When Troy Millings and Rashad Bilal were early in their careers as a public-school teacher and a financial adviser, respectively, they both quickly realized how little their charges understood about finance. Millings’ students knew almost nothing about how to save or grow money; it wasn’t on any curriculum. And Bilal’s clients—even those in lucrative professions like medicine and law—weren’t much further ahead. “You realize that if these successful people don’t have any idea of money, then the average nine-to-five person really has no chance,” says Bilal, 40.
Given this dearth of knowledge, the two friends decided to team up and start a podcast, Earn Your Leisure, which teaches financial literacy specifically catered to Black audiences who have historically been shut out of financial systems. The podcast found a curious and sizable audience during the pandemic, and the duo now helms a rapidly growing media empire that also includes an annual business conference, Invest Fest, and a book, You Deserve to Be Rich, which was released in January.
For Millings, 42, financial trauma is personal: he watched his parents, Jamaican immigrants, work diligently year after year, only to lose their house due to their lack of understanding of interest rates. As he grew older, he realized that the version of the American Dream he had been taught, in which working-class people could carefully save up to buy a house, seemed increasingly distant. “Starting to see real numbers as an adult, you realize that you can’t save your way to wealth,” he says.
So the pair encourages their listeners to pursue multiple income streams and take on entrepreneurial projects. Their book also walks readers through the 101s of long-term investing, even for those on a minimum-wage paycheck. “Living in a rat-race society, the average person is not able to develop patience,” says Bilal, the company’s CEO. “But it is a trait that has to be developed.”
The duo had a busy 2024. Invest Fest attracted 20,000 attendees in Atlanta and featured conversations with Steve Harvey, Don Peebles, and Shannon Sharpe. They also broke ground on a 300-acre residential community outside Accra, Ghana. They interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris on her Economic Opportunity Tour. And they launched a pilot financial-literacy curriculum in 10 public high schools in the Bronx, which they hope to expand across New York City.
Millings and Bilal are aware that investing can be very daunting for newcomers and that their advice comes with risk. “The big institutions, they look at retail investors as dumb money,” Bilal says. “Before, it was almost impossible to think that the average, everyday person could have enough information to compete with large corporations. But now you can educate yourself enough to be an intelligent investor.”
