Cassandra Cummings Delves Into ‘Stocks & Stilettos Group' & The Spring Into Stocks' Event + More
It's way up at Angela Yee. I'm Angela Yee and my Wealth Wednesday partner, Stacy Tisdale is here today.
Happy Wealth Wednesdays, everybody, Happy National Financial Literacy Month. And we are going to make you all very literate in the stock market, so we don't miss this next bull market with the one and only Cassandra Cummings, who is the founder of the Stocks and Stiletto Society, which is a group of over one hundred thousand black female investors, and she's also the author of Fearless Finance, a timeless guide to managing month to building wealth.
Always a pleasure to have you, by the way, such an amazing community. When I went to her event in Vegas, I met so many people that I keep in touch with to this day. Really, you know, and I think things like that are so valuable because you want to be around people who are interested in the things that you're interested in. In the conversations that we were able to have, I mean, I met angel investors, hotel owners, all black women you know at this event. So yeah, it's incredible.
So you have first of all, tell everybody about Stocks and Stiletto Society. It's over one hundred thousand.
The fastest going online community for women investors. Yes, it is.
So. I started the community about eight years ago, and I really just wanted to teach women how to buy stock, how to buy and sell stock in the stock market, because when I was with the firm, a lot of my clients didn't look like me, and I'm like, you know, we have to be at this table. We need to see at this table. And so that's what really prompted me to start the community, and the community has grown. We actually reach about a quarter of a million people. Wow, yeah, that's what Facebook says.
That's great.
How did you get that many black women to invest in stocks when you consider sixty percent of black women in this country are not invested at all.
I know, I was so shocked to see that statistic. Sixty percent of black women are not investing in the stock market.
And I think it has to do.
With creating a sort of sorority around money and around stock. So there's a sisterhood that we've created around the stock market, and who wouldn't want to be a part of that, right?
Yeah? And I think also a lot of it has to do with the conversations that you are having like when you're going to brunch, are you talking about, oh, you know, I just did this. And then I also feel like sometimes we feel that we don't have the extra money to be able to invest. I know, you know, there were times in my life when I was trying to figure out how I'm going to pay all my bills every single month. And when you're in that space, sometimes you're like, I don't have the extra money to be able to invest in the stock market. I got to hold down my family. When I do have extra money, I'm trying to make sure that, you know, the family is good, the kids are good. I want to take them on a trip. I want to make sure they get nice things.
Right, you don't need to be rich to invest the first stuff.
Yeah, you don't have to be rich to invest.
And I think inside of the community, what happens is that you get that proximity to success. So you see the women making strides. They're starting with two hundred dollars and growing their accounts to twenty thousand dollars, and that's inspiring other women to also know that they can do it as well. And so I think the community itself we just sort of feed off each other because success leaves clues and success is contagious. So that's what we do in the community.
And you send out some great email updates too. Now, the last one had to do with beyond Oh yes, Cowboy Carter album and some of the investing secrets that we got from Beyonce's album. So can you talk about that a little bit here since we're all on the Cowboy Carter wave right now.
Yes, yes, So Beyonce is always dropping gems and the Cowboy Carter album is no different. But there are three things that I shared with the community today about her investing lessons that she can pass on to people who are kind of watching her. So the first one is self belief, like really having believed that she could do a coy album to really sort of like buff the system and cross over into a whole different genre. And so I think that has to be applied to you as well when you're investing.
Get out of your comfort zone.
Get out of your comfort zone. So let's not be scared to get this money, That's what I'm saying. And Beyonce is not fearful of any of that. She's going to go for what she wants. The second one is about consistency. She's on her eighth solo album, so she is definitely sticking to it. She's got stintuitiveness, she's determined, tenacity. All of that needs to also get carried over to when you're investing. You can't expect to invest for two weeks and make a million dollars starting with five hundred dollars and even in.
The midst of starting a family, having children, going through whatever she went through with her husband, because she talks about that in her music as well, but still making sure you have that consistency right.
And I think the third thing that's really key is collaboration. Now, she was not a country singer, but she aligned herself with other key black country artists and even you know, other country artists Mighty Cyrus, you know, she did a collab with her. But collaborating with people are going to you know, they're going to help you get to your goals that much faster. So just think this album is so good because of these collaborations, and that's what we need to apply when it comes to investing.
In honor of Miss Carter, let's stick it back, let's stick with this comfort zone thing. That's what we were just talking about this in the green room, how it's the same for not as affluent blacks, but if you look at affluent blacks and affluent whites, And the study I was looking at was people who are of a networth of seven hundred thousand dollars, So whites have eighty to ninety percent of all of their assets and stocks. The blacks have that in real estate, right, And we were talking about that.
What are your thoughts on that?
So my thoughts on that Why the numbers skew so differently between whites and blacks when it comes to the stock market. I think it's because we've been led to believe that real estate is really where the money is. And I'm not putting real estate down. There's definitely a lot of wealth in real estate.
That goes ways back. We used to be property, since way back when we've been told you've made it when you made it.
When you own a home and go in touch and they want to walk up the house, put the key in the door.
They can touch it. Stocks not so much, right, but you can see that money on paper, right, So it's a little different. But stocks tend to appreciate at a much faster rate than real estate depending on where you are New York, California, the coastal states a little different, but the interior states. The real estate's not appreciating nearly at the same rate as the stock market. We're hitting all time highs with the S and P five hundred, all time house highs with the Dow Jones. We cannot miss out on this because the wealth gap is only going to get wider if we don't get in the game.
Talk about that because Cassandra's work is for everybody, and I urge everybody to get her book for less finance especial obviously affinity for black women. Seventy percent of Black women are heads of household, responsible for all of their family members well being, taking care of friends and family. What happens if they don't invest?
Wow, I mean, I hate to think about that, but if they don't invest, life is going to be so much more difficult. I was reading something on the Wiser website before I came in Wiser Women's Institute for a Secured Retirement. If you can make it to sixty as a woman, you're going to make it to eighty four. So just think about being able to finance that time period from time you term sixty to eighty four, right, that's another twenty four years that you have to actually finance. Who wants to be working from sixty to eighty four trying to you know, keep your lights on or keep food on the table. So you have to sort of at least find ways to invest so that your money can work for you when you can't.
You know, when we talk about that too, as people are getting older. I was reading some somebody had a question. She was like, look, I am fifty two years old and I've never invested. And now she's concerned because a lot of people don't have any investments or they're at the time and they have to start really retirement as around the corner. What would you tell somebody that's like, I've never invested in it, I don't even really have any spare money, because that is a time when you can't take huge risks. But you got to do something right.
You definitely have to take some risk, and women typically are risk at verse. We got to get over that because our money is just not going to work for us if we put it in a CD or put it in a savings account.
But fifty two.
You actually still have time, plenty of time money, and you got ten years. A lot can happen in ten years. And I know if you can make it to one hundred thousand in your savings, then it's easier for that money to start compounding and really multiplying itself. So I say, get to the first hundred thousand, get that out the way. Then if you can get to the first seven figures, oh my god, the compounding effect on your money is going to be astronauts.
But how do you get to the first hundred thousand.
Get to the first hundred thousand, You probably have to have at least two to three strings of income. So if you only have one W two income, you're gonna have to get at least one other side hustle. I mean, this is the nature of the beast. This thing you know that we're living in the economy is moving so much faster. We got AI, we got a whole bunch of other things that are happening where we have to make money much faster than we ever had to make before.
Wow.
So a lot of people don't realize when they think about the stock market, they think of risk. The US stock market over time averaging out the ups and downs has averaged about a nine percent return every year, and you just can't beat that anywhere else. But to Angela's point, early year, where can people begin?
I mean you can begin with the mag seven, the Magnificent seven, right, that's your Apples, your Amazons in video, Netflix Meta, you know, so start with the Max seven. The Max seven alone returned seventy percent last year.
I know in Vidia, I have a video I have in video in my stash.
I thought you woant have invested one thousand dollars in two thousand and five, and you would have had.
One hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
I saw that one too. It was more than that. In two thousand and five.
You would invested that last week you would.
Have And that's what you don't know if it's too like because people are like, oh, it's too late, but it's not too late because they feel like, man, I kind of missed that wave of investing because you know, they always say, you don't investment, it's at a peak investment.
Things are low and consistently. The very first UH interview I did with Angela and when we decided to start Wealth Wednesdays That was my messaging, you don't need to be rich to invest.
Right.
When I was on the air, I mentioned that my son turned me on to micro investing because he had a little He asked me for my debit card for acorns okay, and I gave it to him. And then a couple months later I looked and there's one thousand dollars in this account and I'm like, what are you doing?
Yeah, what are you doing here?
And he asked me on top of that instead of allowances, well, in addition to allowances, I should say, he adds like forty dollars a month to it.
Nice.
Can you believe that account? I wanted to tell you that it is twenty eight thousand dollars. It's investing spare change, so getting an app rounding up. There's so many ways to participate in this market now.
And he's just in college now, so that's great.
I know that's just from taking my debit card. And when I went to see him over the holiday weekend and we were looking at it, and I'm like, that's money I would have just never thought of. It's, you know, spare change. Yeah, there's so many ways to make money, and I know you have a free initiative for people called Spring into Stocks.
Yes, talk about that. I'm excited.
Spring into Stocks is our free spring stock market event that we're doing. And so we're basically taking a letter out of every I'm sorry, we're taking spring and we're breaking it down. Each letter stands for something. So S is going to be for stock basics. We're going to show you how to get into the market. P is for passive income. We're gonna show you how the stock market can help you make passive income. R is for reads real estate investment trusts, how you can basically have digital real estate. And then I is for index funds. We're gonna go over index funds. In is for stocks you need to own now, stocks you should have in your portfolio now. And then G is gonna be for graphs and charts. How do you actually read charts? What are some of this you know, mystical stuff that you see on charts. We're going to break that down for you. So Spring into Stocks no gate keeping here. We're gonna actually you know, and it's free.
It's free, it's.
Free, and all you have to do to get it is follow Cassandra. We'll follow stocks and stilettos on Instagram.
And she is about trying to say money because she came in here and I showed her some bookshelves, like I was like, I love these bookshels, but they're so expensed. You say, girl, you can go to a Kia, get some LED lights put it back. She said, that's a hack right there, hack, but it is true. There's certain things that you have to think, like when you're splurging, you have to make sure that what you're splurging on, you know the value that it holds, is it worth it? And you know, for me sometimes I'm like, I just like how that looks. But there are ways to get things done where you it can just look like you splurge.
When you got it, you can ball out right so.
Right now or as I like to say, I'm a little cash poor at the moment. Mindset does matter and into existence, you know.
It's huge, I mean, and you just have to be practical about some purchases. Right, do you really have to spend you know, five thousand dollars on a book case?
Hower than that? Okay?
I mean, but you know you can spend two thousand and save the other eight or whatever, and do something different, you know. So it's just really about perspective, mindset, things like that.
But and like you said, it is financial Literacy month, and it is also tax time, tax time, you know, yeah.
Take some of that refund, but really putting small amounts to work and dollar something called dollar cost averaging, which means, no matter what the market's doing, you put the same amount in. Like once a month, I have an extra forty dollars taken out of my bank account and just put into one of these investment apps. That's how you really build wealth.
And that's key to you know, putting it on autopilot because that way you don't have to think about it, and if you can do that, or if you know you're in real estate, you get commission check. Just no off the top, I'm putting ten percent over here in this account. Just really creating those habits for yourself. You talk about starting small. There are a lot of companies that are going to be doing stock splits. We just had Walmart do a stock split. We recently had Tesla Apples. So basically what happens is that they give you if you have a share and they say it's going to be a two for one split. You'll now have two shares, but it will have the same value as that one share had. So if you had a share that was one hundred dollars and they're going to do a two for one split, now you'll have two shares that are worth fifty dollars. And so we have Chipotle, believe it or not, Chipotle, it's a three thousand dollars a share stock and it's about to do a fifty to one split. So do you if you do the math, it's going to be about sixty dollars I think, right, a fifty to one split.
Yeah, Chipotle at sixty dollars is a buy.
It's a huge buy. And so you have to pay attention to these types of things. We talk about these things in our community. Redd it just went public, right, So we talk about companies that go public.
Should we get in?
What price should we get? So all these conversations are taking place inside of the community.
A truth Social talk to me about that, because we saw Donald Trump to truth Social public and now they're saying the value of it drops a billion.
Dollars, never worth anything?
Yeah, how that works? Because I was trying to figure that out because at first they were like, we're to social going public, Donald Trump is going to be worth X, Y and z. Then it did, and then it dropped like incredibly.
Now you're getting into very sophisticated stuff that's kind of spack. Okay, right because I as a special purpose acquisition essentially because it doesn't deserve more than ten seconds.
No, the facks are some spacks are great.
But suppose an investment company. I'm Donald Trump and I go to an investment company and I said, I have you know this thing, the investment company can be public. So by them acquiring his company, he all of a sudden, it's almost like a shortcut to being public. But it's still not. If it's still not a good company the mark, it's gonna devalue it immediately. It was never.
It was never. It was definitely not what it was way because you were talking about how much money to Social laws last year. Yeah, so they're like, there's no way it's worth.
And that's why it's important that you have to do your research. You have to do your own due diligence. A lot of these companies can almost move like penny stocks, where you have this you know, pump and dump, you know, right, things happening to the stock or pop and drop where it shoots up, people run and get their money out and then you're left once it drops. Right, So you have to really be careful about those types of stocks, especially when they're mean stocks or hot stocks. You know, they have a tendency to have really large fluctuations and volatility. So you know, so the best thing really is stocks that we use every day.
Yes, stick with what you know?
Right?
Who that burritos three thousand dollars.
To share it?
Right?
Do I have to know how to invest to become a member of the Stocks and Stilettos Society?
You don't. We start with where you are. So we have women who have never bought stock to women who have seven, you know, seven figure portfolios. So we really sort of you know, it's.
Like a Montessori school. Everybody each other different, all different levels.
Right.
How do people join?
So they can join the Facebook group by going to bit dot lee Stocks and Stilettos. And if you're not able to join inside the group, you can follow us on Facebook just our page, so that's open to everybody.
Okay, is one L two ts? Yeah? About Cassandra and mentorship is so important in community is so in partant inside. Appreciate what you've been doing.
Thank you. I appreciate that you do.
And what is a message that you have for our audience on this financial literacy month? You are our first Wealth Wednesdays of the month.
Oh wow, pick the book up Fearless Finance.
Fearless Finance Stanta coming. That's on Amazon to grab the book.
You know.
My message I would want to leave is, you know, if things get really hard, just continue to push through and to always always take care of your own money. You are going to be the best thing to ever happen to your money. No one will ever take care of your money like you will.
Okay, yeah that's a fact.
And follow Stocks and Stiletto's on Instagram and you get all of her information. It's a it's a great content. I love your content.
Yes, thank your way up on a Wealth Wednesday. Well