When I was ideating about this interview, I found myself at a crossroads. There are so very many different and nuanced conversations that can be had about money and about wealth. What felt intuitive right now was to share through the lens of how we, as womxn, can not only be setting ourselves up for success with money, but creating generational wealth that has a true impact on our families and the power to ripple outwards in our society at large.

Morgan Blackman is a Holistic Wealth Coach who takes a profoundly intuitive approach not only to education around money, but to going deep with her clients to address the roots of their beliefs and limitations around money and wealth. 

Because let’s get real – raise your hand if you’ve ever had “stuff” around money. Receiving it, holding onto it, giving of it freely. Trick question – we ALL have stuff around money.

The marrying of the mindset work, the hardcore financial expertise, and the perspective around how womxn properly managing their money will make the world a better place makes Morgan an incredibly unique leader in her field.

We’re delving deep into building what she calls a “magnetic money mindset,” tackling investing (even for beginners), and exactly what generational wealth means for the individual and the collective in this interview.

Tell me about your entrepreneurial journey. What’s brought you to the place you’re in today as the founder of Holistic Bucks?

My finance journey really started in university in 2017, when my roomate was actively seeking a financial advisor to invest some of her summer savings. I was incredibly inquisitive and paid attention to all that she was learning from her financial advisor in regards to investing and boom, this is what got me started down this path. I learned that I could put my money away into various kinds of investment vehicles to see a future return and that this was how most people saved towards their retirement. The more thorough research I began to do on my own, the more I realized that investing was going to be a key factor in my ability to build wealth – and what better way to build wealth than to have your money work hard for you? 

I wasted no time in saving up some funds and looking at past savings accounts so that I could begin investing. I’m totally self-taught – I started to do a lot of research through consuming all the books, podcasts and online articles I could get my hands on before I was confident enough to start investing. That first year I was able to invest $5,000, and by the end of that year I was able to double it into a $10,000 investment. 

I’ve been investing for almost five years now, seeing consistent returns, and seeing three to four times more than what the average investor sees at around a 36% ROI. Throughout that five years of investing, I was also able to pay off all my debts, built up an emergency savings fund, and figure out a budgeting strategy that was very effective for me. This enabled me to continue investing in myself and my financial future. 

Last year, I got to a place where I wasn’t really happy in my 9-5 job and I wanted to create something for myself, a business where I was helping to empower individuals to become the best version of themselves and to ultimately uplift whole communities. I decided to use my great knowledge and knack for investing and managing money to help other women do the same. That’s how Holistic Bucks was born, as a means to empower women to make confident financial decisions towards their wealthy future while bridging the gap between their finances and personal wellness journey.

Let’s talk about wealth consciousness (one of my favorite topics). What does this actually mean, and how can we cultivate a “magnetic money mindset” that calls it in?

For me, building a strong money mindset (or wealth consciousness) really just means that you are able to embody a healthy outlook towards money and generating wealth. We want to be mindful not only how we overspend our money or avoid our finances, but ask ourselves… why? 

Our mindset is shaped by our beliefs and these beliefs become defining factors for how we are going to show up in our lives and determine what we are able to manifest into our reality. So, if you have a negative outlook towards money and limiting beliefs around acquiring or deserving it in your life, then you are going to find that there are obstacles and resistance towards you achieving particular financial goals. 

A lot of our behaviours and beliefs are hardwired from early on in our childhood, due to the belief sets and conditioning absorbed from our parents and our external societal environments. You begin to realize that some of the behaviours we embody aren’t even because we truly have a desire for a particular outcome, but because we’ve been influenced by others around us to think that this is what we are supposed to want for ourselves. Learning how to unlearn these beliefs and ideas about who we are and how we should live our lives is so important, and I recommend tools like meditation, EFT Tapping, and simple journaling as a starting point. 

If there are more intense forms of trauma and stress regarding particular areas of your life, therapy can be a viable option for those who can afford and have easy access to this service.

What are some of the blocks that you most frequently see that are holding womxn back from receiving the wealth that they desire?

I’ve come up with four main limiting beliefs that I see most people tend to subscribe to. The first block would be that money is hard to come by and that you never have enough. If you constantly feel like money is the enemy and you are unable to believe that there is an abundance of opportunity able to come your way, this unfaithful energy can lead you to feel trapped in a never ending cycle of lack. Instead of focusing on how much you don’t have, it’s important to show gratitude for what you already have and look for ways to create opportunities to increase your income or re-assess your monthly spending. Be open to receiving and remember that money is a flow, and we shouldn’t be obsessed with having too much or too little.

Another block would be that you believe that you have to work extremely hard for money. This happens a lot for entrepreneurs who have difficulty wanting to reach different heights of success, as they believe that with more money comes more problems and hence more things they will have to do in order to maintain it. If you know that with making more money it’s going to take a lot of time and energy to upkeep it, you may subconsciously be putting out that energy to not receive more and might not do the work to obtain it.

A third block is that having more money is the root of all evil. Some of us have been conditioned through religion that having too much money can be seen as a sin or is for the lack of a better word – unrighteous. It is humble to be poor, because you do not care for the vanity and self-obsession that lots of wealth can bring. Some may also see wealthy people in their lives or on TV, and justify why the world is the way it is today. Greedy corporations, politicians, and individuals using their amassed wealth to do more harm or feed their selfish egos. This isn’t necessarily the case though, as not all rich and wealthy people are evil or bad and just as many do good for the planet and their communities than those who don’t. You get to decide what type of person you want to be with the wealth you eventually accumulate.

The last block would be embodying the popular idea that money doesn’t buy happiness to justify your financial situation. We are led to believe that wealthy people aren’t truly happy and that having both money and optimal wellness is a lie. Although having more money doesn’t guarantee happiness, not having enough money can do the same. We do not work towards earning external things to feed our inner desires and needs, but to make life easier by acquiring enough resources to feel secure, abundant, and the power to make more impactful choices with our dollars.

What does the idea of generational wealth mean to you, and why is this something that millennial womxn should be thinking about now?

Generational wealth to me is knowing that not only are you secure financially in this lifetime, but your children and grandchildren are too. It’s really about setting them up for success, and ensuring that your hard earned wealth lives on as a means for future generations to live within security and not fall back into poverty.

With the current economic climate we live in, due to inflation, things will only continue to get more expensive over time. More and more people are falling further behind the middle income class, because we know that the inequality inflation creates allows for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. The majority of those in the low to middle income class do not come from wealthy backgrounds and were not taught any form of financial literacy. Many schools do not incorporate financial literacy into their curriculums, either.

Living is not going to get less expensive over time, and so if you do not have your money and an investment vehicle that is appreciating relative to the inflation rate or beyond, you’re going to also fall farther behind. It’s important to ask yourself which scenario you would rather leave behind for your children. Do you want to leave behind another generation of poverty and struggle with inherited family trauma, or do you want to leave behind generational wealth and abundance of opportunities? Believing that the latter is possible and that there is help out there to help you shift towards the more rewarding option is key.

This is also why the majority of my work focuses on supporting women because women are more conscious of where they put their hard earned dollars and how best to use their money to be advocates for the change we want to see in the world. Women are out here getting more degrees, landing lucrative paying jobs, and becoming the breadwinners in our households more than ever before. Because of this increasing responsibility, it is my mission to help women make better decisions with this newfound wealth of theirs and have it work for them for generations to come. 

Investing is such a vast umbrella, but if someone is thinking about getting into the game, what advice would you give them as a starting point?

A lot of people ask me if they are in the position to start investing, and only time I suggest someone wait before investing is if they have failed to create an emergency savings fund or carry a lot of high interest debt. So if you have no problem with either of those, then you are in a great position to get started.

You do not have to have a ton of money to start investing. I think there’s this myth that wealthy people are the only people that have access to investment options. There are ways to start investing as an everyday, average investor and with very little capital. There are FinTech companies called Robo Advisors, which are online investment platforms that give you the ability to invest with as little as $1. These platforms are powered by AI to customize an investment portfolio for you by determining your future financial goals and levels of risk to get there, and once it’s set up (which takes less than 10 minutes) you are officially an investor and well on your way to building wealth. 

Another option would be to start off with talking to your financial advisor (you can go to your local bank to find one). Your financial advisor will ask you questions regarding your financial goals and levels of risk to create an appropriate portfolio for you. I love financial advisors for the reason that they don’t only assess your investments, but they also look at all the other aspects of your finances too, such as acquiring certain types of insurance and setting up wills for an estate, and other appropriate things to consider when building out a solid financial plan. 

The only downside I believe to financial advisors is sometimes when working with banks, their products tend to come with larger fees. So you want to be mindful of how much you may be paying upfront or down the road in investment fees. Some banks also have restrictions on who can open up an investment account based on income and minimum investment requirements. This is why I prefer Robo Advisors, as their fees tend to be less and is more easily accessible through platforms like phone apps. 

As a wealth coach, I can guide you to these resources but am primarily here to help you build the confidence to know what to do with your finances, assess the root of your financial limitations, and teach you how money actually works.