For Women Who Refuse to Be Underestimated, Underpaid and Undervalued

When I was growing up, I was terrified of money. Specifically, of spending it or owing it. I had a job from the time I was fourteen, and I put almost every dollar away. Then I got to college and needed bedding for my dorm room. It cost two hundred dollars. My mother had no money, so the expense was mine, and I did not have it in cash, so I opened a credit card and put it on that. I still remember that feeling of fear. Not “Will I regret this comforter?” Real fear that I would never be able to pay it back. Two hundred dollars.

I see it in so many women now, and here is the real issue. We are not bad with money. We are careful with it to the point of self-harm. We hoard, we save, we cut our own rate, we do everything ourselves to avoid the cost of help. What we are almost never taught is the thing men are handed early: that money is a tool you use to make more of it, not a fragile thing you protect until it runs out. So why do so many of us have such a broken relationship with money? Why can we manage every dollar perfectly and still never learn to grow it the way men are encouraged to?

This week's guest on Takin' Care of Lady Business, Dani Lynn Robison, is a walking answer to that question. She started out performing as a musician on cruise ships. She now runs Freedom Family Investments, a firm with over a billion dollars in assets under management. Nothing about that path was handed to her, and she got there by unlearning exactly the fear I just described.

With Love & Lady Business,
JJ 

In today’s edition:
1. Scarcity Is Expensive: Building Wealth with Dani Lynn Robison
2. Scarcity Has a Price, and You Are the One Paying It
3. TJD Power List
4. Lady Bits

1. Scarcity Is Expensive: Building Wealth with Dani Lynn Robison

Dani Lynn Robison went from performing as a musician on cruise ships to founding Freedom Family Investments, a real estate firm with over a billion dollars in assets under management and a 100% investor payout record. She built eight companies to get there, in an industry that assumed at every turn she would ask for permission she never actually needed.

Here is why I wanted her on the show. Dani names the exact trap I opened this email with: women are taught to protect every dollar and do everything themselves, while men are encouraged to raise more, spend strategically, and bet bigger. She calls scarcity what it is, expensive, and she walks through how she unlearned it and built real wealth on the other side.

In this episode, you will learn:
 — Why “protecting every dollar” quietly costs you more than it saves
— How to give every dollar you have a defined job, instead of just guarding it
— What men are taught about raising and deploying capital that women are not
— How Dani went from cruise-ship musician to running a billion-dollar real estate firm

🎧 Listen here: Spotify | Apple | YouTube
Get a copy of Dani’s new book for free and learn more about real estate investing at https://freedomfamilyinvestments.com/chat-with-freedom/ and use code LADY

2. Scarcity Has a Price, and You Are the One Paying It

I told you about the two-hundred-dollar duvet. Here is what I did not say. That same fear that made me terrified of a credit card at seventeen made me a careful, precise, responsible adult who was also, for years, leaving real money on the table.

The instinct that protects you and the instinct that grows you are not the same instinct. Most women are only ever trained in the first one. Be careful. Save. Do not overreach. Do not spend what you do not have. It keeps you out of trouble, and it is only half of a financial education: the defensive half. The other half, deploying money to make more of it, is the part men are handed, and women are quietly steered away from.

Here is the real issue. Scarcity is not free. Guarding every dollar instead of putting it to work has a price, and the price is the wealth you never built. Playing it safe feels responsible. Usually it is just expensive in a way nobody sends you an invoice for.

So here is how you actually start to change it, not someday, this month:

1. Separate your money into two jobs. Look at what you are sitting on. Decide which portion's job is safety, and which portion's job is to go out and bring back more. If every dollar you have is assigned to “safety,” that is the problem, named.

2. Buy back your time before you buy anything else. The most common way women stay small is doing everything themselves to avoid the cost of help. Hire the one thing that frees the most hours. That is not spending. That is buying capacity to earn.

3. Get in one room where money is treated as a tool. You cannot unlearn scarcity alone, because the whole point is that no one taught you the other half. You learn it by proximity, from people already doing it. A few places to start, none of which pay me anything:
 — Alinea Invest, an SEC-registered investing app built by women, for women, designed for people who find traditional platforms intimidating and want to actually start putting money in the market
 — Ellevest, another women-first investing platform, for retirement and longer-term goals
 — Your own 401(k) match, if you have one and are not maxing it, that is free money with a job you have not assigned yet

And one more, specific to this week. Dani, this week's guest, runs a firm with over a billion dollars under management, and she is opening the door for TCOLB readers to talk to her team directly about real estate and passive income. Go to chatwithfreedom.com and use code LADY. Unlike the resources above, this one is a paid partnership, and I am telling you that plainly, because I would rather you trust the list than wonder about it. You were taught to protect what you have. You were never taught that protection, past a point, is its own kind of loss.

REAL TALK
Careful is not the same as smart, and safe is not the same as free. The fear that kept you out of debt at twenty is the same fear quietly capping you at forty. Give your money a job bigger than sitting still. If you want help figuring out what your money should actually be doing, that is what we do.

3. TJD Power List: Sallie Krawcheck

Fired on the Front Page Twice. Then She Built the Bank for Women.

Sallie Krawcheck ran the biggest names on Wall Street. CFO of Citigroup. CEO of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and Smith Barney. She was called the most powerful woman on Wall Street, and she says she is also the only person fired on the front page of the paper twice. She says that second part on purpose.

Then she left and built what that system never bothered to make: Ellevest, an investment platform founded by, funded by, and built for women. She grew it to 2.4 billion dollars in assets under management. She did not ask Wall Street to serve women better. She built the competitor.

This month, Duolingo put her on its board and its audit and risk committee, the room where the money actually lives. That is the pattern of her whole career. She keeps ending up where the real decisions get made, and she keeps holding the door open behind her. Find her at ellevest.com.

💋💋 Lady Bits

💰 Women keep almost a third of their money sitting in cash while men put theirs to work. That gap is quietly costing us a fortune in the one thing money is supposed to do: grow.

📊 Women own 40% of American businesses and pull in under 5% of the revenue. The reason will make you angry, and it is not the one you think.

💼 Women accounted for 100% of the reduction in the workforce this past July

🚀 She just became the first woman from her city to leave the planet. The academy that trained her still holds women to a harder bar than the men beside them.

📈 Women's sports were called a niche for decades. Goldman Sachs now projects the market will hit $2.5 billion by 2030. Turns out it was never the demand that was missing.

Hi, I’m JJ

Since starting the Justice Dept, we have increased women's wealth by over $100MM in just over 5 years. Want to know what inspires me to do this work, other than making women money? My clients' surprised reaction when we manage to get them much better terms for themselves and their companies, whether via talent agreements, employment, severance, partnerships, asset sales or investments. They often admit that they never thought they could get that result. Not even hoped. This blows my mind. As we know at The Justice Dept. you are all worth everything you ask for and more. Reach out and we’ll show you how!
x TJD