Welcome to Getting Rich Together. I’m your host, Shama Bunton. This show was born from my own journey. Coming out of a divorce, I reached out to 50 women to talk to them about money.

95% of them did not want to go there. That’s when I realized we need spaces where wealth isn’t hidden in silence but shared in possibilities. Here, you’ll meet women from all backgrounds, trailblazers, risk takers, visionaries, each expanding what wealth can look like. This is your place to be inspired to discover new pathways and to remember that we rise by building wealth together. Getting Rich Together is a wealth catalyst production.

At Wealth Catalyst, we bring together education, networks, and great opportunities for women to build wealth and change the world. Now, on to today’s show. Today, I am joined by one of the most trusted and respected voices in personal finance.

Ooh, I just got chills. Lynette Calfany Cox, known to millions as the money coach. Lynette, you have helped countless people improve their lives, find their self-worth again through the lens of building wealth, managing their money, and helping them align to their most abundant financial futures. Your best-selling books has touched the minds and spirit of millions. Your national media appearances with your beautiful smile, so fabulous, and your tireless advocacy for financial education. I am honored to have you here today.

I am so enthusiastic, about some of the new projects you’re working on around what you’re building right now, especially when it comes to how we start to bridge together what’s happening in culture and in media through channeling financial influencer network and bringing together the best and most brilliant minds to really help improve this planet through the lens of money. Thank you for being here today. It’s an honor to have you. I’m equally honored and deeply touched.

Thank you for that. We’ve talked about the ways in which amplification, collaboration, a spirit of cooperative ethos of working together. This really is the way many of us were raised in environments where it was like individualism, pull yourself apart, your bootstraps, and this idea that you work hard and you do it yourself. And yes, there is that element and there’s space and grace to align and to connect with others in meaningful ways and profound ways that lift us all. And you referenced the financial influencer network, for example. Yes, our recent baby, our project, our legacy project, if you will, from my husband, Earl, and myself, it’s about connecting those trusted voices, 26 of us, with a 10 million reach to not only our audiences in the communities that we serve, but also with our brand partners who want to be able to offer the most high quality products and services, programming and financial literacy education and opportunities to help people to do better with their money. So we just see an opportunity to connect all three, the experts who are providing our collective wisdom, again, valuable communities that we serve, our audiences, whether online or in real life in person, and again, brands that are values aligned, that are consumer friendly, and that care about financial inclusion for all. I love that, Lynette.

You lead with such a spirit of generosity, I think in this world of money, it’s so loaded with how we communicate, disseminate information, and the energy that we put behind it, and whether we’re coming at it from this everything is possible standpoint, or nothing is possible, unless you suffer hard. Before we jump into what I know is going to be an incredible conversation around legacy, I’d love to start from a young Lynette. Lynette, who’s, I don’t know, maybe she’s somewhere between eight and 12 years old. She’s definitely growing up somewhere.

She might even be leading from a spirit of generosity from this place. Where were you in life at a young girl? Where’d you grow up? What was around you? And what were some of the early money stories that you were picking up around yourself?

This is Leeshaama. I think a lot of what I do today is very much rooted in childhood. What I experienced, the things that I was blessed to have, and even the things that I was blessed not to have.

At the time, some of it seemed like a perhaps a curse and not so much of a blessing, but I now know at this age that there is no sort of happiness and goodness, no experience of the wonders of life and all the blessings without an appreciation for the other side of that coin. Both my peers were from New York. I was born in New York, but my parents moved to Los Angeles when I was a baby, like one year old. My dad was a shoe shine man in Harlem. His father was a shoe shine man, and his father was a shoe shine man. So three generations of black men who really, frankly, did not have access to higher education, advancing their skill sets in ways that would provide a more meaningful, substantive experience financially for their family, but certainly very hardworking. My dad moved from New York to California initially because he wanted to become of all things an actor.

And he did. I’ll share this story. So you asked about eight years old to 12. When I was seven years old, my parents divorced. My parents had five daughters together.

We were all, you know, what we call stair steps, like literally one and two years apart, one after the other. Right now, I think about my mom and I’m like, God bless you because you got girls. Okay. Five girls, pretty much on your own from from her late twenties on after she got divorced. She was married when they had all five of us.

But then like I said, she was divorced when I was seven years old. I grew up in Los Angeles in an era of busing when they would take mostly black and brown students, some Asian as well, from the central part of Los Angeles, from the bad neighborhoods and some might say, and bused us, put us on school buses to go to the western part of the city and to predominantly white, very affluent areas. Third grade, when I was eight, I was at Canyon Elementary School in Brentwood in middle school or junior high school. I went to Parivir Junior High School in Brentwood. Then in high school, I went to Pacific Palisades High School.

Unfortunately, you’ve probably heard about the fires and that recently got burned down. Long story short, the reason I’m saying this is I saw two worlds and I don’t mean just from a race standpoint, of course, I’m talking about socioeconomic status, access opportunities, the whole nine. In many ways, it was like, oh, wow, in this world, my day to day life existence, I’m in a two bedroom apartment my mom in one bedroom, five girls, my four sisters and I in the other bedroom in an apartment, literally two sets of bunk beds, my sister Cheryl on the top, my sister Debbie on the bottom, my sister Denise on the other set of bunk beds on the other at the top, and then me and my sister Hope in the bottom bunk, the fourth bed. My whole life, when I was one year old up until I went to college, I was at apartments like that.

My other friends in Pacific Palisades and in Brentwood, phenomenal houses, the pool, the parents who were professionals, who would say, oh, can you come over and have a play date or stay after school? My dad’s a doctor. My mom is an engineer.

What are your parents to do? And honestly, Shama, I was ashamed. I did not want to say, oh, my dad is a shoeshine man, so I was like, oh, my dad is an actor. Did you see ET? My dad was in, they were like, oh, that’s really cool.

That was like a block, right? It was a way to fit in and to assimilate, if you will. Honestly, it wasn’t until decades later, until I became an entrepreneur that I realized, wow, as much shame as I carried back then about my dad’s work and what he did. And my mom was a cashier and then the secretary and my mom worked multiple jobs while she was a single mom trying to care for the five of us. She was on food stamps. We had public assistance.

There was a period when we were squatting, which is a term for you to stay in a place where you have not played the red, but you have no place else to go. So it was rough, is what I’m saying, just sharing honestly that I definitely was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth, not by any stretch of imagination, because sometimes now people see this version of Lynette, they know the lifestyle, they see a bit of what we have, etc. There are a whole bunch of assumptions. Oh, you married into wealth with your husband or your parents were written?

No, not at all. Both parents who told my sisters and I, you can do anything. You can become anything.

You can do anything, work hard, get those A’s put in the effort. Nobody owes you anything. This world is rough. You have to bring your A game. This is what really much when my older sister’s Debbie, that was her favorite expression, to push, to really say, you have to put in the hard work.

There’s no substitute for that. At the end of the day, we defied the odds, statistically, I guess you might say, in that, yes, the five of us low income public assistant receiving girls, all five went to college. Three of us went on to earn our graduate degrees. The same three of us became business owners, which led to more wealth creation, more opportunities, more access. When I started my own business two years into it, and I’ve had my company now for 22 years, that was when I reflected on, oh, wow, the first entrepreneur I ever knew was Michael Darrell, my father. And my father always taught us all that all honest work is good work.

It doesn’t matter what the title is. It doesn’t matter socioeconomic rung that you’re on. If you’re providing a service, a product, and you’re making good happen in the world, serving a need for somebody, and you’re doing honest work, whether you’re shining shoes, whether you’re sweeping the streets, whether you’re starting a company that’s going to go public, whether you’re a nurse, a teacher, honest work is good work.

He was trying to lay the foundation for the values side of it, as opposed to the sort of the lineage side of it. And I so appreciate that. Now, again, this version of Lynette totally gets that. I can look back on my childhood and on my upbringing and know that both of my parents instilled in us proper values, but really a sense of possibilities, a sense of aspiration that is you’re not limited by your surroundings or what preceded you even. And so I carry that with me to this day. And I hope I’ve shared that also with my kids, because I certainly hope my three kids who are young adults now, I want them to 10x me or 100x me in the way that my parents, they’re so proud of all of us, but they’re so proud to see that their girls have all been thriving.

At such a young age to experience contrast, it leaves a mark on you. When I was growing up, I went to all these incredible private schools, and I was the girl on financial aid. I was the girl in the one bedroom apartment with friends who were living in big homes and had these big lives. And when I was young, I remember just feeling this strong need to like have agency in my life.

And it was like, hi, like this life is up to me. This is my life. And this is my hand. These are my hands. And I need to play with the hands.

I have cards I’ve been given. When you were in high school, what is it that you knew of yourself at that time? What did you want to be? How did you make sense of your young adult self in this space? So knowing education was going to be a ticket out, but also probably feeling the contrast and the pressures of living what could be considered two lives, right? The life at school, and that it’s life at home, which can often be very different.

This is a great question. And the honest answer is that duality actually drove me. It massively drove me. Perhaps I did feel like I had something to prove, which made me a little bit of a type A overachiever kind of personality. So here’s what happened when I was in high school, when I was in 10th grade, I went to Pacific Palisades High School. And in 10th grade, I started asking my mom if I could go to my local high school in my neighborhood.

Picture again, from elementary, middle school or junior high school, as we called it back then, to high school, I was in a very mixed environment, but primarily extremely wealthy neighborhood that affluent communities. My mom was like, absolutely not. She was like, well, these are better schools.

This is more opportunity for you. She was like, you’re going to stay there. I literally had to beg her. I had to cry and plead. When I told her one thing, it left her head. She was like, oh, Washington, it made her like say, okay, I told her an honest truth. I said, mom, but the girls are doing drugs in the bathrooms. I’m not even lying.

I’m like, they’re smoking and they’re using for a bathroom. And she was like, so we’re doubt about that. Honestly, it was nothing to me because I was never going to dabble and whatever.

So like, she was just like, mispurity, I guess, came out of her. And my mom, I think that she did not want anything remotely that could potentially even take me. So what happened was I did get a chance to go to my local high school, Susan Miller Dorsey High School, immediately fell in with an academic crowd. So I became the captain of the CAD team, the California Academic Decathlon team. And I had a mentor and a teacher dance or maybe rest in peace.

But immediately saw talent in me. All these kids tried out for the CAD is like a big thing. I think other states have it, but certainly in California, it’s a competition. It’s like a statewide competition and all the things.

So anyway, they have a thing that’s attached to it called the super quiz. This is so ironic, Shama, that year. And I don’t even want to say the year back in. Right. No, well, the super quiz topic was immigration.

Okay. My old school, Pacific Palisades was known to constantly win the CAD, the competition and or to win the super quiz. The year that I was on the super quiz and on the was on the team, there was one black kid. His name was Brian Davis, if I remember his last name was correctly, I knew him from just middle school growing up and everything. And the rest, white students from Pali and on our team at the Dorsey team, all black kids and one Asian guy, Arthur Han, when I tell you, we were at the newspaper, we were on TV. The media literally pitted us against each other and setting her this Jewish teacher who was known for getting the best out of these low income urban inner city kids.

They’re going up against the rich Pali kids, who will win the super quiz, who will win and all of these things. How awful to be so young and to be like outed for things that you have no control over, right? Like, yes, we studied night and day. Betner was relentless.

He was tough on us, cut to the chase. One day on a Saturday, we’re in the classroom studying, one of my friends had heard something outside that heard something. We’re like, oh, that must be on Saturday.

Nobody is it’s early in the morning. Heard a second noise. Finally, the door goes in the door, creaks and opens and it’s Brian. He opens the door, he has like a stunned look on his face and he was like, oh, shoot, it’s true.

Like you guys literally are in here in the morning studying on weekends. He was like, we might be in for it. After that, our classroom was burned down. I didn’t have zero thoughts that Brian or anybody from Pali, I’m not saying that they had anything to do with it. Somebody who obviously wanted to interrupt us, the classroom was literally burned to the ground.

Again, this was all in the media, everything. We were more determined than ever. We did win the super quiz. Yes, you did.

Yes, you did. So my high school experience was about achievement, excellence, proving yourself. And at that time, you could apply to two schools and the UC system.

So literally, and again, it’s okay for me to say I graduated in 1986 from high school. So I applied to UC Berkeley and I applied to UC Irvine. I got into both of them. I applied to Yale. And honestly, when I think back, I think the only reason I applied to Yale is because of Spettner. I think he said, you should go to an Ivy League school. I got waitlisted at Yale. Spettner took me to Berkeley. I was like, this is it for me.

I love Burton. And he said, no, he was like, absolutely not. I was also working when I was in high school. Again, I told you, my mom was a single mom. And I worked for AAA, the automobile association of America. I was a dispatcher. Believe it or not, I earned $7.35 an hour decades ago.

That was more money than my mom was making at the time. AAA had on UC Berkeley’s campus, a AAA dispatch center. And I was like, great, I can go to college and while I’m in school, I can work here.

And Spettner was like, absolutely not. You don’t work here first year. It’s going to be much harder. You’re going to have to focus on studies and blah, blah, blah. So he told my mom, he was like, no, do not let this, let me hit go to UC Berkeley.

She’s just going to try to work too much. My mom was like, he knew you. Really knew you. So my mom was like, Irvine, they have a great biome side department. And I was like, what do I care about biolateral sciences? Don’t you want to be a doctor? And I said, mom, I told you that when I was like five years old, no, I don’t want to be a doctor. That was like, well, hadn’t you been listening to me?

No. So when I was in high school, I would always get A’s in English, all my writing classes. It just came naturally to me. And of course, I’ll have the gift of gap I’m always talking.

And so the communication side of it really appealed to me. However, because my mother and I did not agree on what my major should be, and I did decide to go to UC Irvine, the compromise for us was that I would be undeclared. Well, as an undeclared student, and the agreement was, okay, take class and see what you bide and align with. And then after year one, declare a major. In my first year, I got to take a journalism class. And I had English courses, except now I was like, oh my God, this is for me.

This is it. I also got to write for the new you the campus newspaper. I became the editor in chief of the Umoja, the African American student magazine. For my sophomore year, I went to my advisor, and I was like, I want a major in journalism, just sign me up.

This is it. And they were like, sorry, we don’t even have that as a major. They were like, we have English, you can be an English major in my advisor.

She said, she was like, yeah, and the entire UC system, there’s only one campus that has a bachelor’s in journalism, undergrad, and that’s UC Berkeley. And I was like, but I did know I was like, oh, this is for me. I didn’t wait 100% know when I was in high school, but I just knew that I really liked writing. And I did very well in that. And I love just everything about communication and talking connected with people. It sounds like your voice was really like you knew the power of your voice at a young age. And like your ability to go and be the editor of a publication means that you will not only understand your own voice, your own integrity, your own values, but you’re also willing to shape the experience of other through using a platform life. That’s really unique and special at a young age.

I can’t say I saw it and modeled anywhere or whatever. I do think that there was an element of that also in my parents, though. Again, my dad, the performance side of him, and my mom is 81, my dad is 83 now.

To this day, my dad is still doing things, performing and he has contracts, his brand deals. And I was in, no, I’m literally, I’m serious. I was in, I live in the Houston area and I work at a doctor’s appointment. I was just, just literally sitting in the doctor and my husband and I, we go to each other’s doctor’s appointments with one another. And I do that with my husband.

Honestly, I think that’s how it should be. Get the question and what they said. And so one of us is like taking notes and her minding and doing all the things. So our doctors all across the spectrum, they’re used to both of us now.

But I saw I was sitting on the, I’m sitting on the table and I’m just waiting for my doctor to come in and Earl is facing me. He’s like chit-chatting, talking to me. And then he goes, look at that. And so I turn around and there’s this, like a, you know, those slide things that just show advertisements.

But no, it’s my father and his, and his wife, Fanny, they were in an advertisement for some medicine or some healthcare campaign. It just flow circle. I don’t know. You saw your father live out his dreams, right? That is not, that is no small thing either. The risk and courage for him to do that.

That’s quite exceptional. But again, at the time it was like, it, well, we got mixed messages. I understood entrepreneurship as a child to be very risky, to be argument provoking, because some of the earliest conversations in my household were around money and around difficulties around money. And my mom’s saying, Michael, you need to get a J-O-B.

You need to have a regular quote unquote job because you have five mouths to feed. My dad had a number of shoe shine stands. It wasn’t just him by himself.

He ultimately built it into a sizable operation where he, of course, he had employees and people working for him and high-end hotels at car washes at different areas. But again, there’s like the old song that said, oh, it never rains in Southern California. Not. That’s a lie. My mom would say, Michael, when it rains, you can’t make any money. You can’t, she was like, you need to just go get a regular job. She said shoes better than anybody because my dad knew how to dye shoes. He knew how to do everything. He was like a classic artist with his shoe shine specialty. It was so crazy because he would have CEOs and clients, executive vice presidents, and they would ask him like insights into all kinds of things. He was like their little focus group of sorts. But he did. My mom, because he wanted to get my mom off of his back, he went and he worked for Floor Shine, the shoe store.

And he was the manager and he was miserable. Our generation might be like, being in a cubicle, being stuck in the office or whatever, right? When you really want to be free. And I can’t remember how long they lasted, but it was not too long because he just wanted his freedom and his, he wanted to call the shots. He wanted to be the owner. He wanted to be the business.

He wanted to be an entrepreneur. And so again, so much full circle. I again, I appreciate all of those values. When I lived in New Jersey, my husband and I had a nice home in a nice area. Our kids grew up with all of their friends, even though it was different demographically than the childhood that I experienced. Because I was bust, it was like me and a whole bunch of other kids of color. But in the neighborhood where we lived in Mountainside, New Jersey, at the time, it was very small population, like 8,000 or so, and about 97% white. So my kids had the experience of pretty much being the only black kid in the class and frankly, many times in the whole school. That was a different upbringing for them. But I would marvel and they had friends of all backgrounds and whatnot, European, South American, but I marveled to see when they had playdates and parties and kids would come to the pool at our house in New Jersey. I was just like, wow, this is a full circle moment.

The kid attending the parties and long after, and what’s the actor is saying, well, wow, this is different than what I had in my two middle. And now I’ve created that. We have my husband and I together for our kids, the next generation. And I don’t know if you’ve got me talking and all kind of things. I love it. So here you are. You’re in university.

Your mom’s ill and that’s not going to be a doctor. She’s made meridian journalism. You graduate university, you’re launching yourself into the world.

How do you meet with your first few jobs? What is that like? Are you aware of negotiating? Obviously, are you on your own already? Are you paying for rent? Is it like, oh my gosh, the world costs so much more money than I thought it would?

Because that’s how I felt. How did you start to navigate launching yourself into the world post university? I went to C. Irvine, as I mentioned, undergrad. And then I went immediately to grad school at USC in Los Angeles. And that’s where I got my master’s degree in journalism. In undergrad, I had an internship at a TV station in Florida, WERTV in Pensacola, Florida. That was my first internship. My sister Cheryl lived out there at the time.

So I lived with her. And then I did the internship. They gave us a little stipend at the end and just really about getting the experience and whatnot.

Not about the money at all. But again, it confirmed for me, I definitely wanted to work in media. When I was in grad school at USC, again, I’m dating myself here. But this is when the riots broke out in Los Angeles.

Rodney King incident happened. And so I was in graduate school at the time at USC. I was literally like typing a paper, a final paper to make a deadline to turn it in. And somebody walked into the library where we all were. And she said, think that all, I can’t believe those cups got off. And then I was like, everybody was like, what? And she said, in the Rodney King case, telegraphed, beating early.

This was before social media, but somebody had on tape showing unfortunately abuse by the police. And I was just like, I was like, focus, just stay on your just do this. So I finished my paper and I immediately went to the intersection.

What became the hotspot of the riots. I was married the first time around when I was very young during grad school because 1992 is when I got married the first time around. My then husband, people were calling looking and checking in on everybody. And he was worried like, where is the Lynette?

And then he thought he was like, knowing Lynette, she’s listening to the radio or she’s like, she’s gonna go and he was right. I had an internship with the Associated Press. In that internship, they picked 10 students from all across the country, a competitive thing. And they told us all you do this 10 week internship, you rotate. And if you’re successful, you are guaranteed a job with the AP. They said, but here’s the thing. Don’t expect to work in the major markets like New York, they flew all of us out there to New York for the orientation and to do everything. But they said, don’t expect wherever you’ve come from, you have to put in your time.

Lynette, you live in Los Angeles, but you will not be working in Los Angeles. That’s number one, number two market in the country. And they said, you guys, you’ll have to start at Newmont Tannum. You’ll have to start in Indianapolis.

You have to start wherever you have to go. And I was like, watch. I was like, I do the internship.

I excel in the internship. They have an opening, a woman named Yumi left and she went to the San Francisco Chronicle and it opened up a full time job at the Los Angeles Bureau of the Associated Press. I made a beeline to Andy Littman, the bureau chief. And I was like, Andy, raise in my hand. I want this role.

I want to be a full time person here. And he was like, Lynette, you’re really good. And I know you have a lot of energy and passion for what you do.

Your rotations, everybody has said you’re great. And you’ve got 10, 10, 10s on your marks and all that. This requires a more skilled, this is a more senior role.

Yumi had years and years more experience than you do. And if I give you this job, this is going to be like news work because other people are going to come and apply for it. And I was like, okay, who’s applying?

And he was like, not yet so far. And I said, Andy, let me ask you a couple of questions. I said, didn’t you guys create this internship program as a pipeline and as a pathway to have internal talent and you wouldn’t have to go externally? He was like, yes, we did. Didn’t you guys say you’re guaranteed a position with it within the AP? Nope. No problems is about where it is.

But you’re guaranteed as long as you successfully complete your rotation. Yes, we did. Didn’t you just say that everybody gave me 10s and marks and you know, so I just took him down the cab.

Andy, I’m a solution to your problem. You have the name. I’m more than prepared and qualified. I can do this job.

You’ve seen me. So he was like, okay, I will make an announcement. I’m just going to tell him Lynette is taking this job. And that’s exactly what he did. And I did. I became a reporter. That was my first full time job after that internship because I talked myself into it. And don’t you know that the Associated Press later sent me to Kalamazoo, Michigan to speak on a channel to talk about rebuild LA and the economic impact of what the riots had done.

And Peter Vuelz had a big campaign about how do we rebuild after the riots and all that. I didn’t really get that the newsroom wasn’t diverse. Yumi was actually biracial. She was black and Asian, but I did not understand that really there were no black people on their feet from staff. Nobody who was on the ground who had covered the riots or had seen what was going on the ground.

They had photographers and stuff like that, but it was limb picking. And so when they sent me to Kalamazoo, Michigan to a university there for an event, it’s all about the media and the riot. AP sent me, little old me.

I was like 20 something, I was just young to be their representative and to talk about what that experience was like. Pause for a second. If you’re not already on the wealth catalyst sub stack, you are missing out. Over 20,000 people have subscribed and they are diving into stories, strategies and money expanders you won’t find anywhere else.

Join us today and keep fueling your wealth journey. Check out the link in the show notes. Now back to the show.

That’s insane. I have a feeling this is just the way the rest of this episode is going to go. And I wanted this and I decided that I should have it for these very logical reasons that I’ve determined. And therefore I will make it easy for you to say yes to me by telling you exactly what it is I think, what I think you should do.

And then also at such a young age to be on stage and to be representing something again, like I said about your editorial background, to be representing and shaping the way other people are experiencing something through being able to shape that narrative at such a young age is so powerful. Can we take it one step further? So here’s what happened. I told you that I was married. My ex-husband, he had gone to UC Santa Cruz. I met him when I was in college. We dated afterwards. We got married. And then he went to Penn to get his PhD in sociology.

So we moved from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. We had an agreement. The agreement was essentially you go to school, you do you.

He had a joint master’s and PhD program and it was supposed to be a five year program. And I was like, no worries. And here I am putting on my black woman’s superhero cape.

I don’t know what I thought I was doing. But I was like, go to school, do you? I’ll work not only one job, I’ll work two jobs. And so I actually worked while he was in college at Penn. I worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the print newspaper by day. And I worked at Fox, the 10 o’clock news in Philadelphia by night.

It was a crazy schedule. I would get home, I would go out in the morning for nine o’clock and get home after 11 after the news ended. So I did that for a year. And my friends at the Inkey, that’s what we call the Philadelphia Inquirer, I worked in their South Jersey Bureau, which is in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. And one day my friends said, oh, we’re going to the Newsday job conference.

Why don’t you come with us? And I was like, Newsday and New York and they were like, yeah. And I said, I live in Philadelphia. I’m crossing the bridge every day to come to New Jersey. Why would I want to go another state? You’re asking me to go like two states.

I don’t want I don’t need a job in New York or anything. And they were like, no, Lynette, I know you’re from LA. This is the East Coast. Everybody’s really mobile here. We just catch the train. We do the Amtrak as quick.

And I’m thinking like in LA, I could be in traffic for two hours, or they’re sitting on the four of five or something. So they convinced me. I went to the Newsday job conference. And that’s where I met some editors from Dow Jones and Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal. So I met a man who would come my mentor for many years. His name is Rick Stein. I met his deputy, Howard Hoffman as well.

And long story short, I meet them at the Newsday conference. Rick is going over my clip. He’s looking at all of my my newspaper stories, et cetera. And he’s this is amazing. He was like, wow, I love your business clips.

I love your stories. And then in my head, I’m not even lion shama. I was like, what is he talking about? What business stories? What is he talking about? But again, I just saw it as that he was talking about the articles that I’d written about rebuild LA and about the economic aftermath of the riots in Los Angeles. How I wrote about how the electronics industry was estimated, how Korean merchants were targeted, what Peter Ubram was doing, et cetera, et cetera.

I just saw it as community journalism, as local reporting. But he saw the money story there, right? So he was like, this is fabulous.

This is he really loved it, right? So we talked. He really liked me. I like Tim. We clicked.

He was like, oh, no, for sure. I want to further engage with you. Well, we talked again afterwards. He made me an offer. He made a good offer, but it wasn’t good enough. And so I was negotiating from day one.

So I said, oh, Rick, thank you so much. I appreciate the interest. I know you offered and I can’t remember what it was back then. It might have been like 48,000 or 50,000 or whatever the number was. This was 93 or 94.

So we’re going back, right? I’ll say it was 94. And I said, I know you offered. This is a good offer, but I was thinking more like X and I bumped it up 15 or 20 percent, whatever the number. And I said, honestly, I want to be paid commensurate with the value that I know I’m going to deliver for you to do that. Like how this is the stuff that people are like still talking about now, right? Like how to position your value.

How did you know how to do that? Honestly, I can’t say what instinctively or what initially made me even think to ask for more outside of economic need outside of that. But I can tell you unequivocally one thing that made me change and negotiate forever.

Like I never forgot it and I’ve always negotiated 100 percent of the time. So the need factor was I was replacing two jobs. So yes, he made me a good offer, but I had to. I had the Philadelphia Inquirer salary and the Fox salary. And even his offer exceeded what I was making for both of those. Nonetheless, I was like, I have to get our Amtrak.

I have a two hour commute and that Amtrak ticket was whatever it was back then, like four or five hundred dollars a month. And so I was like, all of this has to be covered. Again, now I know I never negotiate from a position of need or greed, only from a position of strength. But that’s a whole other thing.

I have a course called negotiating for women and I teach that now. But this was the thing that when I tell you, like I said, it was like, you don’t have to tell me twice. Rips was like, oh, OK, when I asked for more money, he was like, cool. He was like, OK, let’s keep talking. He did not say yes immediately. He did not say no, but he was just like, OK. And he said, OK, let’s talk again.

So a week or so later, we were still talking. We’re still and he doesn’t budge. He doesn’t say yes. And I don’t say yes to his offer either.

I’m like, I want to get the number that I want to get made. So we still don’t agree with it. Another week goes by. We’re chatting it up. He’s, oh, yes, I’m very interested. And I was like, yes, me too.

And as I said, I feel like a compensation in this range is more reflective of what I’m going to do for you and blah, blah, blah, blah. And he still doesn’t say yes. So I’m like, I know with this cat and mouse dance and where this whole thing is going. I get a call from Howard. Shama, I get a call from Howard Hoffman. He’s number two. He was at this, the news editor. Howard’s and Howard’s the nice chatty guy. And he said, hey, how’s it going?

He goes, Rick told me, I know you guys been talking the last several weeks or so. We go, we love you. We want you to come on board.

This is what’s the hold up here? What’s and I say, frankly, Howard, the compensation isn’t quite where I wanted to be. Here’s the skill set that I bring to the table. Here’s what I plan to do for Dow Jones, blah, blah, blah. And I feel that what I’m asked before is reasonable.

It’s not not so far out of the ballpark here. And then he goes, oh, he was like, yeah, of course, he goes to this. And some more and came again for more. He was like, we would think less of you if you didn’t. He said, literally, we would think less of you if you didn’t.

Well, my drop came like drop. I was like, oh, so this is the guy you expect me to. Well, you want to see if I’m just going to capitulate or you want to know to what extent I will advocate for myself.

I don’t I had never experienced that. Like I say, that was the only time in my life that anybody ever had to even suggest to me that I might accept the first offer. So I went back, I initiated the call. I said, Rick, here’s what things stand.

I’m definitely going to be weighing my options. I let him know. I said, would love to join Dow Jones.

I think that you guys have a fabulous team. I would like to work under your tutelage. And he had already told me, by the way, Shama, this shows you about.

I don’t even know. Maybe God was protecting me because I was like all this confidence with this much knowledge of what I was about to step into this much knowledge. OK, because Shama, did I mention what Rick told me that he wanted my beat to be? No, he told me, he said, Lynette, you’re a fabulous storyteller. You know, you have great sourcing. I love your writing. I want to put you on our most high profile beat.

I want you to cover Wall Street. And I was like, you know, this is me. OK, this is me fabulous. And I said, there’s just one little thing, Rick, just to level set here just to be candid. I said, you do realize that I really couldn’t tell you a stock from a bond, right? I don’t know anything about equities.

I don’t know about fixed income. I could and he was like, oh, for that. He was like, it’s about to learn that. That’s just he said, I can’t teach. He said, I can’t teach somebody how to write. I can teach somebody how to talk and how to connect with people and to draw information out of them.

I can’t teach somebody how to know to get a diversity of sourcing and voices in your articles. He said, I’m looking at your clips and they’re insanely good. He said, you can learn the money stuff. That’s anybody to learn that. And he was right.

He was absolutely right. And so I told him, I said, Rick, honestly, as I’ve told you before, this is the number that it’s going to take to get me to come. If we can agree on these terms, I’m happy to start. I’ll start in two weeks.

And this is my requirements. Okay. He said, okay, we get the, I’m not even lying. When I find him and when I say, this is what it takes, he said, okay. So, ever since then, I’ve been quite the negotiator. Oh, how delicious. Such tremendous like self advocacy, owning yourself and also knowing that whatever was up ahead, you were, you could handle it.

Yes. You were the right person. God would not have given you this opportunity if you weren’t uniquely designed. Go after it and crush it. That is so cool. And let me share again, because I know that sometimes it might seem like some things might seem okay, they’re out of your comfort zone or it’s out of alignment. And there’s a lot of research, honestly, around this that women, we can have eight or nine out of the required skill sets that are required for a given position or whatever, but we won’t apply because we’re like, oh, this one thing I don’t know yet. But in a man will have two out of the 10 and be like, yeah, I’m good. And put his hat in the ring for that instantly. But certainly there have been times when I backed off where I was not as confident.

Like I speak Spanish and I had an opportunity to do Telemundo to Spanish language station to do an interview. And I was like borderline petrified. And my husband was like, you’ve got this.

Like my husband Earl, my second and forever husband. So he said, he was like, why are you worried? But I was like, oh, it’s different words and business. And so I gave every reason, every excuse in the book about why I couldn’t and shouldn’t and wasn’t going to do this interview. And so I turned the interview down literally about maybe a year after that, I met somebody else at Telemundo and they were saying, oh, your name came up or something or there was an opportunity to do another interview. And they said, and I said, oh, yeah, I had, I turned it down before. And they were like, why? And I said, well, honestly, I was worried about my Spanish. I didn’t think I was, it was good enough, et cetera. And they were like, well, we do my language.

If you had any words, they would just go to English. So now, so the other day, I’m pitching a clients. I, we’ve launched the financial influencer network. It’s a curated group of 26 trusted voices in the personal finance space.

We have a collective 10 million reach. So I’m talking to a lot of brand partners and different folks. So I’m pitching this one client and they asked me, they said, do you have anybody in your network who is Latino or who speaks Spanish or, and I said, yes, actually we have one woman. She’s Afro Latino, Afro Latina. And I said, and actually I said, I’m African American, clearly.

But I said, but actually I do speak Spanish as well. And I just launched right in. I just went for it. So I just started speaking to him in Spanish.

So when we carried on the conversation for a good four or five minutes before we paused and then went back to speaking in English. So again, I felt, okay, my full circle moment of confidence up a little bit more. And it just showed me, just put yourself out there, just try. You don’t have to be perfect.

You don’t have to know everything. I really do believe that we have everything that we need. We have everything that we need within us and within our collective circles and our spheres of influence, the people that are put into our lives.

We really do have everything that we need. Okay. So here you are building a prolific career where you are further understanding yourself, your voice. So what I still keep coming back to is this ability to shape people’s experiences of themselves. And you held a number of really prominent columns and positions where you were able to write with the languaging and the energy around such an emotional topic where people, you talk about someone’s money and all of a sudden it’s, oh, we don’t talk about that.

Or, oh, don’t ask that question. And here you are getting into people’s hearts and minds and coming at it from softer places and not necessarily the places that they would expect. As you were starting to develop this ownership of your voice and your personality and your reputation. And again, leading from this place of, I believe, is generosity. Right?

Like we’re all in this together. At what point did the entrepreneurial spirit of your father kick in? And you said, okay, it is now time to take ownership over, not just my voice and what I’m creating, but also my life and what it is that I’m here to build. When did that start to happen for you? I had in my mind for several years, the idea or had toyed with the idea of starting a business, but I executed at zero percent on it.

So it was just one of a passing thought, well, it’ll be nice to do. Or, and I talked about it here or there, but I did absolutely nothing with it. So I threw myself into my journalism career. I, as you mentioned, became a senior writer, a special writer, a bureau chief at Dow Jones, I became a Wall Street Journal reporter for CNBC, did a correspondence role there. So in my last role, Dow Jones was actually still paying my paycheck.

They had a partnership with CNBC at the time. So my last role there, I was on air on TV, translating complex story basically for a TV audience. I was laid off. So the short answer of how I got into entrepreneurship is that I was forced into it. And now I always tell people that you leave corporate America with a feather or a baseball bat. So the feather is, oh, they’re getting married and moving across the country. Oh, they’re going to grad school or oh, they have an opportunity or they had a baby and they just decided to just become a stay at home mom or to take time off or whatever. It’s the planned exit.

It’s the party. It could be even in the 20 year career and you get a nice little little going away present as that. What I experienced was not that it was more the baseball bat. Bam. So okay, you got to go. It wasn’t that quick.

They did give us a notice, but I will share that. And I write about this in my book, Bounce Back, the ultimate guide to financial resilience where I talk about setbacks and how you overcome what I call the dreaded D’s, things like downsizing from a job, divorce, debt in the family, disability, disease, damage credit, dollar deficits, even discrimination. Things that hack a punch emotionally and financially. How do you recover?

I talk about 10 dreaded D’s because I’ve been through nine of them and live to survive and even thrive. In my case at CNBC, I was a Wall Street Journal reporter for CNBC. I was on air, corresponding at CNBC and I was in contract negotiations. I struck a deal, a handshake deal with a woman who was an executive vice president and I had a TV agent who had been negotiating for me, but frankly, I was able to negotiate more than the agent was.

Now, isn’t this insane? But again, said I’ll share the good and the bad. I, his name was Bob Barnett. It was a very high profile agent.

He did book deals for the Clintons and for this one and that one and TV deals for different people. And I went back to him. So the deal that I struck with Kathy was I had asked for, I was earning a nice six figure salary and asked for more, of course. And I said, here’s what I want.

She was very clear. You’re worth it. You’re worth every penny and then some, however she was saying, we really can’t afford it.

We have a, we’re looking at the budget right now and there’s a whole bunch going on and we’re not going to be able to afford that. What else can we do for you Lynette? Because we really, we love you. We want to keep you.

We want the over things, right? So she said, just go home and think about it. Take the weekend, come back and tell me whatever you want. And I’m going to, I’m going to make it work for you, but I can go here to this amount, but I can’t really go even more than this. So I said, okay, I’m going to go home and think about it. So I did. I went home, I thought about it and I said, what do I really want? And I wanted some of my time back.

I wanted my freedom and I wanted support from the network because I was in the middle of writing a book. So I was writing my first book called investing success. I got Charles Schwab to write the forward to the book and it ultimately, it did well and everything, but I basically said to her, Kathy, I want to have a four day work week. So you bought my salary here and I want to work four days a week instead of five. And on that fifth day, I want to be at home writing.

And then I want the ability to put on the cover of the book while street journal reporter for CNBC to help me to promote and do it and everything. She was like, deal. She was like, she said, you got it.

So that’s what I did. So I started taking off on Thursdays and I’m sorry, taking off on Fridays. I had a four day work week. When I was, she and I struck our deal.

I went to Bob, I called him on the phone. I was like, guess what? I got it. He, I got, he was like, wow. And on an annualized basis, that’s way more than even what I negotiate. And I was like, yeah, I know.

Or he immediately went to, I said, put it all in writing. Get, let’s button this up. Dow Jones stalled. So they stalled, they stalled. They never came to the table and signed the deal.

Even though I started executing on the deal, work doing it, taking off every Friday, et cetera, a couple of weeks go by and I’m like, Kathy, what’s going on? She goes, oh, don’t worry about it. There’s no problem.

The little while, but a couple more weeks goes by. Still no deal. I’m getting worried. She said, don’t worry. It’s, I’m going to make this happen. Nothing happens by like December. She drops the bar on me and 200 other people too.

And she says, basically, I’m sorry. Dow Jones is going to have layoffs and 200 people were offended. And I was one of them. And I was like, what are they going to do with me? I thought I had a color grade.

I thought I had, I’ve won awards. I’m bringing Sprocketshield dollars because Schwab had also sponsored. I would do a segment called small business world on CNBC and they were the sponsor. So I knew I was generating revenue for the company. So in the nutshell, this was my mistake. First, I should have immediately walked back to my desk and instead of calling Bob Barnett, I should have emailed Kathy Christiansen and I should have said, Kathy, thank you so much. Great conversation. Happy that we were able to reach terms per our discussion.

This is what we agreed on. Here’s my salary. Here’s I’m going to have a four day work week. Let’s hear. I’m going to send this to Bob.

I’m cc him so we can put it further solidify this in contract. I did not send that email, which was ludicrous. It was very short sighted. What happened was I, after the whole notice of a downsizing, I go to Kathy and I say, what happened to our deal? I’ve been taken off these times at Shama. I’m not lying. She looked me dead in my face and she said, what deal? And I was like, Kathy, the deal, the reason that I’ve been taking off after the last two months, taking off every Friday you haven’t seen me.

What? And then she was like, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. So she was trying to like save her own butt there. And ultimately, unfortunately for her, she also was laid off later and et cetera. But it did.

It taught me a lesson. Get it in writing. There’s nothing that you should be doing that you shouldn’t get in writing. So that baseball bat, they gave us three months notice. My last day on ear at CNBC was March 1st, 2003. That same month, March 2003, I started my company and I’ve never looked back. So yeah, it was the baseball bat, but ultimately it worked out.

And I have a friend, her name is Melanie Trotman, who worked at the journal. And I was fussing and saying, this is not right. This is not fair. Why me? Like I didn’t want help people might be a agent, but why me? And then Melanie goes, did you say you wanted to start a business?

Didn’t you tell me that? And I was like, we have everyone’s need on my own terms. How powerful. One of the things that I feel I’ve heard you say now a few times in our conversations is around like legacy and like how everything you’ve been building and working on and really this sort of focus on the impact of the body of work that is Lynette Calfoni Cox. What is this like life impact look like over the last almost 23 years of working in your business and growing your business and impacting the lives of people who you will never know.

Like you, you do not know the legacy you leave, right? Because it happens through people and in ways that that you can never anticipate or expect as you’ve been moving through these iterations of yourself and this business and all of the ways in which you’ve created impact. What have been some of those key inflection points where you felt inside both the magic and then this deep connection to, holy crap, I’m really doing it and like, and this is happening.

And wow, what are the moments where you blew your own socks off your feet? Definitely there have been just major career highlights that are unforgettable being on Oprah and then just being having just the support of Harco as a whole, going through the family. The, you know, what I call it the Harco family being connected with Dr. Phil Tyra being Tyra’s money expert and just that whole run was very powerful. And so many people said this was the first time that they ever got to see a black woman doing finances and talking about finance at a high level or even at an extensible level that that everybody could understand.

So things like that becoming the New York Times bestseller, definitely among the on the highlight reel there. And I’m sorry about that. And I, I look back though. And honestly, the legacy part for me isn’t about the kind of career notches on the belt, because again, I had a friend, a mentor, a professional colleague who also a great amount of business with us. Her name was Loretta Abrams and she used to work for HSBC. She headed their community and engagement division. She did a number of business projects with our business, the Money Coach.net, our LLC, buying thousands of books at a time, doing employee workshops for their HSBC employees, sending them on a tour, doing YWCA in Arizona and just a whole bunch of things, sponsoring something in New York that Earl Linaugra, old speakers at just a tremendous amount of them. And so she retired. When she retired, I flew out to Chicago just to take her to lunch and to thank her. And she reminded me that there’s so much work to be done.

And that at the end of the day, for all the impact that we might make, it’s a drop in the bucket. And that she said, keep at it, keep doing what you’re doing, but just know that because I asked her, I say, what do I have to look forward to when I retire and how am I going to be feeling? We like, she, I will say she took me down emotionally, but she helped me to level set, let’s say.

She right sized you. He looked like at the end of the day, it’s a drop in the bucket. And you can be okay with that. It’s still do it. And I was, because I was like, if I can just change one life, then it’s worth it. And so for me, the legacy part, it is about all the lives that I’ll be able to touch seen and unseen.

Yeah. And the reason that Earl and I have launched the Financial Influencer Network as our quote unquote legacy project is that we know that what we do at scale will reach so many more people. And so whenever it is that we’re ready to ride off into the sunset and do our own things, if we can have a collection of people who are also serving our audiences to do better with their own resources, to save, to invest, to donate, to spend more wisely, then that’s a good thing. We’ve helped more folks along the way.

Oh my gosh. Lynette, I feel like we could talk for hours and I’m so grateful for you. I have two final short questions. The first is what are you calling in right now and how can our audience support you? What are the things that we can do to evangelize what’s important to you in the world? I think number one to me is about spreading financial literacy in all corners of the globe. Everybody needs to understand how to manage the resources that they have, how to be good stewards, how to give back, how to work in collective and cooperative ways that advance us all. So to the extent that anything is global or international in scope or that helps people at scale, then it’s something that I’m definitely supportive of and would love for others to join in on that. We recently announced a partnership with Amir, the Association of Microfinance Institutions in Rwanda, and we’ve been to Africa three times this year and we’re going back again at the end of four months, the end of October through the end of November.

And again, furthering, building out our strategic partnership on the continent, etc. So that is one thing. But then also, I guess the other thing, it might sound a little simplistic, but it’s symbolize in the expression, each one teach one. And it’s just pay it forward. If you’ve learned something new, if you’ve been inspired, if you’ve tapped into a resource, if you have an opportunity to share, if you have access that you can provide, if you have a connection that you can bring to the table, kindness often costs nothing. And so be willing to teach, be willing to share, be willing to give back in ways that are meaningful. And to me, that’s, it’s not that I need that, it’s that the world needs that. And so I would encourage us all to put that goodness out into the world.

Oh, I love that Lynette. And then my final question is we’ve talked so much about money and just career and life and legacy. Money is also really fun.

And as we close out the show, I’d love to know what is your most fabulous or fun recent thing that you have spent money on? Oh, it’s coming. It is, I wouldn’t say it is coming.

He is coming tomorrow. We’re having a curated experience at our home. And so we have one of the top chefs in Houston coming here. And so it’ll be a nice experience for our guests. And so, yeah, we’re paying this private chef to come in and to have a wonderful, not only a culinary experience, but just personally to talk and to engage. He is South African and his wife is Venezuelan. And the fusion and the mix of foods and the style that he prepares, the food is amazing.

It’s called Astros in the Houston area. And so I am looking forward to that. You are an incredible spirit and gift to myself, to this planet, to everyone who gets a chance to meet you and know you. Thank you for being so open, so vulnerable, sharing your light with us. I’m grateful to know you. And I know that everyone today will be so happy to have heard you.

I’m getting rich together. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Getting Rich Together. My hope is that you leave every episode feeling more inspired, more powerful and more connected. Until next time, remember you have everything it takes to create wealth on your terms.