The Dr Boyce Breakdown
Are college savings plans a waste of money?
Good morning everybody. Good morning. Welcome to Money in the Morning. I'm Millionaire Training Camp. My name is Dr. Bois Watkins. We meet seven days a week. You guys know this. And I hope you guys have a wonderful day. I'm having a good day. Even though this morning I was not in the 5 a.m. club. I was in the 8 a.m. club. That's just freaking pathetic. But I did get up and get on the exercise bike for almost an hour. And so that makes a difference. It makes a little bit of a difference. But yeah, I messed it up today, man. I messed it up pretty bad. But we were up late last night. Had some teenager stuff going on that involved the late night phone call, the kind of, you know, so somebody's going to get grounded this week. Somebody lost her phone. Somebody did not, they had her phone confiscated. You can imagine the rest. I'm not going to be snitching out here in public on the little girl. But yeah, so that kept me up last night. But you know how this is apparent. You kind of, I don't, I personally enjoy the dad stuff. Even the bad, even the bad dad stuff. It's all like, it's all part of an amazing experience. So anyway, I hope you all are doing well. And what I'm doing is I'm sitting out that text to get us started. And if you're not on the text, let's make sure you text the word morning to 87948. Text morning to the phone number 87948. And I'll send you a wake up call. And then also Dr. Alicia later on today is tonight. She's doing her mental health Monday. We've talked about how mental health is a very important part of financial health that you can't have one without the other. Most of the time that if you have a lot of money and you don't have your mental health, you're going to lose all your money. And if you, if you don't, also if you have good mental health and no money, well, money, a lack of money, can jeopardize your mental health. Give me a guess if you have ever been in a situation where the stress of being broke and the stress of making hard, horrible financial choices has ever just driven you to like borderline insanity. I know I have. I know I have money has made me insane before. Now, because you can't focus on your big dreams if you're stuck on the little stuff, right? You can't really make a 20 year plan if you don't have enough money to buy food this afternoon. So, so, so, so that stuff becomes a distraction. Being broke is a huge, horrible distraction. And I'm just telling you that you want to get that distraction out of the way so you can focus on your high level of consciousness. All right. So, um, all right, so let's talk about the black wealth problem. Um, I, I, I believe that this thing I'm going to talk to you guys about today will solve the black wealth problem in about a decade, right? I believe that within one decade, the black wealth problem would disappear if we all did this one thing and this one idea, which I think is worthy of consideration is being presented to you by a guy who has spent decades studying this stuff. You know, uh, my background in case you're one, in case you're new. Um, I'm a finance professor. I got my doctorate in finance over 20 something years ago. And if you want to know the awkward experience of getting a PhD in finance, it's that you almost have to become an alien because the type of thinking required to even do the insanely difficult work that we were forced to do is not normal thinking. Like you really, you would get scrutinized beyond belief. Uh, every idea was challenged. Uh, every, everybody was a hater. You know, every, every professor in the department was a complete hater. Even if you spent a hundred hours doing the most brilliant work imaginable, imagine just doing all that work for like six months and having somebody chop it up and tear it into pieces. And so, uh, anyway, that's a, and by the way, I forgot to mention, thank you, Patricia. You reminded me, uh, if you want to join Dr. Alicia and mental health Monday, uh, pull out your phone and text the word love to the number eight, seven, nine, four, eight. She's, uh, she's a relationship therapist. She believes deeply in black love as do I. And so, uh, they, but they cover a lot of mental health topics, uh, things that relate to men, things that relate to women, things that relate to family, even children, things like that. So anyway, um, so yeah, so, so, so let's, let's get back to where was it when I lost my train of thought. All right. So, so let's talk about, uh, the black wealth problem and what, what's really going on. Um, if you're talking about, uh, the black wealth issue, uh, the biggest issue that we have is that our wealth is going down. Our wealth is going down just like, uh, population is actually going down. In case you guys don't know, the global, the world global population is declining. And a lot of this in my view is due to very bad policies where for many, many decades, we were worried that there were too many people. And if you remember, if you're old enough to remember, you remember there was a time where, uh, where they were campaigning actively for people to have fewer children. You might remember that they were trying to reverse mother nature, almost like playing God in a way. They were like, no, no, no, you know, go ahead and, and, and, and terminate the pregnancy. If you get pregnant, uh, make sure you're doing your birth control stuff because you don't want to have kids because kids are a burden and they're expensive and they're hard to raise. Well, now they're, they're, they're, they're flipping out, they go in the other direction. They're now saying like we need more kids, right? Well, because, uh, human beings are an economic entity that has tremendous value. Human beings possess something that's really important called, uh, called human capital. Human capital matters for a country. Countries that cannot have babies are poorer countries. They lose their wealth. Why do they lose their wealth? Because a lot of your wealth is connected to your productivity. If you don't, if you don't understand, if that doesn't make sense, let me give you an example. Uh, give me a yes or no. Do you make more money when, or not even a yes or no, just answer the question and chat. Do you make more money or less money when you're productive? Do you make more money or less money when you're working hard? Typically on average, um, do you make more money or less money when you're putting more hours into whatever it is that you do when you spend, uh, you know, 50 hours a week at the factory. Do you make more money than if you spent 10 hours a week at the factory? That's all you need to understand to understand why human, why having more human beings matters. Why more people in the country actually ask to your wealth. So, so in the midst of what's happening globally, and I'm going to circle back to the original point because I wanted to talk about the black wealth issue, um, what's happening globally is that somebody told us to stop having babies. And when they did that, we listened because we think that some of these, um, idiots are experts, uh, when clearly they're, they're stupid because it, all these policies they were giving you, uh, we're not, we're not actually going to be beneficial. And, and it's, it's so, so you got to be real careful about listening to so-called experts. Uh, a lot of times they just, they just make, they're just making a huge mistake. And so now now they're like, oh, we need everyone to start having kids again. But now people are like, no, but we've already have a culture that is built around men and women stay staying away from each other. Uh, a lot of the surveys, uh, when we talked about this briefly, but a lot of the surveys show that young men under 25, the majority of them have not even gone out with a woman in a year. A lot of them haven't had sex in a year, you know, and, and a lot, and then, and then on top of that, you know, there's also, and I talked to a young guy about this and he said, you know, a lot of it's a hassle. Um, I don't want to deal with somebody, you know, mistreating me. I, I, he said, I'm, I'm worried that I, that if I say the wrong thing, I'm going to offend somebody. So, so I don't step to a girl because I don't want her to be offended. If she rejects, if she likes me, then, then, then it's all good. But if she doesn't like me, then maybe I've offended her or I'm going to get yelled at or I'm going to get called a predator or, you know, like these are real conversations I've had with young guys and, and, and so basically, um, and I saw this in China when I taught a finance class in China. Um, I remember that, uh, it was really strange because China, because they had that one child policy. Anybody remember that? Anybody remember when China was basically like telling everybody, not to only have one kid. Anybody remember that? They did that for many, many decades, and they implemented that in terms of social interactions between males and females. Because here's something you may or may not know this. Um, but did you all tell this is going to really shock you? This is going to blow your mind. So get ready. Are you sitting down? Are you sitting down? This is going to, this, this information, this is going to just make your head explode. You all ready? Did y'all know that, that a baby requires both a man and a woman? Did y'all, how many of y'all knew that? And did you also know that if men and women spend more time together, they actually have more kids? Somebody gets pregnant. Did y'all know that? Did y'all know that? And then they, they, and then they get together and they do this thing called sex. And, and then this baby comes out. What's a baby got to do with it? You know, hey, early, I, it's, it's, I know it's mind boggling. See, you already know that coming to class, you wasn't just going to get financial stuff. You're going to get the birds and the bees, right? That's crazy, right? So, so here's what China did that was really ridiculous. Cause I, I, I give China, the Chinese government credit for the smart things they did, but one of the dumbest things they did was they implemented into the social policy rules that pretty much incentivize the girls and the boys to stay away from each other from an early age. Like, you know, one of my students, I never forget, like, here's what I'll tell you why I asked her the question and then I'll tell you what our answer was. I noticed in my class that the boys were really shy and the boys would all sit on the same side of the room and the girls would all sit on the other side of the room and the girls, you know, would just sit there and they, I think they kind of wanted the boys to say something to them, but the boys were like, I'm not talking to a girl. God, no, no, Lord, that's scary. Right? And I asked one of the, I think I talked to one of the girls. I said, I noticed that there's no, like, couples in the class. Like, there's no boys sitting next to his girlfriend down there. I said, we had that in the United States and she said, well, she said, no, she said, when I was in high school, if you got caught holding hands with a boy, you would get expelled. Not suspended. She said, expelled. I said expelled. She said, yeah. So they incorporated this. So now when it gets to the point where people are supposed to be together, when men and women are supposed to hook up and connect and start making kids and typically in their twenties, that's a, that's actually ideal from a fertility standpoint to have kids. I know people say you should be having kids when you're 50 and stuff. That's, to me, that's more of that social engineering. I, if you look at the science, the science does not support this idea of having kids super late, right? The sperm and the eggs are healthy up until really super healthy up until about 35, 34, 33, 34, 35 starts to kind of decline a little bit. So anyway, long story short, it made me really think deeply not just about the wealth implications of a declining population, which is devastating. That's why they're concerned. I mean, you always got to follow the money. When you look at the things politicians care about, you got to pay attention to the money first. The money's what they're, they're, they're, they're upset because if Japan does not have children, they know that their productivity as a nation is going to drop, which is going to kill their wealth. They're going to decline into becoming a third world country if they don't fight for some immigrants, right? And I know immigration is a politically charged topic. There are different types of immigration. There's legal, there's illegal, there's highly educated, there's low education. It kind of depends on how you view it. I don't want to talk about that part, but a lot of countries are fighting over immigrants because they're like, oh my God, these third world countries that didn't listen, when we told everybody to stop having babies, well, they've got the kids. And so there, we want you to send your kids to us. And I want you to really process this for a minute in the context of a black wealth. For hundreds of years, other people have always wanted your kids. And in some cases, they wanted our kids more than we wanted our kids. I mean, if you think about how many times you have little children that could be assets to the family, I wrote about this in my book, The Ten Commandments of Black Economic Power. I talk about how your children are an asset. But for whatever reason, we're trained to believe children are just a liability that children get in the way that having kids is kind of like, oh man, let's go miss up my groove. I can't go out to the club no more, right? But the problem, the thing that you got to remember if you are financially conscious is that youth is an asset. Energy, the energy that young people bring, the ideas they bring, the 40 hours of labor every week they might bring, that's an asset to a nation. That's a multi trillion dollar asset. So countries are concerned about losing their youth because they know that that's going to lead to a loss of money. So I want you to process this as you look at your own children. And as they get on your nerves and do stuff, that's going to cost you money and all these things, I need you to really understand what kind of an asset they are. Like my father, when I was born, he was 16, my biological father, he didn't have interest in having a baby. That was going to get in the way of his heroin addiction, apparently, or him getting more girlfriends. I was not of interest to him as a child. But there was another man that came along and met my mother, thought she was cute, probably checked out her butt or something. And then he saw that she had a son and he said, okay, well, if I want the woman, I need to accept the child. And he made an investment in me. And so as a result, the second guy who made the investment got the benefit of having someone like me as a productive, healthy asset that's been able to contribute to his wealth for decades. I've been sitting, I've been giving my father money for decades. I've been, I helped him pay off his house. I bought him a new truck with cash when he wanted a truck. If he needs something lifted in the house, he's tired, he's older, I lift it up for him. And I was with my mother all the way up until she took her last breath, right? So, so, so having, having young people in your life really is an asset if you train them properly. My, my mother invested in getting my sister to medical school. So, up until her last breath, guess which medical doctor was standing right next to her bed, checking on her every two or three hours to make sure that she was okay, right? If my mother had not invested in my sister, if she had said, you know what, I don't need no baby. I need to either run to the clinic. And if I can't do that, then I need to just drop the baby off at the, at the, at the orphanage or I'm just going to ignore this little Negro. So, I can go to the club, pop my booty, meet, you know, meet another baby daddy and, and live my best life. But she wasn't thinking that way. She had a different value system. So, she invested in the children. And as a result, we became assets for her, right? So, this, this microcosmic example of what happened in my own family happens in millions of families when you play the game right. See, if you play the economic game right, you understand where your wealth exists, even if it does not show up in the form of money. Sometimes wealth does not show up as dollar bills in your bank account. Sometimes wealth shows up in a wonderful relationship. Sometimes wealth doesn't show up as, as, as, as, as dollar signs in your checkbook. Sometimes wealth might show up as, as, as that knucklehead little kid that they're sitting there that's asking for milk right now. And you don't understand if you don't have any consciousness and a lot of people don't have financial consciousness. If you don't have consciousness, you don't realize that that little knucklehead asking for milk is going to grow up into a grown man who can protect you, defend you, support you and help you, especially as you get older and you start to decline. You understand? So, so if you understand wealth, you can see where human beings are an asset, you know, investment in people is absolutely critical. And so what's happened in our society throughout the world is that the reason they are deeply alarmed about the decline in reproduction, reproductive rates is because they know that they're losing trillions because they don't have enough people. If you look at most economic models, they will show you that young people are the ones who do the work. They're the ones who carry the load. They're the ones who, who provide the GDP that is, that is invested into social security. So young people in a society take care of older people and you've lost a lot of young people. And then on the flip side of that, in addition to that, I want you to think about our community. And I want you to think about how many of our young people that they corrupt and destroy and ruin before the age of 18 by sending them through inferior educational systems where, where your best and brightest kids are growing up wanting to be wrappers and thugs and don't want to, you know, don't deal with them because they're growing up glorifying all the wrong ideas. And then our poor kids come out and they don't even have a skill to do anything. They can't build anything. You know, I'm not saying all of them are in this category for sure. There are lots of young people that are doing amazing things, but that should not be the exception. That should really be the norm. It should be the norm that nine out of 10 black boys have some sort of marketable skill by the time they're 18 years old. That should be the norm. It should be the norm that that nearly every single black girl can go into some sort of corporation or organization and be an asset to that organization immediately, not the scenario that I've run into where some young people, you got to beg them to come to work. Some of them, you can't, they don't want to hear nothing about no saving and investing and planning for the future. They want to hear about twerking and partying and getting high and getting lit and getting drunk and living their best life. And I just really think that this is the kind of cultural phenomenon that leads to extreme, extreme discomfort and pain later on in life. Why? Well, because you're not investing, when you don't invest, then you have nothing. If you don't play on indices, you have no harvests. It's really that simple. It's very, very simple, actually. It's not complicated. It's not complicated. So the world is struggling right now. We're losing trillions of dollars in wealth throughout the globe because we did not make an investment in people. We did not do the simple things. Get the boys together, get the boys together with the girls, encourage them to make sure that they understand that family is an asset. Make them understand that, that make that man understands that a good woman is an asset. Make that woman understand that a good man is an asset. Don't you mistreat that good man? You treat that man right. You make sure that you become a, you become a pick me. So by treating him well, they call him pick me. They make fun of women who are nice to men. That's what they call them on the internet. In the kitchen, I follow on the drama. No, you treat that man well because then that man is going to want you more and that enhances your market value on the dating market, which is probably one of the most important markets you'll ever enter into. Same thing. You get you a good woman. You treat her well. You go out of your way to make sure that if she meets another man on the street, that she maybe likes better than you or could like better than you. No, there's no competition because she knows she's got the best man on earth at home who really values her and loves her. These are basic ideas that actually enhance your wealth. They actually enhance your wealth because I explain to you that that people in your life and relationships and the reproducing and having children is a tremendous economic asset. Not just for the world, we talked about the declining population and how that's costing trillions, but it's really important for the family. Really important for that. Do you see the connection? Give me a guess on the chat if you're understanding the connection. Sometimes I repeat myself because I don't want, sometimes I get excited. I talk fast and I don't want to talk over anybody's head. I want you to understand that key idea that it all goes back to having the baby. Some of you are doing this. Some of you are having five, six, seven, eight kids. I'm telling you, you have the right idea, especially if you're raising those kids right. Some of you are homeschooling the kids. You're giving them the right values. They're helping with the family business. And some of you, and even in our household, our middle child who's very smart, she's 17 now, she runs my business. We, our e-commerce business, I think we cracked a million dollars last year. She did most of the shipping for that business. So she literally enhanced our family wealth, and she's only a teenager. So what I'm saying to you is that all these things are connected. All these things are connected. So don't throw your wealth away. Don't throw your wealth away. All right. So one other thing I want to talk about with kids, and before I do that, I want to remind everybody that tomorrow we're doing Stop Market Tuesday in case you guys don't know this. We get together at noon and I talk about the stocks that I like the most. I answer your stop market questions. We talk about trends that are happening in the markets. If you want to join us in our Stop Market Investors Club, just go to doctorboysstopmarket.com. You can do a 30-day free trial, 100% free. See if you like it. doctorboysstopmarket.com. Also, mental health Mondays with my wife, Dr. Alicia Watkins, is happening tonight. She's the head of our Black Financial Therapy Department in the Black Business School, where we break down the psychological barriers that block us from achieving black wealth. So she works with the best black therapist that she can find. So basically, if you want to join her for that, text the word love to the number 87948. So text love to 87948. Since we're talking about kids, let me throw another idea out at you. And I don't know if anybody else is saying this. I've never heard anyone else really break this down and really discuss this in a sort of repetitive way. And I've actually typed on this idea before, but I really want to refine it today because I actually had another epiphany while I was on the exercise bike. That's what happens when fat people exercise. We start thinking of stuff. And so here's what came to mind. How many of you have, how many of you believe, give me a yes if you agree, that children should have a college fund? Give me a yes if you, if you had, if you were to have a child right now, how many of you feel that it would be important to get a college fund for your child? Like, like put some money to the side so that when it's time to go to college, they got money ready. You got the 529 and it's not 529. Yeah, why am I thinking the 529 savings plans and stuff like that? Yeah, 529 is what they are. Okay, so I'm gonna give you a little hack. I'm gonna give you a little little insights, a little secret. Okay, so here is what a 529 savings plan basically does. And let me explain. And I'm not, in case you're wondering, this is not a pro or anti-statement, this is just a clarity statement. Okay, so a 529 savings plan, what does that do? It's something where they basically say, you don't have to pay taxes on a certain amount of money and you could use that money and put it toward paying for college for your child. And so in, you know, 18 years, they'll say it's projected that it's going to cost x amount of dollars for your child to go to college. If you invest this amount every month, then that money is going to grow into enough money for you to then pay for them to go to school. All right, I think that that's fine. You know, if, you know, there's nothing wrong with that at all, right? And I think that that's a great way to prepare for college to prepare for the future, etc. And, and also, if you, if you, if you don't spend the money, you can do a lot of things. You can transfer and change the beneficiary to somebody else who wants to go to college. You can use it for your own education. You can withdraw it for non-educational reasons if you want to, but there's going to be a penalty and you have to pay taxes on that money. You can roll it over to a Roth IRA. You can do a lot of things with that. Okay, so, so, so I'm not against those plans at all. I think that they're absolutely excellent in terms of preparing for the massive expense of going to college, college expenses and medical expenses, all the two things that Americans can't afford. Two things you can't afford in America are to go to school and get sick. And you do those two things that they can bankrupt you. So with that said, I want you to think about the 529 plan a little more broadly, though. Basically, it's a stock portfolio. That's what it is. It's, it's, it's, it's similar to the $5 day plan that we talk about in the black business school where you invest small amounts of money every month. And then, you know, over time, it grows into this massive amount of money. And, and we've talked about other little interesting things when, you know, when people tell me that black people don't have any wealth and that we can't ever build wealth, I say, well, you know, if you just bought $1,800 with a stock in Apple in 1997, you'd have, you'd be a multi-millionaire. You know, it's, it's really simple. It's not hard. It's not, it's not calculus. It's not even algebra. But, but sometimes when you are brainwashed enough through repetition, you can believe something that's simply not true. But as a finance professor, I can tell you that that's just not true. Anyone can build wealth. The hard part is just simply having the discipline to do something that's different from what other people are doing. Now, with that said, back to 529 plans, a 529 plan for the most part is basically a stock portfolio. The reason your money grows is because that money's being invested somewhere. It's typically an S&P 500 companies and things like that. And, and the thing about a stock portfolio is that I don't want you to just see the 529 plan or any other plan as just a bunch of money that you're supposed to spend on a university. Why is that? Well, because universities are not as effective as some of us expect them to be, right? How many of you know a lot of people who have college degrees that they would love to just throw in the trash and get a refund on? How many of you, if you could get a refund right now on your college degree, like literally, like give them the degree and they say, here's all your tuition money back. Your student loans are canceled. Yeah, go have a nice life. How many of you would give that degree right back? Even if it meant you couldn't even work in the field that you got the degree in. A lot of people don't work in the field. They got the, but yeah, I see a lot of the yeses coming through, right? So colleges are not as effective as they should be and they used to be. Also, they're much more expensive than they used to be. And this was driven actually by the student loans. When they started giving all the student loans, what that does is that creates inflation similar to how the pandemic caused inflation because they increased the money supply. Well, when they started giving all the student loans, they actually increased the money supply within the educational space. That's why suddenly education became super expensive because money was easy to get. So we feel like they're doing us a favor, but really it's not quite, not quite. So long story short, here's what I want you to consider. This is an idea. I don't think anybody else is ever going to say this to you. And if they do ever say it to you, just know they probably got it here because I haven't heard anyone else really talk about this on an extensive level. I would argue that even though 529 savings plans are fine, I think that the bigger win isn't just to save up money. So you're talking go to college. I think the bigger win is to build them a portfolio that they can use for whatever they want. And why would I say that? Well, because money that's specifically designated just for college, what does that mean? That means that when your child is 18 years old, all that money you've been accumulating is going to be given away to the university. And you're not really getting dollar for dollar value on that. You're getting like probably 20 cents on the dollar because they'll charge you 80,000 a year for an education that really should only cost you 10 or 20,000 dollars. You understand? So basically, it's almost like if you come to me and you say, "Hey, boys, can you give me a $50,000?" And let's say I work at Wendy's. And I say, "Well, I can't give you $50,000, but I can get you $50,000 in Wendy's coupons." That's the same as $50,000, isn't it? What do you all think? Do you think that $50,000 in Wendy's coupons is really worth $50,000? No, it's not. It's not. It's not as valuable as $50,000 cash because when I give you that $50,000 in Wendy's coupons, there's a constraint on what you can do with that money. It's a currency that only has value if you like Wendy's hamburgers. If you don't like Wendy's cheeseburgers or hamburgers, you're not going to see the value there. And then if you do try to sell those coupons, $50,000 with the coupons, you might get 10 grand, maybe 15,000 for it on the open market. You follow me? So my point is to say that a 529 savings plan where you're specifically saving money specifically so you can hand that money over to an overpriced university is just like somebody giving you half a million dollars in Wendy's coupons or a quarter million dollars or whatever the amount is. And it doesn't mean that Wendy's coupons don't have value. It doesn't mean college has no value. I've never been a person to say don't go to college. I have to repeat myself because sometimes in a world of simplicity, people like to take the nuance out of the argument and they love to say they love the three things people say about me that are not true, that just drive me crazy. I have to repeat myself for. It's one, they say Dr. Boyce is telling everybody not to go to college. That has never been true. I've never said don't go to college. I've said, think carefully about your next move. Number two, they say Dr. Boyce tells Black people not to vote. I've never told Black people not to vote. I simply talked about why I can't vote for certain people anymore because I don't think that they're very effective. But I don't tell you who to vote for. The third thing that people say that is never ever true is they say Dr. Boyce believes everybody should quit their job and start their own business. I do not believe that. I believe everyone should have financial security, which could come through investing or at least having the ability to start your own business if you have to because everybody's got to eat, even if Massa says you can't eat, right? Or even if Massa don't want to feed you, you have to have a plan B. We have to have a plan B. We can't just be sitting here dependent on other people to take care of us, especially when those other people have a track record of not really coming through for us when we need them the most. Is that radical for y'all? Is that too much that I just don't want to be like depending on white folks to take care of me? Does that make me a crazy Negro? Am I being mean today? Okay. So my point is to say that with the 529 plan, I'm not saying that you should not go to college. I'm not saying college is for suckers. But I got, I'm a college professor. I love college. College is great. You know, my best years were at Ohio State. I had some good years at Syracuse. There's nothing wrong with college, but college is overpriced and it doesn't always hit the mark in terms of giving you or your children what they need. But here's what does hit the damn mark. Here's what hits the mark. You know what hits the mark? Financial security. That's, that's exactly, that hits the spot. That dig, that, that bullseye, bam. Do you know why I went to college? I had horrible grades in school. I was not college material. Do you know why I went to college? Because I wanted to have some damn money. That was it. I, I didn't know anybody else knew that way. I went to college and I wanted a career and careers meant money. Do you really think that I, that I went to college? Because I'm like, I really have a tremendous desire to work for white folks and wake up every morning and go to a job that I hate with people that don't even treat me right. Do you think that's why I went to college? I know, that is my, I went to college because I was broke and I knew that education could get me access to a job, which in the, in a good job could get me access to money. That was it. That was the criteria. So what I'm saying to you is that because you're economically conscious, if you've been, we did, we did about 200 and about, actually over 320 of these lectures this year. So I, if you've been with us almost every day this year, your economic consciousness probably exceeds 98% of the population. So if you're economically conscious, then you'll understand when I try to impress upon you the significance of getting rid of the middleman. Getting rid of the middleman, the middleman is, you know, is this whole process. I got to go to school for four years and then I get a piece of paper and then I go and I go to an employer and I fill out 8 million job applications hoping that they'll give me a job, he'll go and they will give me my little job. I'll make enough money where one day I'm going to be rich. Now you won't give most, most studies show that people will go to work every day, do not have financial security. Just go look at the data, go look at the data. It's, it's, it's like you're following the yellow big road like Dorothy and the 10 man and the scarecrow and the cowardly lion and, and just like in the Wizard of Oz, what you are chasing at the end of the golden road is not real gold, that's not the real success, what's really significant, what you really need is already inside of you. The lion already had courage, he didn't have to go to the Wizard of Oz to get courage. The, the, the 10 man already had, he was missing a heart, right? He already had a heart, right? The, the, the, the scarecrow, he, well, scarecrow had the, what, the scarecrow, what did he have? The brains, yeah, the scarecrow, you, and, and they tell you, you don't have brains until we give you a piece of paper. You don't have brains until we certify that you have brains until, until white folks say that you're, you're qualified, then you're not qualified because by God, you're just a Negro. I mean, Negroes can't be qualified for anything. They don't have courage or brains or a heart, but you know, and, and I can just tell you, just like the Wizard of Oz, uh, you are, um, you're cursed in a way where you are trained to believe that you have to go to other people to get the thing that I believe that you can get on your own. Do you understand? Now this is not to say the education does not add value. I love education. I love being smart. I read for fun. I, I, I, I absorb information as I habit every single day because knowledge is power, knowledge is power, thinking is power. All these things are power. So yes, I am addicted to learning. I learn, learn, learn, love to learn, love to read, love to just listen and pick up a, it's, it's amazing. If, if, if knowledge was crack, I would be pooky from New Jack City. You'd be calling me man. If you call me. So there's nothing. So knowledge is not an issue. And you know, you can acquire knowledge on your own. Um, education, college, all that is great too. There's nothing wrong with that. But if I had a choice between having a piece, a college degree that gets me a job versus having, I don't know, $400,000 in the bank as a 22 year old. Well, you know what I would pick. Oh, cause my 400,000, I can, I can get the information. I can get the knowledge. They got college professors teaching for free on the internet. I have a PhD in finance. I taught at Syracuse. They, you had to pay $80,000 a year to go to Syracuse and learn from people like me. But I talk to you all every single morning. So, so, so, so it's, it's, it's the money that you're trying to kind of get to. The money is what matters. So, so let me kind of give you a little bit of perspective on some of this. And by the way, Dr. Chloe Anderson says hello. I talked to him yesterday. And, um, and he's actually, uh, he's actually, I, I was talking to him and his wife. And he actually concluded, we, we all concluded that it would be helpful to develop, uh, a poweronomics, uh, training for children, uh, that as, as a benefit. In case you don't know, he wrote the book poweronomics, the most significant economic book in the last 100 years. And so, uh, I said, what about teaching the kids poweronomics? I think we need to teach our own children. What do you think about that? And he was in agreement. So we're gonna, he's partnered with the Black Business School and we will develop a poweronomics curriculum for children. So I'll let you guys know when that's ready. I'll bring it to you guys first. All right. So, here is, um, here's something that you should understand. Uh, first off, um, if you were to take $300 a month, which is probably half of, which is actually less than half of the average car note in America and put $300 a month in an SOP 500 fund for your child. By the age of 20, they'd have a hundred and seventy six thousand seven hundred and six dollars. Give or take a few thousand. So a 20 year old with a hundred and seventy six thousand seven hundred and six dollars has already won the game. They've already, they've already done a checkmate on life. They're not struggling as a broke 20 year old. They've got a hundred and seventy six thousand seven hundred and six dollars in liquid assets that they can turn to if they ever have a financial problem. This means that they can sleep in peace. This means that they don't have to go, uh, beg for anything. This means that as long as they don't do anything stupid, uh, they don't even have to get up and go to work every day if they don't want to. They don't, they don't even need a college degree. This is, this is better than damn near, not damn near better than getting signed to the NBA draft. And it's not the same amount of money, but in the NBA, you got to work hard and you got to go to practice every day. They don't have to actually do anything for anybody. So this is the simple, straightforward formula for liberation for an entire community. This solves, this solves the black wealth problem. This solves the black wealth problem for one simple reason. If every single black child in America had a parent that loved them enough to put three hundred dollars a month toward their future, then imagine that if every black child has a hundred and seventy six thousand dollars in the bank, um, white kids don't, most white kids don't have that kind of money. So that solves the black wealth problem. There, there is no racial wealth gap anymore. Now, our, now we've really actually manufactured black privilege. We've manufactured our own version of black privilege and black, black privilege, you know, I think I saw somebody say we should give each other black privilege and I agreed with that, but they, but she was talking more in terms of us being kind to each other and things like that. And I agree with that a hundred percent, but sometimes black privilege also connects to money privilege in America. Privilege is connected to wealth. Wealthy people have privilege. So we manufacture black privilege by making the three hundred dollar a month pledge to our children when they're born. Think about it. Some people may say, and this is the thing I, I, I have to address, you know, the people I refer to as the Negro naysayers. You know, the Negro naysayers have a problem for every solution. So the way I would address the Negro naysayer who would come to me and say, this isn't possible. This, you're being bougie. Black people can't afford three hundred dollars a month. I would simply turn to them and say, what are you talking about? We will spend 600 dollars a month paying for a car that will depreciate to zero in the next three to four years, right? We will pay two, three hundred dollars a month for our cell phone. We will pay the landlord two thousand dollars a month. We will spend, if you add up the amount of money we might spend going out to dinner, going to the club, doing whatever else we're doing with our free time, going shopping, we're spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a month. So what do you mean? We don't have three hundred dollars a month to invest in our kids. So so so three hundred dollars a month, your child is 20. They've got a hundred. You give them a gift like a bar mitzvah, the black bar mitzvah, you give them a hundred and seventy six thousand seven hundred and six dollars in their stock portfolio, or you least let them know that the money's there. I told you, I told you, we've talked about this. I don't believe in giving all the money away to the kid when they're young, because their brains are not yet fully developed. But now they're good. Now they're safe. Now your daughter doesn't have to go and you know turn tricks to go make money or you know these poor girls that are in in in Magic City stripping to get through school. Why the hell are you stripping? Whenever whenever I would hear stories like that, I'd say, well, where's your daddy yet? Did your daddy? Why? What kind of man is he that he's got his daughter out here doing only God knows what to get through school? You know, and so so I'm tired of seeing our people broke. This is a simple straightforward method. The cool part about it is you don't even have to understand stock markets to even do this. You really don't. All you got to do is randomly pick S&P 500 stocks. I showed you all that. I've showed you that when in this class we've talked about Burton Malkiel's experiment in 1971 in his book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, where he talks about how he taught monkeys to invest and all the monkeys did was pick S&P 500 stocks randomly and they still made money. So so that's so so if you want to know what that money grows into at the age of 30, it grows into about $447,108. That's $300 a month. Now if you did $600 a month, if you have that kind of money, then you're doubling that. Now your 20 year old has $370,000. And then if you add that with some financial knowledge and things like that, they're going to be fine. And I would almost dare to say that if I had a choice between giving my child a free college at the age of 20 versus $176,706, I'd rather give them the money. And then I'd say, well, if you want to go to school, you can. If you don't want to, I mean, people go to school so they can get a job. You've got money. So if you take care of your money and you invest it properly, then you're going to never really actually have to work for anybody ever. And that and that what that does is that enhances their well-being in a lot of different ways. They have nothing to do with money. They end up being able to sleep better. All the financial stress goes away. I mean, I want you to think about how different your life would have been. If you'd had, let's say I was your dad and you were raised with a father or mother that thought that they took this class and they did, they executed on this for you. And so when you were 20, you had over, you know, almost $200,000 in the bank. Think about how much differently your life would have been. Think about how many hard choices you had to make. I don't know, maybe, maybe everybody in here wasn't broken their 20s. How many of you were broken in your 20s? How many of you struggled? Give me a guess if you struggled. Give me a guess if you had to make hard decisions. Give me a guess if you were just in stressful, tough situations because of money in your 20s. Like it was really, really hard. You know, in a lot of your energy that could have been spent being creative and being and traveling and learning about yourself and live really truly living a fulfilled life, all that was drained. Thousands of hours were spent. Thousands of hours of your life was spent going to someplace called a job doing work that you weren't even interested in doing stuff. You didn't get no interest in that stuff. I spent hundreds of hours working at RBS in college. Do you think I had better things to do as a young man with potential than to be a fricking RBS, making, you know, beef and cheddar sandwiches? I mean, you know, so there's nothing wrong with hard work. I'm not saying hard work is bad, but who said hard work has to be meaningless? See, one of the types of black privilege that you can give your child by helping them to escape the rat race early is they get the privilege of having a fulfilled and purpose driven life. You know, and I get it. Some of y'all love your jobs and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with loving your job. I think the biggest question to ask yourself is this. If you had all the money that you needed to do whatever you wanted to do, would you go to work every day? If the answer is no, then that means that there's another, there's a higher level to the video game that maybe you haven't reached it. If the answer is yes, like I would do this work even if they weren't giving me a paycheck, then I say congratulations, good for you. You climb to the next, you climb the next ladder of self-actualization. You climb, you're rising up the ladder fulfillment because most people are not in that category. Most people have jobs where if they had enough money, they won the lottery tomorrow, they quit immediately. I'm one of those people that actually, I love what I do. I did what I do even when I wasn't making any money. This is what I believe. This is something that I think is a simple, straightforward process. Any family could do this. If you have any bill that's over $300 a month, then you can afford this because there's no bill more important than your own damn family. Also, remember this, when you're building wealth for your children, you're not just building it for them, you're building it for yourself. Capital is powerful. Capital is the reason Elon Musk is one of the most powerful men on earth. If he had no access to capital, he would not be powerful like that. When you give your child capital, you are giving them black power. You are giving them black power must come with black money, black power must come with black wealth, black power must come with black economics. If you do not give them the economics or support them in their quest to obtain that, they will not have power in this society because the language that America speaks is money. That's it for today. I'm going to let you guys have a good on with the rest of your day. We do have a training in the black business school called How to Turn Your Child into a Millionaire. If you want to go take a look at that, you can go to kittyboss.com, K-I-D-D-I-E-B-O-S-S.com, kittyboss.com. It's a template on how to structure your child's future. It only takes about two hours to go through, and I think you guys would like it, kittyboss.com. You can also, if you're interested in some of our children's programs, we do have a black business school for children. It's called Black Millionaires of Tomorrow. If you're interested in receiving information about that, just pull out your phone, text the word "youth" to 87948, text the "youth" to 87948, and we'll send you some information. Anyway guys, have a great day. God bless you, and I'll check with you guys tomorrow morning for class. If you're not on the text list for this class yet, you can also again, pull out your phone, text the word "morning." M-O-R-N-I-N-G to the phone number 87948, and I'll send you out a link to join us. So have a good day, everybody, and I'll see you soon. Take care. Bye-bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Dr Boyce Watkins explains something that is better than a college savings plan.