Building Generational Wealth Through Investing with Calvin Williams, Jr. | Ep. 24

• Tiffany introduces Calvin Williams Jr. as the first Black owner of an automated wealth management platform and founder of FreemanCapital.co. They discuss his family's history starting with his great-grandparents who were among the first out of slavery.

• Calvin explains that Freeman Capital is named after his great-grandparents George and Evelyn Freeman who began buying rental properties in Washington, DC in the 1950s.

They knew that just saving is not going to be enough to get me where I want my family and my family legacy to be. And so I had to do something else.

• They practiced a 'fix it or flip it' mentality before it was popular, providing housing to the community while planting seeds for generational wealth.

• Calvin emphasizes that people who use financial advisors generally have at least double the wealth of those who don't. He discusses how having someone to discuss estate planning could have changed outcomes for families who sold assets prematurely.

Even just having someone to have that conversation with, that in and of itself is a massive privilege.

• Calvin shares how his family's open financial discussions enabled him to start investing early. He opened a ShareBuilder account (later acquired by ING Bank, then Capital One) with $20-30 of allowance money during the dot-com boom.

It was like really kind of game-changing because I remember that you could buy companies or buy shares of a company for like $1.99 a transaction.

• This early exposure showed him the power of making money through investing rather than manual labor.

• Tiffany discusses how she teaches her two sons about money by paying them for good grades and requiring them to divide earnings into save, spend, and donate buckets. She also started 529 college savings plans for them.

• Calvin mentions using Quicken at ages 14-15 to track his McDonald's earnings and project future financial milestones like buying a house.

• Calvin explains how his parents added him as an authorized user on their credit cards at 18, giving him decades of good credit history. Combined with his full-time co-op salary, this enabled him to qualify for a house at 20.

This is how generational wealth can go from person to person because my parents did hard work. They maintained their credit. And then when they added me to their card, now I now had decades of good credit as well.

• He rented two of three bedrooms to college friends who paid his mortgage during his remaining college years.

• Calvin describes Freeman Capital's three pillars: financial planning with automated budgeting and debt payoff plans, access to certified financial planners, and investment management. The service costs $27/month - 'the cost of Netflix and Hulu.'

We're focused on trying to treat everyday people like they're millionaires.

• The platform includes education through webinars, self-paced courses, and blogs, all aimed at closing the wealth gap.