Syama Bunten:

At 16, Emma Malina saw a bus stop ad that said, “Don’t be like Margaret.” She walked into her bank the next day with 50 pounds from a DJing gig and opened a pension plan. The bank laughed, but she didn’t care. Three decades later, she’s traded a Brooklyn walk-up for an acre in Santa Barbara through a 1031 exchange. She backs female founders with angel checks and hosts Matcha and Money to get women talking about capital. This is what a lifetime of hooking up your future self looks like.

Women don’t talk about money the way we should. Not honestly, not openly, and not with each other. But that’s changing. I’m Syama Bunten, founder of Wealth Catalyst. And Getting Rich Together is where the conversation lives. Every week, a different woman, a different path, and a conversation that will change how you think about your own financial power. This community is growing and you belong in it.

Please subscribe so you never miss an episode and leave us a five-star review so more women can find their way here. Now, let’s get rich together.

I am here today with someone who has been such an incredible voice and leader within our Wealth Catalyst community, the brilliant Emma Malina. Emma, I’m so grateful to have you here today. Your story, your vision of the world. I remember when I was doing a just a tad bit more research on you, and I saw this gorgeous photo of you, and I was like, my God, who is this woman who’s out here changing the world, who’s been leaving a mark and legacy everywhere you go?

Ladies who are tuning in, Emma brings a rare blend of experience across hospitality, entertainment, nutrition education, curriculum development, investing, and real estate. She is one of the most values-aligned, impact-driven women that I know, an incredibly kind spirit with a beautiful heart and mind. And someone who I believe is truly leading the path forward when it comes to combining a rare gift of both having a tremendous amount of wisdom and a tremendous amount of curiosity to values that I hold very deeply.

Emma has done an incredible job throughout her life of getting herself into lots of trouble. And we are going to hear all about the trouble and how it’s been spun up into the most incredible impact. As an active investor today, she backs ventures that prioritize social and environmental well-being. She’s focused on funding female founders, especially all of us who are underestimated founders. And that goes beyond being female founded.

In this conversation, we’re going to talk about money, impact, opportunity, and taking unconventional paths towards living the vision and version of your life, of your dreams. Everyone, please welcome the gorgeous Emma Malina. Emma, thank you for being here today.

Emma Malina:

Holy shit, that was quite an intro. Oh my gosh, thank you so much. I’m going to replay that one whenever I’m feeling down. Wow. Thank you. I mean, you have been an incredible resource, a foundation and catalyst for me since I discovered you a couple of years ago, I guess. And now we’re getting closer in this past year, and I’m just incredibly grateful for you. I’m in awe of what you do and the platform that you’re creating, and the voice that you have, and the platform that you’re giving other women’s voices to come onto. You are a hero to many of us.

And I will do one correction. It definitely wasn’t the front cover. I think it was like Real Estate Weekly or something like that.

Syama Bunten:

I swear, I swear. It was like some big headline. And I was like, and you had this cute little haircut.

Emma Malina:

I was definitely in the press a few times, but yes, I don’t think I was the cover.

Syama Bunten:

Well, Emma, jeez. Were you in Page Six? Was there a—

Emma Malina:

Not ever.

Syama Bunten:

Okay, Emma, take us back. Obviously, today you sit here as a strong voice in the space of women, money, values, but take me back to a little girl, somewhere around the ages of 10, 12 years old. Where were you in this beautiful world of ours? What was life like around you? And what was money like?

Emma Malina:

Yeah, let’s see. Okay, so a little bit further back, I guess. I was born in California in beautiful, bucolic Santa Barbara, California. My parents divorced when I was pretty young, around age three, and I stayed in Santa Barbara until I was about five. Then my mother had moved to the East Coast, so we joined her. My brother and I joined her over there in Boston for about two years. She remarried at that time. He already had two kids. And then when I was about eight, my mother, who was originally from the UK, actually born in Scotland but raised in England, moved us to London.

So third grade, I started in London and stayed there until just before my 21st birthday, actually. So the formative years of my life I spent in London, and then kind of coming back to Santa Barbara for school holidays.

Money in our life was sort of talked about, it was felt. My father came from a pretty working-class family in Louisiana. His father was a traveling salesman, and he was the eldest of four kids. My mother came from a pretty well-to-do family. Her mother was originally from Santa Barbara, and her father’s family were all in the UK. But in England, everything passes only to the men. So as the daughter of a daughter, you get to live in that world a little bit, but you don’t get to take it home.

My mother was comfortable. Her mother had passed when she was very young and had left behind money for her children to go to school. So my brother and I had private education. But we lived a pretty normal existence. My mother rode her bike everywhere. She wore the same jeans and sneakers and t-shirts every single day. We didn’t go on particularly fancy holidays, but we would go skiing every now and again or whatever.

My father, he’s retired now, but he was a hardworking guy and worked in the mortgage industry. When they were together, they’d had a bar and restaurant. But for most of my life, he’d been in the mortgage industry. So on my mother’s side they were sort of landowners and developers, and on my father’s side they were mortgage and real estate. That was a constant conversation in my life growing up, that you could make money from something you could drive by, as opposed to just slogging away for hours and hours and days and years in the office.

Syama Bunten:

I didn’t realize that your parents had a stint in business together. That’s interesting, and in hospitality, huh?

Emma Malina:

Yeah. It was short lived, but it was a kind of notorious late seventies restaurant, actually in Montecito. It’s now a very fancy hangout. But they had a jazz bar and restaurant, a French restaurant, and our chef was French. It’s where I had my first escargot at like two years old, and I totally believed escargot was a totally normal thing to order in any restaurant you’d go to. Wherever I’d go, I’d ask, do you have escargot? Even at two years old. A totally precocious, bratty kid, but I just knew no better.

Syama Bunten:

Oh my God, how hilarious. Okay, so talk to me a little bit about young Emma developing her independence as a young girl. Take me into high school days. Was Emma working after school? Were you deep into the books? How did you start to develop yourself as a young woman? What did you know of the world at that time? What did you know of yourself?

Emma Malina:

Good question. So I started working my first official job. I recently found my first pay stubs, from the summer of, I think, ninety. So I would have been thirteen years old, and I was working as a receptionist slash assistant at my dad’s office, getting paid five dollars an hour. I definitely remember that first taste of, having money feels nice, making money feels nice.

I always had a very strong work ethic. My mother had, by that age, divorced her second husband, and it was just my brother and my mother and I living in a house. My mother was a wonderful, loving mother, but she was also quite checked out on the responsibility side. So we were kind of allowed to do whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, with whoever we wanted.

I started working in London, probably around 14, 15, after school, on the weekends. My first job was in a Chinese medicinal herb shop that I worked in after school and on weekends. I’ve always been curious about a lot of things. I’m definitely more of a jack of all trades than a master of anything, so I go down rabbit holes a lot.

When I was about 15, 16, I started going to a world music all-ages club with my brother and his friends. That opened this whole door to club life, staying out really late, meeting really cool and interesting people, and spiraling into that world and becoming a bit of a club kid. I was still in school at the time, ninth and tenth grade. I was a party kid, a club kid, pretty deeply involved in that world, and it was really fun.

By the middle of tenth grade, I was a good student. My teachers and I really liked one another. I was the kid who was always asking questions and starting debates in classes, sometimes getting kicked out of class because of it, but other times actually being thanked for being a bit awake in class. I’m still to this day dear friends with one of my teachers.

I was asked to leave school. They said they didn’t want to expel me, but could I remove myself. Every one of my teachers fought for me to take my final exam. So I did that, and then got my GED. This is pre-internet, obviously, but I found a university in the UK that offered it when you were 16 years old. So I got my GED at 16 and started working full time in nightclubs and DJing and doing all sorts of crazy things like that.

Syama Bunten:

Amazing. Okay, so let’s go back to learning Chinese medicine and being in that space, because some of my most formative early memories, especially with my father, was like being super into health. I remember taking papaya enzymes when I had a belly ache when I was a little girl, or colloidal silver, all these potions, and I remember when my dad would go on a kick of, we’re only going to have fresh made orange juice, or my mother with the acupuncture.

So I understand what it’s like when you’re around that stuff, and there’s something about that that opens up your eyes to things. It broadens the aperture, both on what it means to heal yourself and what tools and resources you have available to you, but also different kinds of culture. This knowing that knowledge doesn’t just come from one Western cultural space, that knowledge and wisdom can come from these different places. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that I realized until much older, but I know those early experiences opened up my eyes. What was it like for you? What did you pick up in the background as a young girl working in the shop, but ultimately picking up a lot of information?

Emma Malina:

Yeah, a hundred percent. There’s just so much to unpack here. I’ll say this, my parents actually met in a religious cult, and her second husband had been in it as well. So there was a lot of that stuff, and it wasn’t too weird, although there’s a lot of stuff out there about it. My ex-stepfather, my mother’s second husband, started this Chinese medicinal herb business.

When we were still living in Boston, first grade, we became macrobiotic. If you had a cold, you were not taking Nyquil. You were probably over a humidifier with some crazy drops of something to open up your channels, and if you were sick, the first thing anybody would tell you to do is stick out your tongue, because they’d want to read your tongue and see where the heat was, and then they’d take your pulse on your wrist to see what’s going on with your energy, whether you’re very yin, or you’ve got some liver chi going on.

You learn these words, this sort of broad approach, which is nice. But the minute you’re open to, huh, it’s not just this one way, there are so many different ways to approach this. It’s funny listening to the potions, my mother didn’t leave the house without a little bag with her smelling salts, her rescue remedy, and little packets of tea. I used to tease her so much, and now I’m exactly the same. I’m packing for tomorrow and I’ve got my little thing of stevia and my—

Syama Bunten:

Do you have a dandelion tea? Because I always travel with the dandelion.

Emma Malina:

Lemon balm. Yep.

Syama Bunten:

I love that so much. I feel like these formative experiences are ultimately what allow us to extract more richness out of life. It gives you more. Okay, so thinking about you as this young, fabulous, hot club kid is great, because I also loved being 16 and 17, and that also gives you exposure in a different way. I think there’s something I knew at the age of twenty, which is I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to be, but I knew what I didn’t want to be, because you could see people much older than you in these environments, and sort of the decisions they’ve taken. Most young people are not afforded this visibility into what does it look like when you spend your whole life in these directions.

What were some of the experiences that you started to notice about the world around you as you were being rambunctious, having a lot of fun, but also probably hanging out with people who were like 10 years older than you?

Emma Malina:

Yeah, if not more. It was a wild time to be young and in London. I was by far the youngest person. The club that I helped run for three years, our staff was probably me the youngest, and our eldest person was in their mid sixties. This was in the advent of, the internet was just starting.

We were a nightclub called Megatripolis. It was in Heaven, which was owned by Richard Branson. It’s a notorious gay nightclub set in the late seventies, eighties, nineties, still going strong today. We had Thursday night, which was the straight night, and it had been for years. There were four rooms. One was the main dance floor, which was techno and trance, and then there was another room that had house and disco and reggae depending on the night. Then there was one room that was the techno silence suite.

We had lecturers come in, and we did crazy technological things. We did an ISDN link-up, so this is like a transmission with Arthur C. Clarke in his home in Sri Lanka into our main dance floor one night, and we did an interview with him. Allen Ginsberg came and spoke. We had Timothy Leary speak via internet. I actually came out to LA and met him in his house. The Dalai Lama was speaking at the Barbican, and we were the only outfit allowed to beam it into our club to a group of about two thousand people on a Saturday. Just some crazy, amazing things.

It blew my mind, literally. And as a DJ, I was traveling. I was playing at parties in Paris and in Greece and up in Manchester and Birmingham. I was thinking, I don’t think I could ever do an office job. I don’t think I’m cut out for that. I gave myself a really hard time for a long time. I still do, I’m about to be fifty in January, and I still think, I probably should have gone to college, I should have done this, I should have done that. But at the same time, so far so good.

Syama Bunten:

You did a good job, Emma. The first thing in my mind is I think we need to have you be the official Wealth Catalyst summit DJ. We’ve got to start them young. Okay, so what was it like for you to then start making this early money? During these young years, you are DJing, and once you get good and people know you, you can make so much money.

Emma Malina:

I was never there.

Syama Bunten:

But there’s upside here. As you were starting to make money, what did you do with it? Was it to fuel the cabs, late nights out, hang out with friends, dinners? Were you saving it? How did you think about the early money?

Emma Malina:

Yeah, and just for the record, I never became like a big-named DJ or anything.

Syama Bunten:

Not yet, Emma. This could be like a whole new decade.

Emma Malina:

I don’t know what I’d do with these machines. I was vinyl only. But anyway, great story. One night, I was 16 or 17 years old, I had just DJ’d and was going home on the night bus, and there was a poster up at the bus stop. I don’t remember exactly what it said, but I’ve told the story a few times now, so I’ll just go with the version I’m telling. It was a black-and-white picture of a rather miserable-looking older woman, and it said something like, “Don’t be like Margaret. Open a pension plan.” It was an ad for the Abbey National, which is where I banked.

I was like, well, what the heck’s a pension plan? I think I’d made like 150 pounds the night before, and the next day I went down to Portobello Road to my local Abbey National branch and I walked in and said, “Hi, I don’t want to be like Margaret, I’d like to open a pension plan, please.” They laughed and said, “Madam, you’re too young.” And I think I said, “Legally too young, or you just think I’m too young?” The bank manager came out and said, all right.

I didn’t know what it really was, I didn’t know what I was doing. Something in me said, you can’t rely on anybody else to look after you. Nobody’s coming to save you. There’s no knight in shining armor. You need to look after yourself, and whatever you can do now will likely help you in the future. I don’t know where that came from, because I had a good, loving family. It wasn’t like I was living in my car or anything.

I put fifty pounds into it that day, and every time I got some money, I’d put a little bit in. There were times in my early twenties where I was like, I need that money right now, I can’t pay rent, why am I still contributing to this? When I moved to the States, just before I was twenty-one, I eventually closed that account out, paid the penalties, and put it into a retirement account in the States.

That was my first move, and it’s funny, I knew it was a smart move, but it wasn’t until probably the last eight to ten years where I’m like, wow, that was a really smart move.

Syama Bunten:

Girlfriend, that was hooking up your future self. I don’t think we always realize how we’ve hooked up our future self in many ways. Sometimes we make decisions and don’t know why, we follow the instinct, and we don’t know at a young age what the instinct is, or where the self-guidance is coming from. Especially when you are self-guided and taking control over your future, it’s a blend of, man, you really did have to look after yourself, and also, what a gift to be able to understand self-responsibility and agency at a young age, and to be really proud of your younger self right now.

Emma Malina:

So incredibly proud now. It’s why I talk so deeply about it to my daughter and her friends now as well, because it’s so important.

Syama Bunten:

And to be able to afford yourself those sorts of freedoms, knowing there’s something there feels good. I think it’s one of the most liberating things a young woman can do, to have the resources. Sometimes those resources are your community, sometimes it’s the money you’re saving, sometimes it’s both. But feeling well resourced, I think, is such an important thing.

Okay, so now you’re all of, I don’t know, 21, let’s say, and you’ve already built this name for yourself as a DJ. You’re starting to save money, exhibiting a lot of maturity for a young person. Talk to me about some of the dominoes that fell. Your career has been full of explorations, curiosities, following your instincts, and also answering the calls that are being heeded, right? Something calls you and you shift forward. What were some of the next unfoldings that happened?

Emma Malina:

So the biggest one, which was what brought me back to the States, I got a call from an old friend of my mom’s who was a lawyer, and he had a big case involving the ownership of the Empire State Building. He was filming depositions in Paris, and his practice was based in Boston. I was the one person he knew on the other side of the pond who was young and hungry and possibly available for a two-to-three-week freelance gig, to go to Paris to film these depositions.

I remember thinking, one, what’s a deposition, and two, I’ve never picked up a video camera before in my life, but, when do you need me there? I took the Chunnel and arrived in Paris and was there for about two and a half weeks filming these depositions. At the end of that, he and his business partner, who is also his wife, offered me a full-time position as a legal assistant, kind of slash nanny, in Boston. I moved out there two weeks later.

I feel like sometimes I’ve answered the call too much, and haven’t, I’ve just been driven by, hey, I’m going to come over here, and I’m like, okay. Which perhaps is refreshing, but also, sometimes I now look back and think, should I have answered that call or should I have waited for the next one?

I worked for them for about a year. It was super exciting and cool. I grew up watching Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law, and I felt like I was living that life for a moment. But I very quickly realized it was not for me. I called another friend’s parents and said, hey, do you know anybody who would hire me. They got me a job as a hostess in a restaurant, and three weeks into working as a hostess, the owner called me up and said, hey kid, we think you’ve got a lot of potential, a real My Fair Lady, Pretty Woman kind of moment. They said they would like to train me in every position in the restaurant, to train me to become a manager and take over building the restaurant division out.

That very quickly shifted me into that world, and I worked for them for a little over four years. During that time, they were also playing Muzak in all of their restaurants, so I kind of rekindled my DJ heart. This is pre-iPod, so I started building computerized music systems for their restaurants and bars, and that led to this whole other thing, which led us to move to New York and answer another call. It’s always been this crazy trajectory of just, okay, we’re going with the flow.

Syama Bunten:

What did you learn during that time? When you get the chance to work in hospitality that way, and you basically get to see business operations and scalability, how things grow. As someone who is quick and learns fast and then sort of dominates something and moves on, it feels like there are puzzle pieces constantly being formed. This clicks in, and then this clicks in, and now I see what this is and what its potential is. What did you learn from that experience? How did you understand business a little bit deeper, and humans and people?

Emma Malina:

One of the greatest tools I learned was from my boss, a wonderful Scotsman who lives in New York now. He taught me what I call “restaurant ears,” the ability to be in a room with a hundred-plus people and basically listen in on every single conversation, and make sure that if there’s an issue somewhere, you’re the first on the scene. It’s kind of a first-responder vibe.

He taught me this skill, this art, of being able to scan rooms and assess situations. If somebody’s not happy, if somebody’s overly happy, if somebody’s had too much to drink, if there’s a domestic situation arising, if your toilet needs to be snaked, if the chef’s about to kill his sous chef, being aware of your surroundings. I learned how to snake a toilet during Mother’s Day brunch. You just learn the craziest things. There’s so much on-the-job learning.

I also learned everything there is to know about the differences between scotches and whiskies, how to do a P&L report, hire and fire staff, train staff, and open up a whole new restaurant from scratch, building it and the whole team, deciding on what material we’re going to use on the banquettes, what the uniforms are going to look like, the menu, the cocktail menu, all of it.

My father has always said, the restaurant industry, no matter how much technology takes over, will survive because we always need to eat. That’s always been in the back of my mind, that if things don’t work out and I need to get a job, I know I can just go and work in a restaurant, I know how to sling a drink. It’s a solid feeling to know you have a skill set that’s relatively untakeaway-able.

Syama Bunten:

I was 11 years old the first time I learned that nice things weren’t for me. That belief ran quietly underneath my entire financial life for the next 20 years. That’s the reason I built the Money Story Reset, five reflections on the beliefs shaping your relationship with money. My own stories are in every single one, including the parts I don’t usually say out loud. I didn’t write this from the outside, I did every page myself first. It’s free. The link is in the show notes, or go straight to wealthcatalyst.com/reset. That’s wealthcatalyst.com/reset.

You now have spent a lot of time understanding health and nutrition and food and our bodies, and you’ve also spent some time in restaurants understanding the food and all of those components. With this Chinese medicine background, how do you think this formative restaurant experience impacted, even the way you then stepped into real estate? I feel like this restaurant world taps into so many different categories of business and has fueled you in different ways. How else might you be connecting the dots there?

Emma Malina:

Wow, okay, that’s a big one. Everything is connected. When people meet me, they’re like, my God, you’ve done everything. I’ve always said, well, from the ten-thousand-foot view, there’s a very clear red line running through everything I’ve done. It’s food, it’s music, it’s real estate, it’s people. That’s kind of it, in some way, shape, or form.

My now husband and I met in Boston. We very quickly moved to New York, and bought our first apartment a little after 9/11, about a year and a half after, in the East Village. Everybody thought we were crazy. I remember thinking, wait a second, we owe how much for how long? I need to understand this more. So just to become an educated consumer, I went and got my real estate license. I knew we wanted to probably buy more real estate in the future, and I have this rabbit-hole mentality, needing to go deep and research and know things.

I got my license just to become more of an educated consumer, but a girlfriend called me up one day and said, hey, I want to buy a place, will you help me. I said, well, just because I have a license doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing, but if you hold my hand, I’ll hold your hand. That led to ten years of working for Corcoran. One of my first clients was somebody I was building a music collection for, who was a hedge fund manager at UBS. It’s all connected. It doesn’t make sense to a lot of people, but most of the time it makes sense to me.

Syama Bunten:

I think it makes a lot of sense when you’re not living in fear. When you’re in a sense of fear, there’s a clinging on to things, a suffocation of your own potential, a fear of taking a risk and failing. To have that inner resiliency, I think, is an interesting mark of your story, to be able to take those risks.

Emma Malina:

Yeah. I don’t want to overstate it, but I also think I’ve always felt like, if the shit really hit the fan, there was support there. Maybe not, come and live with us for months on end, but a crash pad for a little while. I guess I always just felt like, we’ll figure it out.

Syama Bunten:

I love that. Talk to me about some of these financial building blocks. As you started your career in real estate, all of a sudden you found yourself, I won’t say the New York Post cover, but I swear I saw you somewhere. What were some of the financial building blocks that grew with you as you took these different steps? Obviously, getting exposure to the mechanics of real estate and understanding how that’s advantageous is a huge win, but only if you actually execute it yourself and figure it out. So how did you internalize these building blocks and start to build your foundation?

Emma Malina:

I’ve often thought about these pivotal moments, alongside the accounts I opened at each time. DJing opened up that pension plan. When I first moved to Boston working for the lawyers, I opened my first brokerage account. When I worked in the restaurant industry, they offered me a 401(k). I didn’t know what it was, but I took it. When I started working in real estate, I was commission-only, and I was advised to open a SEP. I was able to lock in seventy thousand dollars of pre-tax dollars into those accounts for close to a decade.

We bought that first apartment not that long after 9/11. The market was a little crazy. I was also in real estate during the crash, so there were opportunities everywhere. A lot of my clients around the time of the crash were parents of NYU or Columbia students, and they went in and bought their kids’ first apartments. Those kids, a couple of years later, met their partners and wanted a bigger place. It was that trajectory of relationships, people, staying in close contact with everybody. I have clients I helped buy their first place, sell it, buy their next place with a girlfriend or boyfriend, then they’re married, having their first or second kid, now buying a townhouse in Brooklyn. That’s how everything builds.

We became parents and sold our first place for three times what we bought it for. Then we bought a place in Brooklyn, a third-floor walk-up with an amazing roof deck. When we moved back to Santa Barbara, we kept it and rented it out for a while, but then we decided to do a 1031 exchange on it, since we’d been renting it for about two years. We bought a thirty-six-hundred-square-foot house on an acre in exchange for our two-bedroom, third-floor walk-up in Brooklyn.

You could call it lucky, well-timed, smart, I don’t know. But we were never in a position where we had to do it. We waited for the right moments when we could and should, and when the right time presented itself, we made the move that was right for us.

Syama Bunten:

How old were you when you bought your first place?

Emma Malina:

I would have been twenty-six.

Syama Bunten:

Not a bad time to start, my love.

Emma Malina:

And we were super lucky. We got a familial loan at a low interest rate, and we know how extraordinarily lucky we are to have had that. When we sold it, we paid it off completely, and we were able to get a bridge loan because we had to renovate the second place with that. We were extraordinarily fortunate, and I don’t want to make it sound like, because we were both working really, really hard, but we didn’t have oodles of money to do things like that. We absolutely had familial support, and without it, we would have still done it, it just would have been a little uglier.

Syama Bunten:

Also, to know that you wanted home ownership at that age. I think today if you talked to a 26-year-old, they’d say, buying a home, maybe sometime in the future. Even this idea, and I know friends who’ve bought homes but never lived in them, they’ve only rented them out to other people, and have their own rental, this idea of looking at real estate across different utilities and how you think about leveraging it. To do so at a young age, to know that’s something you want, and to have the confidence to ask for support. I think that’s another component, having the confidence to ask, because when you ask, you also put yourself at risk of being denied as well as being granted.

Emma Malina:

There’s also the level of handing over some control there, and then having to do things out of duty as opposed to desire, and it complicates things. We definitely wanted to be out from under that as quickly as possible, but incredibly grateful. I hope to be able to do the same thing for my daughter. I think homeownership isn’t for everybody, and for some people it just doesn’t make sense at all. We treat it as a long-term hold. We have other investment properties now that we enjoy, but they’re vacation rental properties, so we get to go and ski for free basically, which is nice, but it took a lot to get there.

Syama Bunten:

Talk to me a little bit about this move back to California. In thinking about the places to live, you certainly picked two places that are not cheap. The decision to move back, how you started to organize your life back in California, and talk to me about identity shifting. At that time, you’re building this real estate career, people know who you are, you have a name for yourself, and then all of a sudden there’s a desire and a shift to move. Explain to me how these decisions came to be, and then ultimately the decision to walk away from a career. Before it was you kind of rogue building and doing things, but by the time you get into real estate and have established yourself, you have quite a track record, so to leave that is certainly not a choice to be taken lightly.

Emma Malina:

No, and honestly, it was not really my idea. It was not something I really wanted to do. My husband was definitely the driving force of that. We also, at that time, had a three-year-old, and just the prospect of looking at schools, we were paying a full-time nanny because we were both working full time. There was the idea of being closer to family. My father is here in Santa Barbara, my stepmother, my brother and his wife and their two kids.

We could have also gone to England, or my husband’s from Switzerland, so we were sort of moving further from his family. But there was just something, he was closing up shop with his business partner, and maybe it was a little bit of a midlife crisis, I don’t know. I said, okay, I’ll give it a year and see. I didn’t tell anybody I was going. I hired a full-time assistant. I was in total denial. I said we’ll only move if we can save up enough money to not have to get a job for at least a year, thinking that would buy me a lot of time. I hired a coach and saved up enough to do it in about ten months.

I was kind of kicking and screaming. My assistant knew, and the manager of my office knew, but I kept my desk, and I literally had a sign on my computer that said, “Gone fishing, see you soon.” I had clients where I’d say, I’m so sorry I can’t make it today, but Jen will be there, let’s talk about it afterward. I was totally living this lie that I was still in New York for a year while we were in Santa Barbara. It was total career suicide.

I got my California license, but it’s a very different business. I didn’t love real estate the way I loved it in New York City. It’s a very different beast there, kind of the wild, wild west, you get to be super creative and negotiate things and deals you don’t get to negotiate anywhere else. In California, everything is check this box, check that box. In New York, it’s words, emails, phone calls, very old school.

We moved to Santa Barbara, and after a year I stopped working. I started running, had a running injury, had to have reconstructive hip surgery, and spiraled into a total depression. That’s when I really found this health thing. I became an integrative nutrition coach, or something like that, and started working with vegan cheese, doing vegan cheese-making classes in wineries around Santa Barbara, and thinking, what am I doing.

Then I met some people who were also really interested in plant-based nutrition education, and we started a nonprofit, and that really sort of formed, and I moved into a board position. The nonprofit is going incredibly well now, and we’re reaching huge populations in our community that have limitations to preventative health measures. All of our classes are bilingual, we do classes in libraries and schools, we train the trainers, we’re training doctors and nurses at our local hospitals and doctors’ offices. It’s pretty cool, working all around prevention through nutrition, because most doctors don’t know anything about nutrition, unfortunately.

Syama Bunten:

Yeah, no joke.

Emma Malina:

We’ve now been here twelve years, which is so crazy to say out loud. It feels like tumbleweeds a lot of the time, because I’m used to this fast-paced city life, I’m a total city girl. Being back in New York for Wealth Catalyst, I felt alive again, the noise and the coffee and the vulgarity running through my veins again. I love it.

Syama Bunten:

I love it too. Also, because your accent is an amalgamation of so many different regions and experiences. I’m sure when you were in New York it was extra New York.

Emma Malina:

Who knows. My family teases me, because when I’m on the phone with my family in England, they’re like, okay, Madonna.

Syama Bunten:

I love that, that’s so funny. Okay, so as you’ve been in these next chapters of your life, your thesis on money, how you’ve been leveraging money, using it, expanding your horizons around it, talk to me about what gave you your first inclination that maybe you could start to invest in other things. What was that aha moment for you?

Emma Malina:

I think it was in 2017, and I read an article about equity crowdfunding. I was like, what is this? It mentioned sites like Circle Up and Start Engine and WeFunder. I went down that rabbit hole. On Circle Up, I found a company, a cleaning company. I thought, well, that’s totally unsexy, that sounds like a great investment.

In 2017, blindly, I thought, I want to be in this world, I want to know more about it, nobody knows I want to know about it, so maybe if I just write a check, I’ll be invited into the room. I wrote a check, and I was not invited into the room, but I’m still an investor and the company still exists, and maybe one day we’ll have an exit.

A year or two later, I started reading about pre-IPO opportunities, sites like Equity Zen and Linqto, which is a whole debacle, but yes, I invested there. I started doing some of these pre-IPO investments, mostly big tech companies. I was trying to talk to people about it, but it was very much a man’s world, and nobody I knew was into it. I thought, okay, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.

Then, at the end of 2022, my mom passed. That turned my world upside down. I walked away from the nonprofit. I was the executor of the trust with my brother. She was in the UK, so for the next almost two years, we were trying to figure out this estate between the US and the UK, and it was brutal and awful.

She was a dual citizen and had accounts in both places. In America, it’s pretty simple when you die, as long as you have a trust, within a few days everything goes as you want it to. In the UK, it’s not as simple. They basically take forty percent of your global assets, and unless you had planned for it, which you can, there’s really nothing you can do about it.

That was a big rude awakening. She didn’t have a ton of money, but she had advisors she’d been paying, and managers on her accounts she’d been paying about one percent of AUM for over forty years, and these people hadn’t advised her properly, or, more likely, she had avoided these conversations. Every time I tried to talk to her about money, it was, darling, I don’t want to talk about it. She felt really overwhelmed by it and felt stupid around the topic.

Syama Bunten:

I’m going to pause, Emma, because this is such an important thing. If I could have you here for another hour, we would talk so much more about this. Can you please share more of the nuances and details? I think it’s so important and powerful to talk about these kinds of uncomfortable conversations. I had a conversation with someone the other day and said, the kind and loving thing to do is actually to set up your affairs, not to pretend like it’s all going to be magically taken care of. That is not the kind and loving thing.

Emma Malina:

The sad truth is she really thought it was taken care of, because she blindly trusted these people. So, first, don’t blindly trust anybody. Participation is a word that keeps coming up for me. I think of it kind of akin to voting. You don’t always get the person you want, you don’t always get all the things you hoped for, but you’ve got to vote. You’ve got to show up, you’ve got to participate. This is a really important thing.

When I was going through this with her, and I was trying to talk to girlfriends about whether they’d ever been through this, it was always hands up in the air, like, my husband deals with that stuff, my advisor deals with that stuff, my dad deals with that stuff. It was always a man. I get it, men want to protect us and take care of us. But the most caring thing men can do is actually have these conversations and be really open and honest, making sure the women in our lives understand it.

Most women I talk to say, I don’t even go to the yearly meeting anymore because the guy doesn’t even look at me. But it’s also our job to say, hey, can we spend half an hour today, can you just show me where things are, I want to understand this. There’s a statistic, something like ninety-four percent of millennial men wish their wives were more involved in the financial parts of their lives. It’s proven that when both people know what’s going on, there’s less stress, less speculation, less hiding, less distrust.

Participation, getting involved, asking questions, it shouldn’t be confrontational. This is your life, this is your money. Women generally die before men, and I think about ninety-five percent of women will eventually be the financial controller. Would you rather learn while you have the time and space and energy, and you’re not in crisis mode? Learning this stuff in crisis mode sucks, I can tell you from experience. And it was bad enough with my mother, I can’t imagine if it had been my husband instead.

Through all of this, I went down a rabbit hole, learning, meeting, listening, talking, trying to understand, asking the “dumb” questions, which are not dumb in the slightest. Last year, a couple of girlfriends said, you need to do a meeting, let’s gather and talk. So last year I started hosting what I call Matcha and Money in my living room. I’m slowly starting to build it, because I believe awareness and confidence around this topic comes from community and conversation.

Syama Bunten:

I’m just so happy you didn’t call it Wine and Wealth. You know how many “wine and wealth” things I’ve seen? It’s so bad. Matcha and Money is classy, a little sophisticated.

Emma Malina:

I wanted to call it Avocado Toast and Money, because women are told they’d have more money if they just wouldn’t buy their avocado toast, their matcha, and it’s like, no, we can have it all and we can have our matcha too, thank you very much. It’s green, and it’s money. I also don’t drink anymore, so it had to make sense to me.

Syama Bunten:

I love that, Emma. Tell me a little bit about your vision with Matcha and Money. What is the vision you are creating? What is the legacy you’re leading into? I have no doubt that in five years, when we re-record this podcast and ask where is Emma now, I don’t know, it could be a Matcha and Money airline company, it could have community stores. There are so many places you can take this vision of bringing women together. What do you see? What is the legacy you’re building toward with this?

Emma Malina:

In the long run, I want women to eventually become thoughtful stewards of our capital. From a very basic standpoint, I want women to understand that they have power with their money and that they have a voice. Women are, generally speaking, better investors than men, by almost two percent annually. We have better long-term viewpoints, we’re a little calmer most of the time in situations, we attach our values to things more. I think we’re actually better suited for long-term wealth creation.

Santa Barbara is a relatively affluent community, and I see women very comfortably writing philanthropic checks. I want women to understand that we can also write checks to women-founded businesses that are advancing innovation, advancing health tech. That’s one of the big reasons I got involved as a limited partner in a portfolio. We have the ability and the capacity, and if this wave of money is coming in over the next few years like they’re talking about, we have the capital to make serious change.

If we just keep investing in the old way, everything stays status quo. But when women get involved and ask, how about some investment in health innovation, why are we suffering through menopause, there are all these amazing companies starting up. The biggest thing I’d like women to understand is that their capital can have impact but can also deliver returns. That means you’re able to double down, triple down, and leave a legacy for your kids. It’s not just a handout. Philanthropic giving is really important, and we can do both.

Philanthropic giving is often cleaning up the village, we’re dampening the leak. Writing checks for companies, investing, that’s actually turning the faucet off. I want more women to realize that, and I think venture capital has this real “boys’ club” vibe about it. People think you’re not a VC unless you’re writing a million-dollar check. I can tell you right now, I am not writing a million-dollar check. Most of my checks are like ten thousand dollars. You can get in on these deals for five thousand dollars in a lot of cases. Twenty-five thousand is kind of a top line for a lot of them, the entry point, but it’s so much more accessible. Don’t be afraid to ask the questions.

It’s so exciting to see how much has changed just in the last two or three years in this area, and to see more and more happening. I want more women to become thoughtful owners and participants, not just earners, spenders, and savers, but capital givers and stewards, actively participating in the future we want to see for ourselves and our kids and our grandkids.

Syama Bunten:

I love that, Emma. What comes up for me is this feeling of responsibility. We actually have an economic responsibility, and if we do not become active with our capital and exercise that agency, we are not doing our responsible part in the economy, because that capital needs to be invested into the future. The returns people have today are because people back then invested into a future. It’s about future thinking, and being active and investing is taking an active interest in that.

As our conversation starts to wind down, I’d love to ask you two more questions. We’ve talked a little bit about capital, agency, investing, an incredible life story, and starting to open up a retirement account when you were so young, hooking up your future self. But obviously money is a lot of fun, and I’d love for you to share some of your most recent fun or fabulous ways you’ve been spending your money.

Emma Malina:

Gosh, I am not a very fabulous spender, I have to say. The thing that, and unfortunately my daughter knows this, is the thing I will not ask any question about, if you want to go see live music, just ask and I will buy the ticket. I think live music, going to concerts, having these experiences. She’s in Switzerland right now, she’s going to a three-day hip-hop festival outside of Zurich. We’ll be up in San Francisco for Outside Lands later in August. I love live music, I grew up in that crazy world, I love going to concerts. That’s my carte blanche, we’re going to go see Rufus du Sol, then we’re going to do this, then David Byrne. I just love live music.

Syama Bunten:

I love it, that’s so fabulous. Our final question to take us home. What are you calling in right now? How can we, the audience, support you? What do you need? What do you want? What can we do?

Emma Malina:

Just keep talking to the women in your life. I had my eyelashes tinted the other day, and the aesthetician doing it was twenty-four, and we got into a conversation about opening a Roth IRA. I took my friend’s twenty-two-year-old daughter to matcha the other day, and we talked about the Roth IRA. Get the girls in your life, boys too, but particularly the girls, thinking about financial independence now.

It seems so unsexy, but when you can look thirty years down the road and go, holy shit, it grew to that from this, it’s so crazy powerful. Come find me at Matcha Money on Instagram, but just keep talking, keep inviting women into this conversation, keep investing in women, find opportunities to invest in women, they’re very capital efficient. Keep talking, and don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions. If the person you’re asking makes you feel dumb, they’re the wrong person. Find the right person.

Syama Bunten:

Yes. Amen, sister friend, that is fabulous, fabulous pearls of wisdom. Emma Malina, thank you so very much for being here today on Getting Rich Together. You are a gift to be in community with. You have an incredible story, and I’m so excited to see how this next chapter unfolds.

Emma Malina:

Syama, thank you so much. It is an honor to be here, and I appreciate you so very much.

Syama Bunten:

Thank you for listening. This is the conversation we come back to every single week. Real women, real wealth, and what becomes possible when we stop being silent about money. If today’s episode moved you, don’t let it stop here. Wealth Catalyst is where women go to take it further. Our Freedom Tour salons are gathering women in 32 cities this year. Intimate evenings in homes and private spaces where women talk honestly about money, risk, and what they’re building.

And if you’re ready to go even bigger, join us at the Wealth Catalyst Summit, a full day event in San Francisco this October. Find your city and claim your seat at wealthcatalyst.com. We’ll see you there.