At Factora, everyone is capable.
By Haley Noble and Allegra Moet Brantly, Photos courtesy of Factora
Upon learning about her own desire to become more financially experienced and confident, Allegra Moet Brantly began to change her life. During her early career, she did her research and saw her work come to fruition in negotiating her own salary and learning how to invest wisely. Close friends around her saw this and asked for help, and then friends of friends. She quickly felt the weight in her heart to share this with more people and saw a trend of timidity within women when it came to confidence about their finances.
So, in 2018, after her move to Austin, Factora was born, a company dedicated to giving women the tools and skills needed to learn to save, invest and become unafraid to talk about their money. Factora has done so for nearly 2,000 women and continues to inspire Moet Brantly on her own journey.
“Now that I’ve dedicated my career to helping women achieve financial freedom,” Moet Brantly says, “here are some things I wish I had known about wealth building earlier.
Investing is the key to building wealth.
I used to think that the path to wealth was by earning a big paycheck, but making more money does not equal having more money. The only way to access exponential growth for your money is by investing it. We grow up believing having a job is safe and investing is risky, but if you have a job that you depend on for your entire financial livelihood, that’s actually quite risky. What’s safer is to understand investing so you can diversify your income.
Most of the U.S. population has an investment rate under 10%, but the more of your income you invest and the higher you can get that investment rate is directly correlated with lessening the amount of years you need to work toward financial freedom. Instead of depending on a job and one paycheck, create enough passive income so your investment portfolio can pay for your life.
It is not hard to get started.
You can get started with as little as $10 or $100 a month, and doing this consistently for several years can turn into a huge amount. That’s exactly what you’re doing when you have a retirement account and a portion of your paycheck is being directed to it month after month, year after year. Most important to getting started is that you give yourself the most amount of time in the market, rather than trying to time the market. Time in the market allows for compound returns.
If you can avoid the trap of ‘When I have more, I’ll start investing more,’ start now and be consistent, you’ll be in a great place. The financial industry wants to make you feel insecure, inadequate and inexperienced when it comes to investing, but actually, women are proven to be successful investors.
Upgrading your money mindset matters.
After five years of teaching women about wealth building, I firmly believe that upgrading your money mindset matters more than any dollar amount. We’ve all heard about people who win the lottery and go broke within a few years. If you don’t have a positive relationship with money and you’re given a large sum, it’s very hard to have quality behaviors with that money. The sooner you can transition your beliefs about money, the sooner you can be better with your money.
When you create a positive money mindset, it will allow you to inflict quality changes in your financial life. In the future, as you earn more, or if you ever do come upon a large sum of money, you will be able to utilize that money in a positive way.
You are the center of your wealth-verse.
I’ve noticed that so many people want to go to a financial advisor, their parents or Google for a recipe to follow in order to build wealth, but none of those places know your life or desires or goals better than you. You are at the center of your wealth-verse. You have to decide where you’re going in order to figure out the steps to get there. When it comes to wealth building, it’s a waste of time to look outside of yourself for answers that start inside.
No one has the same mix of ingredients. Nor will anyone have the exact desired goals you want to achieve, so no one will have the exact same investment portfolio. They should all be unique because you are unique.
Talking about money is not taboo.
I grew up with this innate sense that talking about money is bad, but how can we be good at something we’re not even allowed to discuss? I have learned through doing this work that talking about money simply leads to wanting to learn and do more with your money, so it’s the best way to start implementing changes that can build wealth. That’s why Factora teaches women about wealth building in a community setting. When you have a community that talks about investment strategies openly, it’s a game changer.”
If you want to see this in action, check out the Factora podcast Coffee and Coin at Factora and anywhere you listen to podcasts. Allegra Moet Brantly interviews women on their entire financial lives, and they share every number, from their debt to their net worth and everything in between.