First Steps to Investing with Allegra Brantly

Leading 1 million women to $1 million in net worth.

Allegra Brantly is the founder and CEO of Factora, an online wealth building community for women. Factora educates and empowers women on how to close the gender investing gap. Their mission is to lead 1 million women to $1 million in net worth. She is deeply passionate about helping women learn about financial freedom.?

We dive into the difficulty of getting started with investing, how a community keeps you motivated, and just how personal investing is.

Eve #WealthWednesday Highlight 49: Allegra Brantly, CEO and Founder - Factora Wealth

What’s your background?

I'm talking to you from Austin, Texas. I'm the CEO and founder of Factora Wealth, which is a company on a mission to lead 1 million women to 1 million net worth. We do that by way of our online course and community called a Wealth Circle.

We started in 2018, and we're getting ready to open up the fall Wealth Circle later this summer.?

What was your first investment?

Two come to mind.?

The very first would've been opening up my 401k at the Estée Lauder companies. But, I didn’t make selections, so I sat in a money market for two years before I actually cashed out of that to start my first company.?

My first intentional investment was opening up a robo-advisor account with Betterment and depositing $250.?

I remember that experience so vividly, because there are so many women in the Factora community who go through it for the first time. A lot of them have retirement accounts, but likely never shopped for a financial institution.?

With a robo-advisor, you get the benefit of answering questions, putting in details, and having them determine the risk tolerance. They create a dynamic, fully allocated portfolio for you, but I still didn't trust it. I thought that that money would be gone in the morning. Instead, I made a few pennies. The moment your money makes money is a very significant moment in life.

Why did you start your investing journey with Betterment?

At that point, I had spent about a year researching personal finance and investment fundamentals.?

I was making a lot of money, but I was spending just as much as I was making. I knew that if I stayed on that path, I was not ultimately going to be able to do all the big audacious life goals that I wanted to. I had never been taught these concepts.

But then I faced my second, way bigger challenge, which is that we all know what to do, but it doesn't necessarily mean we do it. We know we need to eat better. We know we need to sleep more. It's really hard to take that first step.

I ultimately picked Betterment, probably due to recency bias. I was between Betterment and Wealthfront and ultimately chose Betterment. I don't use them any longer - I DIY my own investing through Vanguard. But at the time it was such a benefit. It was done in 10 minutes and that next morning, I still had money there. I felt so confident. I felt like I made this significant move that I'd been frozen to make for so long. After that, I upped my automations, and I was automating probably a thousand dollars a month within eight months from opening that.

How/why did you get into the personal finance space??

The best founders are the ones who had the problem themselves, and I absolutely had this problem. For many years, I really thought making money equaled having money, and that if you wanted more in your life, you just had to make more money.?

But as I was going up and up that corporate ladder in New York, more money came with more headache, more stress, more time in the office, and more responsibility. I knew something wasn't working. I'm all about teaching women that understanding how to invest means getting out of the rat race faster because you don't have to count on just your income to be able to spend. That's the paycheck to paycheck cycle that so much of America is on.

Once you understand how to invest, it all gets going. This isn't just in paper assets. I have investments in business assets in real estate, in the crypto space, in spaces outside the stock market.?

That first step is education, which is why Factora has a wealth circle to educate women on how to do this, how to take the baby steps.?

Once I had done it, my bigger realization was I was so proud of the small incremental changes I was making, but I didn't really have much community to discuss it with. I definitely didn't have any female friends who were investing at the time outside their 401ks. None could really talk to me about the market. Suddenly, I was really interested in this topic and I didn't have community. That's the other element that really helps women take action: having this support and inspiration that other women are doing it.

What role do you play in the wealth space, and why is it important?

I just had someone call me a financial leader, and I do not look at myself that way. I put myself in the same position. I'm able to keep that memory of the first Betterment investment, turning up my automation, and getting additional brokerage accounts open. That’s why I can stay so in tune with my customer.?

But I am not an expert. I'm the first one to say that. I want to lead a million women to a million dollars in net worth alongside me. It’s true, I'm already there, and I did do it in a short amount of time. But I really want to be a motivator sharing my story and continuing to share so loudly.?

This is the most important element that your personal financial life is just that. It's personal. No one will have the same goals, dreams, timelines, situations or background as you. We need to take all of that and apply it to our wealth journey, I see a lot of women come in saying, “I know I'm not doing enough with my money. Please give the recipe. I promise I'll be so good and follow it.”

You simply can't. You can't give someone a recipe for their risk tolerance, their interest, their skill sets, their household income and expenses and liabilities. It's all about learning. I like to teach by being very transparent with what I've done. It's not everyone's path, but here's one option.

What do you believe is the most exciting thing you’ve learned and want others to know?

Doing something is how you gain the experience and the confidence to continue doing it and tweaking it and getting better at it.

Wealth building is like a marathon. It's not a sprint. As long as we are alive, we have the opportunity to be building wealth and generating return. It is going to be something that you do and tweak your strategy on for years on end, which is why there's no reason to wait on learning and doing it.

Like that Betterment experience I shared at the beginning and any other investment I made, it felt really complicated and arduous at the time. But it gets easier.

Now, I'm very capable of doing that work because I've done some of it. It just takes one step incrementally. Nothing can mimic the experience of doing it.?

Who is a person or company that inspires you in the space and why?

I really like the company Open House Austin. They are a women's real estate education company. They do what we do, but solely for real estate, and they have a great tagline: “Houses before spouses.” They really encourage women to look into buying on your own.?

A lot of people wait for that life phase, but Open House is really into using creative partnerships. Why can't two sisters buy a property? Why can't a friend group buy a property? Why can't you and your best friend living in different states? Find the state that has the best investment opportunities and co-share the mortgage.

There are so many ways to do it and get really creative. What they're doing is really interesting.

What advice would you give to someone getting started?

Don't wait, just do. Get started.?

I was not investing in 2007 and 2008 when we had our last bear market followed by the longest bull run we've had in history, but I'm great friends with women who got their start at that time.

They were able to take advantage of the up and to the right curve until now. Even though there is news mania which is hard to ignore, it is really not relevant because investing should be a long-term play. If you are under 60 and need to be investing, then this is a great time to do it.

With the market down, it effectively means that everything is on sale. Everything's highly discounted right now. But it does take having the right mindset and mental fortitude, which is hard for first time investors. That is why Factora is all about surrounding yourself with community and inspiration so that you don't pull the plug early and do yourself a disservice by not sticking to it.

Is there anything else we should know?

You can check out factorawealth.com. The wealth circle information is on there. There's an application that you can fill out if you're interested in joining the fall cohort, we have about 500 spots. We fill out every time. We only run them twice a year because they're live cohorts, so we can only handle so many women at a time.

We do that so that there is this real, palpable, exciting community of everyone learning together and knowledge sharing. You can find me personally on Instagram at @AmBrantley, but I am taking a four-month maternity leave about two weeks from now, so I may not be the most active.

I love building businesses, I love educating women, and I love empowering women with their financial life. Every American woman can achieve financial independence within their lifetime simply by understanding and applying pretty simple investment principles, but it does take learning, implementing, tweaking, and consistency.?