From managing $90 million a day on Wall Street at age 20 to becoming the first African American to report from the New York Stock Exchange, Stacey Tisdale's accomplishments are nothing short of remarkable. Especially when you consider that she left home at just age 11. Stacey is the Founder/CEO of Mind Money Media and hosts the Wealth Wednesdays program with Angela Yee. Throughout her diverse career, Stacey has developed a deep understanding of "money scripts," the beliefs about personal wealth that influence our financial decisions and limit our potential. Stacey shares her own history with money and the profound impact our psychology and behavior can have on our financial well-being. She offers invaluable advice on how to shift your perspective, break free from limiting money scripts and develop new ones, and acknowledge where your beliefs surrounding money come from.
From managing $90 million a day on Wall Street at age 20 to becoming the first African American to report from the New York Stock Exchange, Stacey Tisdale's accomplishments are nothing short of remarkable. Especially when you consider that she left home at just age 11.
Stacey is the Founder/CEO of Mind Money Media and hosts the Wealth Wednesdays program with Angela Yee. Throughout her diverse career, Stacey has developed a deep understanding of "money scripts," the beliefs about personal wealth that influence our financial decisions and limit our potential. Stacey shares her own history with money and the profound impact our psychology and behavior can have on our financial well-being. She offers invaluable advice on how to shift your perspective, break free from limiting money scripts and develop new ones, and acknowledge where your beliefs surrounding money come from.
Learn more about Mind Money Media and Wealth Wednesdays.
In this episode, we cover:
Quote of the Week:
"The point where you are stuck is the very same point where you're going to be set free. So, at that moment, if you're willing to do things differently, that's success." - Stacey Tisdale
Hosted by Katherin Vasilopoulos. Made by Cansulta and Ethan Lee.
Music by © Chris Zabriskie, published by You've Been a Wonderful Laugh Track (ASCAP).
Songs used in this episode include: "Air Hockey Saloon," "Short Song 012823," "Short Song 020223," "Cylinder Three," "Short Song 021823," "Short Song 030823."
Used under the Creative Commons 4.0 International License
[00:00:00] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Hi, I'm Katherin Vasilopoulos. Starting my own venture wasn't easy.
After a decade working in the corporate world, I realized that so many things were out of my control, like layoffs and changes in direction. I didn't like the instability. I didn't want that to define my whole career at professional story, and so I left. I started my own company and achieved more than I ever imagined.
Now I'm on a mission to share stories from extraordinary entrepreneurs who are changing the world and who never gave up on their vision.
To succeed as entrepreneurs, especially as women, we need to become financially literate. Learning to manage our wealth can make or break our business. But to truly understand our relationship with money, we need to take an honest look at how we perceive wealth, how we've learned to view money.
Stacey Tisdale's understanding of money has in many ways shaped the life she lives today. Leaving home at just 11 years old, she went on to manage over 90 million a day at a major Wall Street firm at the age of 20. Pivoting to broadcast journalism. She was the first African American to report from the New York Stock Exchange.
She co-hosts Wealth Wednesdays, a platform dedicated to increasing wealth among the black community. She's also the CEO of Mind Money Media, a content provider focused on financial wellness, and she's a bestselling author. The list goes on. Throughout her career, Stacey realized how our understanding of personal finance is mainly determined by what she calls money scripts.
By reinforcing certain beliefs about our personal wealth, we not only limit our earning potential, but prevent ourselves from living the life we truly want. She's the perfect guest to breach the topic of financial wellness. Stacey covers her. Own history and relationship with money and how our understanding of wealth is closely linked to our psychology and behavior.
Of course, she also offers countless insights on how to positively shift our perspective when it comes to personal finance.
Hello, Stacey. Hi. Thank you for joining us today.
[00:02:22] Stacey Tisdale: It's my absolute pleasure, Katherin.
[00:02:24] Katherin Vasilopoulos: I'm so excited to talk to you because we're talking about a subject that we really haven't looked at in our podcast series so far. We've done a lot of discussing women's journeys and their emotional state during the transition phases in their lives, but we really haven't talked about financials.
I wanted to ask you first to give me a brief overview of your professional journey. Where did you start and how did you get to this point?
[00:02:50] Stacey Tisdale: Out of college, I started working on Wall Street. I had studied international business and finance, and I did an internship at a commodities firm and they hired me out of school and I was there for a few years in a wonderful position.
I was a cash manager at the commodities firm, which means I invested the company's money. But I wasn't feeling that in terms of, that's where I wanted to stay. So I literally called the Wall Street Journal and told them that story and they ended up hiring me to report for their news wire service.
Wall Street Journal has a phenomenal TV department. I reached out to them and I soon moved over there and happened to get the right first boss who had everyone who came into the department learn absolutely everything. And for a time there, after a few years, it started to feel more authentic to me, to be the one to tell my own stories.
So I moved from behind the camera to in front of the camera. That was a great thing to be able to do there. And in that role, I became the first woman in the first African American to report from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, which was great. And along that journey, I became really frustrated by how I saw people struggle with money.
And few things work as simply. Don't borrow more than you can afford to pay back. Don't invest more than you can afford to lose. Don't spend more than you have. But when you look at the other side, money's also a leading cause of depression, a leading cause of anxiety, a leading cause of relationship problems and all sorts substance abuse.
And as I think I told you previously, Katherin, my mother used to tell me I had w h y instead of d n a. Wondering what was really going on, setting me out on what I had no idea was gonna be a six year research project into what drives financial behavior.
[00:04:41] Katherin Vasilopoulos: And you said the key word here is why.
Why do people feel the way they do about money? Why do they invest certain ways? Why do they feel that there is either abundance or scarcity in their lives when it comes to money? What did you discover when you started looking into this and writing your book?
[00:04:58] Stacey Tisdale: Conditioning plays a tremendous role. In this and I use the term money scripts, which was coined by Rick Kahler, who's one of the founders in life planning, which is a holistic form of financial planning.
And we blindly follow these money scripts, the way you saw money handled or not growing up. And, as a black woman, in the black community there's just this messaging that blacks are lack and have financial challenges and are not financially wise. None of that's true if you look at the history and the communities created, but again, it comes back to what you believe about yourself.
The why is the same for everything. We're not conditioned in the west to learn how to navigate conditioning, so we identify with our stories versus leaning into the deeper dimensions of ourselves that can transcend all that.
[00:05:52] Katherin Vasilopoulos: And those scripts that you're talking about, tell me more about what they are, what they mean, how people can apply the learning to their lives and their financial health.
[00:06:03] Stacey Tisdale: While I was writing my book, a friend of mine, an Italian woman, her mother and her brother, died in the same week. And her daughter found out she had, they had cancer. This was all in the same week. Wow. And this woman was quite affluent because she had some very successful restaurants and catering businesses.
And at the same time she was, when all this happened, she was opening another restaurant. Just because of her upbringing. She never reached out for things like help with cleaning and stuff like that, just that's not how she was raised. And I remember I saw her one day and she was physically gray. And I'm like, what is going on?
And what are you doing? Because she did not have to work as hard as she was working. It's that Italian work ethic, it's only good if you're suffering, it's only good if we're suffering. And we joked about that, but she was really following it. So these scripts, and we just follow them like little robots.
It's just about awareness. Becoming aware of what's running the show. Some good ways to do that are to really get a visceral connection to what you authentically care about and what your authentic priorities are. A good place to start, I call there's the kinder questions, which are good place to start all financial planning.
Ask yourself if you had all the money in the world, if money weren't a problem, what would you be doing with your life and your time? The second of the three questions is if you found out you had five to 10 years left to live, just five to 10 years left to live, what changes would you make in your life?
Where would you be? Who would you be with? What would you be doing? And the final question is, if you found out this is it, this is your last day, not what would you do with it, but what are your regrets? And when you really think about those questions, you start to see pretty fast how you're spending a lot of time and money on things that are not authentically important to you.
It might be where you live. It might be the school you're sending your kids to, the car you're driving, the way you advocate for yourself or not. So that sets you off on a different kind of journey. So once you start to see that, and so what and what is the only reason we would spend money and time in ways that are not aligned with our goals or priorities?
Money scripts.
When you figure out what your goals are, like really get a picture of what does my ideal life look like? This is also great for retirement savings. What does your ideal life look like? Figure out what it costs, where you're go, where you're gonna be, what you're gonna be doing. How you know, okay, I wanna travel a lot.
I want to spend time with my grandkids. I want to do this. What's that actually gonna cost? But it's also interesting when you create goals and when you figure out, okay, what's my income? And then juxtapose it. Do I really want to work 28 hours to buy this purse? Do you have to do little brain hacks? It's very important to know our stories, our money scripts.
So that you can know when you're in the pattern. Don't get seduced by the psychology just for the sake of psychology. You just wanna do this so you can identify, oh, there's that again, and know your own tendencies so that you can catch yourself when you're in them. But so much of it is more in science. I remember covering a project Merrill Lynch did called Merrill Edge.
And they were trying to encourage people to save more for retirement. And if you understand our brains, that frontal cortex of our brain, that's the oldest part of our brain, and it's all about survival. So your brain really can't relate to saving money, can it? It's about keeping you safe and protected here and now.
So it's like when you hear all these things from the financial services industry, oh, save this, do that. We're not wired to do that. So it was very interesting with this project, they had an app. That showed people an image of themself old, the app would actually age them. Their brains. Seeing that image and getting that message, oh, there is gonna be somebody I have to take care of.
Their savings habits improved 90%.
[00:10:39] Katherin Vasilopoulos: I am curious to know what were your scripts when you were growing up, and did you also have a chance to discuss this with your parents?
[00:10:47] Stacey Tisdale: I was a figure skater. I left home at 11 years old and I was an athlete. I can't think of a group that gets greater scripting. You just worry about your sport and we'll worry about the money.
Yes. From day one, and I was living with people whose parents were second and third mortgaging their homes. So that their kids could skate. I was an only child and my parents gave me an upper middle class upbringing, so money was never something that I thought about. And also from my parents' generation, you hid money problems.
I have to catch myself for caring, to make sure that I'm thinking about money enough because it doesn't come naturally for me. I just will do and not think about the finances. And it's also. Served me as an entrepreneur. It served me very well as an entrepreneur because I don't worry about money.
[00:11:40] Katherin Vasilopoulos: How did you develop that though? Because you didn't grow up at home the way most kids did. You were taking out of that environment, you watched other people manage their money, and then how did you become risk averse in your adult life?
[00:11:55] Stacey Tisdale: My mother would come wherever I was skating every summer and she took a two year sabbatical.
But remember the messaging they were sending me, I was. Out away pursuing my dream and not having to think about money or working. So that was huge. The situations when I was in that I was in growing up, put me in the situation of racial isolation a lot. For example, my parents wanted me to go to the best school before I went away for skating.
So I went to, private school in Connecticut. That I was surrounded by the 1% of the 1%. It was such an incredible level of wealth. So I also, that's my social scripting. I grew up with that being normal to me. I remember when I was growing up, a very powerful lesson that stuck with me is I was bullied a great deal on a daily basis.
And the lead bullier George Kohar, who I actually saw as an adult and out of total random, and he just came up and hugged and apologized, which is very powerful. Oh. I was at a vending machine buying a soda one day, and he was standing behind me and I bought it and I gave it to him, and he was nice to me.
So that if you give people things, they'll be nice to you. That was one of my very early money scripts too, and I recog, when I started being able to recognize all this stuff with my work, I start, I saw that hugely also, right? And my adult behavior. So those messages. There's a statistic, men, this is graduate students men negotiate their first salary.
Women don't, and it ends up costing women 800 plus thousand dollars over the life of their career. And wo and think of that invested. It's important to understand those scriptings, and it's not about saying, mom and dad were right and wrong. They had their own scripting too. Where you ultimately are taken is in what I call signature strengths, and this is the first lesson we teach in my financial education curriculum, the ability to change your mind.
We were born. Perfect personalities are not reality. The reality of what human beings are born with and all of these incredible tools we have, we're perfection. My favorite mantra is from a spiritual teacher named Muk Ananda, you are already perfect. If you don't believe this, it is due to a poverty of your understanding.
Get rid of that understanding and you'll become rich.
[00:14:30] Katherin Vasilopoulos: But how can people change their scripts if they don't know that they have them? At what level? Like you have to do some inner searching, or you have to stop and look at your bank statements, or something has to happen in order for you to say, oh, I am not doing well with money, or, I don't deserve to have more money, or whatever it was that people conditioned you to believe as a child or as a young adult or your first boss or whatever it is.
How do people change their minds about their scripts?
[00:14:56] Stacey Tisdale: We have this ability to witness our behavior. There's a difference between knowing and thinking. And you know it when you know the truth. When you're hear, you'll, you hear it. One of the psychologists I was researching with pointed something out to me, a little truth test.
The truth is true all the time. So if something's not true all the time, it's not the truth. That's what's so great about money. You'll see it, you'll see it in financial stress. It's tragic, the systemic issues that society has given women when it comes to making wealth. But the fact is that women do control the majority of the world's wealth, but they're only 7% are confident in their ability to make financial decisions.
So the confidence gap is probably more powerful than the wage gap.
[00:15:43] Katherin Vasilopoulos: When you look at that number though, the 7%, why do you think there's such a huge confidence gap? Where does that come from?
[00:15:50] Stacey Tisdale: How could there not be for women? When, I don't see how there could not be. It's our early conditioning that, men were pro the providers and the prote protectors and women are nurturers.
All of that plays out in our finances. And you look at a man and a woman walking into a car dealership, you think they're gonna be given the same price and the same interest rate. No. Absolutely not. And again, the question has to be why do you fit the profile? If you do your research before you go into the car dealership, that's not gonna happen to you.
[00:16:25] Katherin Vasilopoulos: So what would be your advice then, for women especially who need to find that higher level of resilience and confidence with money? How do you get there?
[00:16:35] Stacey Tisdale: FinTech companies like the Robin Hoods of the world, the STASHES of the world, the Acorns of the world made financial markets accessible to underrepresented groups like women and people of color, and they are embracing it in droves.
What technology has also done is provided us community. There's real research. If you have a goal and if you write it down, I think it improves your chances of achieving it by 60%. If you write it down and tell someone and ask them to help. You stay on track, it'll improve your chances of achieving the goal by 98%.
[00:17:17] Katherin Vasilopoulos: That's an incredible statement, and I'll tell you that you're one of the many guests who have echoed this particular kind of advice, especially if you're starting off and you don't know. If you feel lost and there's no one else out there, go find a community out there of other business people who can surround you and help elevate you.
There's definitely an especially in North American society, this association with, I own an expensive car, or a property in a certain neighborhood, and that makes me better. Or now I've made it. And we also live in an era of everybody wants to be famous somehow, either through a TikTok, everybody's aiming for that it seems.
And then it's creating problems because you're saying that, Debt has become a huge thing, and people don't want to talk about their debt. There's this perception that, oh my God, I have all these things, but you don't know if this person has negative amounts in their bank account, just to be able to create this fake persona or public facing character that they've created based on that.
[00:18:15] Stacey Tisdale: We think of, if I use the term financial literacy to you, you're probably gonna start thinking about things like learning about things like stocks and bonds and stuff, but it's much more about science 18 something I wanna say, 1863, Leon Festing or Social Comparison Theory. The human brain actually gives the way you feel inside your own skin, the way you feel about yourself.
The human brain gives you that sense by comparing you. To what's around you. So when you hear people say, oh, she's just spending that money because she's trying to keep up with the Joneses. That's just what our brains do. And I remember my mother was a great educator, a great principal, and she was, went to a school and a community.
The whole community would change. She'd walk in there and keeping my school open for seven days. I'm doing this, I'm doing that. Then I remember every year she'd do a Christmas thing where she would make her name as Jetty dollars. She'd get lots of donations of toys and everything, and she'd have the shopping event and let some of the parents, some of them had nothing come in and shop and buy toys with these fake dollars.
And then there was a giveaway. I think the giveaway was for like $500 or something. And I remember the woman who won the giveaway, they're like, oh, what are you gonna do with the money? And the first thing that she did was say, I'm gonna go buy my son like a Nintendo or something like that. And of course, everyone was like, Oh, horrified.
If you think every message from every aspect of society is telling this woman normal kids have this thing, normal kids have this thing, normal kids have this thing. What did she want? She just wanted her kid to be normal. So if you really understand the, you know what's really going on, you can look at it from a different perspective.
And bring compassion into how you look at yourself and how you look at others. And that kind of tamps down some of all that judgment, financial stress impacts decision making. So the more you can reduce that and just get to the deeper aspects of yourself where you can see things a little more clearly, the more the better decisions you'll make.
[00:20:30] Katherin Vasilopoulos: But you're right, we do typically have our tribe. We all grew up in a tribe of people, and we compare ourselves to whoever is next to us. And if you're a parent, you definitely want your child to experience their tribe of their own age group, and to have the things that others have. So that's normal.
And I think that also goes to the whole issue of I need to make enough money to be able to have the lifestyle that everyone else around me has. Otherwise we won't be able to keep up. But let me go back to something that we were talking about earlier. You talked about the different positions that you occupied and the different broadcasting stations that you worked for.
At what point did you decide to step out of that and then pursue your own entrepreneurial journey?
[00:21:10] Stacey Tisdale: It's wonderful to look at the places where I've worked and that I, had a 25 year career that, that I'm still in 20 years. Yes. I was two when I started.
[00:21:21] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Yes, exactly.
[00:21:22] Stacey Tisdale: And broadcast journalism at that level.
It was also "struggle" isn't even the word. Like I, when I was at CBS, there were some southern affiliates that wouldn't air my reports. I was always scrutinized much more than other journalists. I was always, new news directors would come in and wipe me out. I actually had Roger Ailes.
I was interviewing for a position at Fox and I was by far the most qualified person for the anchor position. And he just flat out looked at me and said, you simply don't look like a financial expert. And I gave, right back to him. You're gonna have to change your definition of what a financial expert looks like.
But I realized that was never gonna be a battle. I was gonna win. It was going to be one I'd transcend also, my last job, they actually made the, it was so crazy because you're doing your typical broadcast job, your writing job, and they want you to be a digital media star all the time. Writing three blogs a day and stuff, and my body broke carpal tunnel crazy.
Like I couldn't, for almost a year I couldn't move. This company also wanted you to find your own marketers. So I learned a lot and I remember we were talking to one firm that they were doing a content campaign for a certain number of, it was a certain number of videos, a certain number of blog posts, a certain number, whatever, a month.
And I was I worked for them. So I was the one writing all that. And I was in one of the meetings and I heard what they were charging these people for that. And I was like, what? And I knew that they were also going into old inventory. They had. And I was like, what? Yeah. And then when I started having physical, just my body was like flipping out with compressed vertebrae and everything.
And then I'm like, if I know how to, I'm the one doing the content. I know how this game works. What I didn't have was the distribution channel. Like a major media outlet that a company would want to put on. Through an appearance on a show called The Breakfast Club, I really connected with one of their hosts, Angela Ye, who now has our own show.
We wanted to do something empowering for underserved communities, so we created this platform, wealth Wednesdays, where we'd have like monthly conversations like this about financial topics at her. One of her restaurants in Brooklyn, New York. iHeart Media caught win. It was just obvious how much people were liking this and they wanted to do something with the Wealth Wednesdays platform, and Angela, we were just talking about this, gave me, I think, the best piece of advice I've ever received and the start of me on my journey to entrepreneurship.
She's I'll do whatever you want. And her finance was not her expertise or her space. She's I'll do whatever you want. Promise me you'll keep it yourself. Because as a journalist, I would've been perfectly happy to go to, iHeart with the idea of wealth Wednesdays, give it to them, taken, a talent fee and been happy.
She's keep it yourself. So now I had the. Editorial expertise, the production expertise, the show that I worked on, wall Street Journal, Emmy Awards. I had, that whole network of producers and everything. And now I had the distribution channel.
[00:24:34] Katherin Vasilopoulos: I think it's interesting because as a pure journalist, you're never expected to come up with your own distribution, anything. You were expected to cover the story, produce the content, and now it's, you've branched into all of the other things that created this incredible product. But you had to learn how to do that and that was never expected of journalists 25 years ago, cuz none of these things existed.
[00:24:57] Stacey Tisdale: You couldn't have paid me 10 years ago. No. To believe I'd be an entrepreneur. Exactly. I'm such a journalist in my DNA that I wasn't able to find the outlet that was the right fit, so I had to make it myself.
[00:25:13] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Yes. I think many entrepreneurs have this thing of, I don't have anything ahead of me. I don't know what the journey looks like.
And it's only what in retrospect that you realize, oh, that's pretty good. I had a virtual machete and I made my way through the jungle and I eventually made my own path. But only when you look back, you can have now some, a 10 or 15 year hindsight in seeing that path. What does that look like for you?
[00:25:36] Stacey Tisdale: Getting comfortable with not knowing, like we always feel like we have to know and. Does that ever really work out? Honestly, getting real about not knowing the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. That's just facts. So your willingness at that moment, the point where you are stuck, is the very same point where you're gonna be set free.
So at that moment, if you're willing to do things differently, I. That's success.
[00:26:12] Katherin Vasilopoulos: What was your biggest stretch? You had to stretch out of that comfort zone and break a boundary. What was, what did that look like?
[00:26:18] Stacey Tisdale: This is huge for women. I'm not trying to do everything myself.
[00:26:22] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Hallelujah. Asking for help.
That's huge. That's so hard. It's so hard to let go of the control and ask for help
[00:26:30] Stacey Tisdale: In your mind, it's hard. There's a term mindfulness. Real success comes with mindlessness, letting your instincts and stuff. It's hard in your mind just making different choices and the expectation that it's gonna feel good.
When you're doing something counterintuitive and outside your comfort zone, it feels uncomfortable. That's how you know you're in the right place.
[00:26:52] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:26:54] Stacey Tisdale: And that's, and that's how you get comfortable with it. And that's how those zones that keep expanding and expanding, so this expectation that everything's gonna feel great and that I'm going to get to a place, it's the journey, it's the present.
Show me one person who can hand me the past or hand me the future. Everything is happens in the present. The decisions and choices you make. Now how you experience now taking responsibility for what's going, what's your internal world like, correcting it and then things change around you.
[00:27:30] Katherin Vasilopoulos: That's it. I have another question for you.
The audience can't see you but I can see you, I see your eyes light up when you talk about certain things, but the question is: what has made you the happiest in all the things that you've done in the last few decades?
[00:27:45] Stacey Tisdale: My son. Oh. Oh. Having my buddy who's getting ready to leave me cause he's going to college.
But that's okay.
[00:27:54] Katherin Vasilopoulos: That's good news. That's very good news.
[00:27:56] Stacey Tisdale: Sometimes we get so caught up in our life situations that we don't realize that the real gift is life, that aliveness. Consciousness and him like. I went through a period. I got laid off. I lost my job at cnn. Three weeks later, my mother passed.
Three weeks later, my grandmother passed, and three weeks later I found out I was pregnant. And then my mother and my grandmother were such big figures within our, I've, I'm an only child, but I come from a big family. And they were such pillars in those families that there was just so much grief and confusion and loss.
When they passed like that and then all of a sudden out of nowhere I was pregnant. My son is like my mother from somewhere. But what it was, the perfection of that. The gift of that, is awe is the only word that I can use, and it that it's continued to be that kind of a gift. And then you see this is nothing about religious beliefs at all.
It's just a appropriate word like resurrection. That's why I was saying get in touch with what you really are, what human beings really are, and all the constant ourselves and our essence and our being in ev, all of these miracles that are just a gift from somewhere that happened in us constantly. Get with that, that can manage any money problem you got.
[00:29:25] Katherin Vasilopoulos: My thanks to Stacey Tisdale for sharing her story with us. You can learn more about Mind Money Media and Wealth Wednesdays in the episode description. If you like the show, let us know. We would love to hear what you enjoyed in a review, no matter what platform you use to listen. "And So, She Left" is made by Cansulta and Ethan Lee.
We'll be back next Wednesday with a new episode.
Our music is by Chris Zabriskie, edited for your enjoyment. You can find a list of all the songs you heard here in the episode notes. I'm Katherin Vasilopoulos, and thanks for listening.