After making millions in the stock market, Tiffany James is now the founder and CEO of ModernBlkGirl, a company that teaches black women how to invest. James got involved in investment in 2019 when a co-worker introduced her to the concept.
The said colleague was a Tesla “bull” who kept pushing James to buy a share in the electric car company owned by South African-born Elon Musk. The colleague advised her to use one paycheck to buy stock in Tesla in 2019 when shares were $60 to $70 each.
James would turn her initial investment of around $10,000 into more than $2 million by adding a mix of long-term growth companies, S&P SPDR exchange-traded funds and semiconductor chip stocks among other investments, according to CNBC in 2022.
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When it comes to investing, people of color are still lagging, according to a survey by CNBC. The survey further noted that half of Black U.S. adults don’t currently own individual stocks, mutual funds, bonds, exchange-traded funds, cryptocurrency or real estate. In terms of gender, the survey found that 59% of Black women are not invested in anything, compared to 48% of Hispanic women, 34% of White women and 23% of White men.
According to James, investing in Tesla was her “first real taste of investing” although before that, she had a small portfolio. Despite her investment success, the daughter of Jamaican and Haitian immigrants felt she was an outsider “in a world of mostly White men.”
“For people of color, it was something that wasn’t talked about,” she said of investing. “It’s very intimidating, it has its own unique language and if you’re not privy to that language it can be very difficult to understand.”
Today, the $2 million she made from investing in Tesla and others has grown to $7 million, she said to Forbes.
Through ModernBlkGirl, James wants to see more Blacks, especially women, show interest in investing as a way of building wealth.
As of 2022, her ModernBlkGirl community had more than 225,000 (mostly) women, CNBC said. She said at the time that her “1k to 100,000K in 1 yr” class starts at just under $100 and a monthly subscription is $130.
Starting ModernBlkGirl was not on James’ “bingo card”, she told Forbes. She had always wanted to launch a luxury candle brand because of her love for fragrances.
“But the community chose me you know. Before that I always tell the story where I wanted to start a luxury candle line.
“I love fragrances so I wanted to just have a luxury fragrance line that talk to like the different client profiles that I built in my life. I built around just like different women around the world and I wanted to create a line and a fragrance line for that but Clubhouse started talking about finance people loved me talking about finance and they were like ‘you should start something’”.
And this led to the creation of ModernBlkGirl.
