregnant and it’s been difficult because your hormones are not as balanced as they should be, this is another way that wild yam could prove to be beneficial. Research reveals that not only does it contain properties that can help to increase your estrogen levels, but it’s also able to improve the quality of your cervical mucus which can make it easier for you to conceive. Just make sure that if you are pregnant or nursing you DON’T use wild yam. In those cases, its estrogen-like effects could be problematic instead of beneficial.
6. Wild Yam Reduces Inflammation
If bodily inflammation is something that you’re currently trying to stay on top of, the diosgenin that’s in wild yam can help with that, too. There are even studies that cite that inflammatory issues like asthma actually see better results when diosgenin is used instead of certain synthetic treatments.
7. Wild Yam Boosts Cognitive Function
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Want to boost your memory? Use some wild yam. Wish to improve your emotional well-being? Use some wild yam. Looking to slow down the signs of aging in your brain? Yep, you guessed it. Keeping your brain in great condition is just one more thing that diosgenin has the proven ability to do.
8. Wild Yam Brings Relief to Rheumatoid Arthritis
So, if you were to go online to purchase some fresh wild yam, you might notice that another name given to it is “rheumatism root.” That’s because remember how I said a sec ago that wild yam is good at decreasing bodily inflammation? Well, since rheumatoid arthritis is inflammation of the joints, there are ongoing studies revealing that wild yam could be beneficial when it comes to soothing arthritic-related symptoms, too.
9. Wild Yam Soothes Muscular Discomfort
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Since wild yam contains properties that help to balance and even elevate certain hormone levels, it’s actually something that many bodybuilders are fans of. Not only because it can help to build muscle mass but, if you’re someone who experiences muscle cramps or spasms while working out (think charley horses), some research reveals that wild yam has antispasmodic effects — which means it can (possibly) help to bring relief to menstrual cramps too.
10. Wild Yam Is Great for Menopause
Listen, the fact that wild yam comes with zero side effects as far as hormone replacement alternatives go is enough reason to give it a shot in my book because the same cannot be said for going the more conventional route (you can read more about all of that here). And although studies continue to be ongoing, there are some that say wild yam (some say taken internally more than applied topically) can help to make menopause-related symptoms more manageable, again thanks to the diosgenin that’s in it.
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You know what they say: knowledge is power. So, if you’ve been looking for an all-natural approach to certain health-related issues, at the very least, do some of your own deep diving into wild yam. It’s something I’m a fan of and have not one regret for that being the case. Not a one.
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