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The author, Choncé Maddox.
Choncé Maddox
I network with other professionals and pay attention to which companies value my work and pay me fairly.
I stay educated about the value of homeownership and opportunities like down payment assistance.
I read a lot about saving and investing and use investing apps that make it easy to build wealth.
Growing up, my parents taught me that racial disparities existed in various shapes and forms. But when I started my financial journey in 2015, seeing the cold hard data behind the racial wealth gap hit me like a ton of bricks.
According to the Federal Reserve, white Americans hold 84% of US wealth and make up 60% of the population. Meanwhile, Black Americans hold 4% of wealth and make up 13% of the population.
In fact, 2022 data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that on average, Black families had about $957,000 less wealth and Hispanic families had $982,000 less wealth than white families.
While these numbers look discouraging, I’ve never been more encouraged to build wealth as Black woman in America. I have four siblings, and we often talk about how we want to be the generation to build wealth and pass something on to our kids.
Here are three things I’m doing to make this dream a reality.
1. Making sure I have a say in what I earn
I became self-employed in 2016. While I don’t believe this is the career solution for everyone, I’m so grateful that I can set and negotiate my own rates. Sometimes I still struggle with charging enough for my freelance services, which involve content creation and digital marketing.
However, I tend to do a lot of research on how much my services are worth, and I’m not afraid to network with other freelancers. About two years ago, I joined a group with other self-employed people where we share tips and leads and encourage each other to be more successful.
Joining this group has helped me gain confidence in my abilities to be able to overcome mindset obstacles that have prevented me from charging what I feel I’m worth. I can’t afford to be underpaid when I know that the wage gap exists.
My husband is a W-2 employee, and I encourage him to research salaries and compensation trends as well. We use sites like Payscale, Glassdoor, and Salary.com along with other public wage reports from different companies. We also discuss ways that we can build more professional experience and grow our skills to be more valuable at work as well as which companies and brands have demonstrated the ability to pay minorities fair wages for their work.
2. Educating myself to buy a home with confidence
I believe that home ownership is important in building wealth. Pew Research backs my thoughts up by sharing statistics that indicate a direct relationship between homeownership and net worth.
Pew Research cited 2022 data from the US Census Bureau that 74.6% of white households owned their homes, compared with 45.3% of Black households. Racial disparities, biases, and discrimination have also played a key role in these results and make it harder for some Black Americans to become homeowners.
Back in 2016, my husband and I knew we wanted to become homeowners, so we started planning for this a year or two in advance. We worked on our credit, and I attended a free homeownership education class hosted by a local mortgage company.
We learned about down payment assistance programs. Then, in 2018 when we bought our home, we were able to receive a grant to boost our down payment. The process of buying and caring for a home taught us a lot and has actually sparked my interest in investing in real estate, and the ability to build equity through homeownership contributes to me being able to build wealth.
3. Making learning about saving and investing my new hobby
Several years ago, I immersed myself in the personal finance world. I love reading blogs, watching educational videos, and reading finance books. I found a book called “The Simple Path to Wealth” and read it twice. Not everything in this book was directly relatable to me, but I still had some major takeaways.
What shocked me was the fact that you can start investing with just a little money. I began putting money into fractional shares through an app called Stash. Later, I started using Acorns to save and was impressed as I watched my money grow over time.
In 2017, I opened an IRA for the first time, and just contributed whatever I could. It wasn’t until 2020 that I was actually able to max out my contributions for the first time.
It took some time, and I’m still on the journey with lots to learn. Overall, putting in the time and money to learn more about finances has helped me make wise money decisions and have a better shot at building wealth as a Black woman.