Rashad Bilal
speaker
114 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Rashad Bilal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Thank you for having us, Nicole. It's a pleasure to be here.
Everyone relax.
The beautiful thing about our audience is that they grew with us through the pandemic. And so they've seen crisis before and they've seen a bull market and they've seen a bear market and they've seen catalyst events that have the market appreciate and they've seen catalyst events have the market depreciate.
And so when this happened, it was kind of that preparation of there's some uncertainty, which has always been the number one thing in the market that we can't control. And you can reference 2020 March of what uncertainty looked like. And we can reference
Exactly, right? Like, this is the end. Like, how far can this thing fall? And so when you see something like the tariff announcement happening early April, it was like, oh, okay. We've seen something like this before. There's a lot of uncertainty, but this is an opportunity, right? Every time there's a crisis, we always tell people there's an opportunity for people to really take advantage of it.
And so our audience was prepared. It wasn't like I'm selling everything. It was like, we know what to do, right? When these prices get to points that we like inside of good companies, we're investing. And so they did that and they're slowly, but surely they're starting to see the benefits of that discipline when it comes to investing.
You said something important. The title sophisticated investor really doesn't have a monetary amount attached to it anymore. You could have $10,000 and be a sophisticated investor because you have the education.
Whereas in the past, a sophisticated investor was somebody that had over 250,000 in their brokerage because they had the capital and people giving them information, then they were making better decisions. But now with the wealth of resources, obviously shows and books, people can make their own decisions and become sophisticated with the amount of money that they had and can grow portfolios.
Yeah, it's interesting. I still live in the neighborhood where that house is, which is pretty interesting. So when we were writing the book, I drove past it just as a moment to see how far we've come. But yeah, my parents from Jamaica, they moved to the Bronx, and we were living in the South Bronx in the 80s. And they bought a house in Greenburg, New York.
And at the time, I remember them trying to get as much money as they could for the down payment, borrowing money from family members. And we finally got the house, and it was great. It felt like, yeah, we're moving on up. And within three short years, everything turned around. We lost the house and ended up moving twice and ended up in somebody's basement, one of my dad's friends, his basement.
And it was humbling, the embarrassment of it. You have a house in the neighborhood and everybody's looking at you like, yo, you guys, you're doing well. And then you're in somebody's basements, roach infested, rat infested, and you're just like, how did this happen? As time goes on, you realize that the financial education wasn't there. What happened to them was,
They signed an adjustable rate mortgage in 1988, and they didn't know what a fixed rate mortgage was. And so when they could afford it in 1988, it was great. But by 1990, 91, that interest rate almost doubled. And so now it wasn't something that they could afford anymore. And it was moving on down. But what it did do is it showed me what coming together looks like.
Because even in the midst of that, we never felt like we didn't have. I grew tight relationships with my parents. I grew tight relationships with my brother because we were experiencing that in the same time. And so financial discipline became the thing.
I was going to school in Westchester but living in the Bronx and getting bus money and trying to figure out how am I gonna have the bus money and lunch money. to get home every day. And these are the things I'm thinking about, like, how am I gonna do this? I didn't have a TV at the time. I remember I used to just listen to the radio and read the newspaper.
But inside that, that's why I got a love for reading, especially, like, I was reading the sports section, but then I'd go to the business section, and then I would read the news there in the front. So I always read the daily news back to front. I love sports, and I was like, all right, I'll get a little business in the middle, and then I'll get to whatever's happening in the world.
And so that discipline helped me later in life. When it was time to learn about finance, I didn't go to school for economics. I didn't go to school for business. It was self-taught. And so that reading came back into it. It was Business Week. It was CNBC.
It was anything I can get my hands on that would help increase my knowledge base around the world that I wasn't familiar with, because my parents didn't come from it. A lot of my family didn't come forward. I did have some friends who had some financial knowledge, but I wanted to be part of their conversations. Like I was around and they would have financial conversations.
I was like, man, I can't really contribute. I don't know what they're talking about. And so I took on the liberty to say, all right, I gotta go educate myself. So the next time they have a conversation about money and finance and real estate, Yeah, I'm well in depth. In fact, I'm going to add to this conversation. So it was like a challenge for me from that point on.
But that all happened because of losing a house and figuring out how you're going to move on as a teen and how you're going to correct those mistakes in the future for your family.
I own a house, I own two homes, yeah. So I own, my parents, we live in a home now. And that's interesting. During the pandemic when interest rates were really low, I remember like, hey, we gotta refinance this house. And my parents were like, we can't do it, we co-own it.
Showing 1–20 of 114 · page 1 of 6
Next →