W hen Troy Millings and Rashad Bilal were early in their careers as a public-school teacher and a financial adviser, respectively, they both quickly realized how little their charges understood about finance.
Given this dearth of knowledge, the two friends decided to team up and start a podcast, Earn Your Leisure , which teaches financial literacy specifically catered to Black audiences who have historically been shut out of financial systems.
The podcast found a curious and sizable audience during the pandemic, and the duo now helms a rapidly growing media empire that also includes an annual business conference, Invest Fest, and a book, You Deserve to Be Rich , which was released in January. For Millings, 42, financial trauma is personal: he watched his parents, Jamaican immigrants, work diligently year after year, only to lose their house due to their lack of understanding of interest rates.
As he grew older, he realized that the version of the American Dream he had been taught, in which working-class people could carefully save up to buy a house, seemed increasingly distant. So the pair encourages their listeners to pursue multiple income streams and take on entrepreneurial projects. Their book also walks readers through the s of long-term investing, even for those on a minimum-wage paycheck.
The duo had a busy They also broke ground on a acre residential community outside Accra, Ghana. And they launched a pilot financial-literacy curriculum in 10 public high schools in the Bronx, which they hope to expand across New York City. Millings and Bilal are aware that investing can be very daunting for newcomers and that their advice comes with risk.
