Latest / The SmallBizChat with Melinda Emerson / How Women Business Leaders Can Manage Their Legacy Wealth with Syama Bunten

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How Women Business Leaders Can Manage Their Legacy Wealth with Syama Bunten · The SmallBizChat with Melinda Emerson

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Three, two, one, zero.
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Ignition.
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Lift off.
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Ending small business failure.
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Welcome to the Small Biz Chat podcast with the number one small business expert, Melinda
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Emerson.
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Melinda's goal is to end small business failure, and she'll give you the information
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you need to succeed and live the life you dream of.
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Now here's your host, the small biz chat lady herself, Melinda Emerson.
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Have you subscribed to the small biz chat podcast?
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Well, it's time.
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Every Wednesday, we offer listeners bite sized actionable tips to start and grow a successful
0:45
small business.
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In just twenty minutes or so a week, you can get a ton of insight and resources to propel
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your business forward.
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Be sure to subscribe to the Small Bitch Chat podcast today.
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Small Biz Chat podcast where we help small
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business owners get real answers so that you can succeed as your own boss.
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I'm Melinda Emerson, small biz lady, your host, and I am America's number one small business
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expert.
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And since it is Women's History Month, the conversation today is gonna hit even deeper.
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This month is about honoring the women who broke barriers before us, but it's also about
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challenging ourselves to build something worthy of being remembered.
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So legacy is not accidental, it is intentional, and it's built through smart financial
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strategy, disciplined execution, and leadership that multiplies impact.
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Today's conversation is not just about making money.
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It's about managing it, it's about legacy, and it's about power.
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We are in the middle of a massive economic shift.
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Women are not only earning more than ever, but they're also inheriting, investing and
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directing capital at unprecedented levels.
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The question is not whether women will control wealth, the question is whether we will steward
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it intentionally.
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Today's guest Shama Bunton is the founder of Wealth Catalyst, a national platform convening
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women who are building, preserving and deploying capital with purpose.
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Shama's work centers on what she calls the great wealth enlightenment, a structural shift
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where women are simultaneously earning, inheriting and directing wealth at scale
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through her curated salons, summits, and private community gatherings.
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She creates spaces where women move from passive ownership to active stewardship.
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She has been featured in Forbes and a host of other podcasts, and she has her own wonderful
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podcast called Getting Rich Together, where she explores capital, agency, and legacy with
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founders, investors, and executives.
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You're a woman leader and you wanna know how to do more with your money, you are in the right
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place.
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Shama, welcome to the Small Bitch Chat podcast.
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Thank you, Melinda.
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I'm so happy to be here.
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All right.
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So Shama, let's just jump into it.
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Research shows that women are projected to control 40% of the investable assets by the end
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of this decade and inherit $86,000,000,000,000 by 2048.
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Why do you believe this moment represents not only a wealth transfer, but a shift in power?
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Yes, this is a really critical moment that we've never seen before in history.
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Women are now able to benefit from the last fifty years of being able to start businesses,
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get loans, be able to get credit cards.
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So really from a maturation of time, we are now able to do so much more than we ever have been.
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And that means that we now control more capital.
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Now simultaneously, as you mentioned, there are so many assets at play here when it comes to
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inheritance.
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And so we're not just looking at inheritance from our parents, which I won't be getting any,
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but we're looking at also the spousal inheritance.
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Right?
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What does it look like across, across the family channel?
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And so these two moments are coming together in a capacity that has never been seen before.
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And honestly, Melinda, I don't think many women realize this isn't going to happen to us.
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This is happening to us right now.
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And so there's a tremendous amount of conditioning, as we know, that has happened
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with women throughout generations that have simply left us feeling not necessarily
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unintelligent with math, but not confident.
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And so I do believe that right now we're entering into what we will see as a confidence
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crisis because as women have far more capital agency and the ability to deploy capital, we
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really need to feel confident to move it.
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Because if we don't move it, it's gonna sit in legacy portfolios and it's going to dwindle
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over time.
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So this is our moment, Melinda.
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This is the time to get confident and, get interested in what your capital can do.
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Well, let's talk about how you got on this journey.
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Right?
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You're like, you're like, like, how did you become the lady that's gonna make everybody
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started talking about their most private business.
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Right?
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Like, how how did you, like, get on this mission around financial empowerment?
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Oh my gosh.
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You know, it's, it's wonderful because I was a business owner at the time, and I had been in
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my business for about seven years and had decided I was going to file for divorce.
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Now anyone who's been a business owner and gone through a divorce knows that it is sticky.
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It is difficult, and it really puts everything on the line.
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And so I did what a lot of friends do, which is I sent an email out to 50 girlfriends, and I
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said, hey, guys.
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I wanna talk to you about money.
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How are you investing it?
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How are you building it?
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Outside of having a business and buying a house and a four zero one k, I had no idea what my
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money could do for me.
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And it turns out from these 50 women that I wrote, 95% of them would not wanna talk to me
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about money.
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And it left me feeling really isolated.
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I was like, how are these successful women not feeling capable of talking to me about this?
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Because, obviously, as we know, money is something that touches us every day.
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You know?
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You buy a latte.
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You're paying for a new subscription service.
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You're buying that movie on Apple TV.
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Money hits us in all sorts of ways.
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So that is really what started this process, and I realized that it wasn't just me that
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needed to have these conversations that were feeling isolated.
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It turns out that there are thousands and thousands of Americans who want to have this
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conversation, which is why this has started and why we're taking on the road and bringing these
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conversations of women and money, to cities near you.
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I love it.
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I love it.
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And I've been a part of that and I've been it's just so interesting who comes and what people
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share.
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So you said that the real risk isn't that women will mismanage wealth, but that they'll leave
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it untouched.
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Why is an action showing up so often in women?
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You know, I think a big part of it is we don't know who to trust.
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And during my journey of closing my own confidence gap, closing my own knowledge gaps,
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I often found myself in rooms where someone was trying to sell me something or separate me from
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my money.
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So a lot of the conversations around women and money tend to be hosted exclusively by wealth
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managers who want to take control over your assets to invest, or someone was raising money
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for a fund or some other investment that I wanted to be a part of or to learn more, but I
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didn't wanna feel so hard pressed on a transaction.
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And so I think, unfortunately, people are trying to get women to do more activity with
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their capital to invest, but without there being a safe trusted place to be able to do
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that, I think what we're going to find is more women go, hey, You're trying to sell me on
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something.
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I don't wanna make a bad decision.
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I need to context myself so I can understand risk, liquidity, what timelines might look like
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for me, when do I need to send my kids to college.
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You know, these are all important things to consider when you're making an investment.
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And I just don't think that there have been enough spaces for us to be able to candidly
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say, hey, Melinda, how was that investment for you?
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How did that work out?
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You know?
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Help me close the gap so I understand the emotions behind it, the actions behind it, and
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I can actually see modeling that allows me to picture myself in that space doing that thing.
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Well, know, it's interesting.
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For the longest time I was this person you described, right?
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I was like, oh, let the people put the $4.00 1 ks money wherever they want it.
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I barely would pay attention to the paperwork they sent me other than the monthly statement
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to see how much money was in there.
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And how I got empowered around it was actually when I went to graduate school.
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I took a class in my MBA program called Financials for Executives.
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And I learned how to read a 10 ks.
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Like I learned how to look at, when you wanna know what a company cares about, you look at
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their balance sheet and you look at what they're putting money into.
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And these were things that I never ever understood.
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And once I learned how to effectively read a 10 ks, I never let anybody invest my money for me
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ever again.
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Wow, that's I was like, I know how to read.
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And and then I became a 10 k jerky.
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Then I was like, oh, send me the papers.
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I wanna read them.
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You know?
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I mean, so but again, everybody doesn't have that kind of time or that interest, but I think
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it is really important for people to know that it's okay to go educate yourself and get this
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information.
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Tell me if a woman is listening today and they know that they need to be more intentionable
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about their wealth, what do you think are the top three things they need to do?
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Yeah, the very first thing is to understand what your financial needs are.
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I think that sometimes we have moving goalposts.
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I actually found in my conversations with my girlfriends who did wanna talk to me, a lot of
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them did not wanna share about what they were doing with their capital because every time
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they reached a new milestone, they move the goalpost.
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And so I think a big part of it is to, you know, understand what are my real goals here
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with my capital.
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And those goals can be both in terms of wealth accumulation or impact with your money.
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You know, I think too often we think about our capital as only accumulation, but, ultimately,
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we both know you can't take it with you.
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Right?
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So at the end of the day, the capital needs to be deployed.
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So I think the very first thing is, what are some of the goals that you have?
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Whether that's milestone markers and ultimately legacy.
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Right?
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Ultimately, sort of the big things.
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The second thing is to understand, and this was a really important thing for me, is that not
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everyone can actually be risk averse.
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You know?
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It depends on where your starting line is.
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Being a business owner puts you in a high risk category.
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You know?
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A lot of my friends who are business owners assume that their business will exit and will
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be their retirement.
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I have a lot of friends who are also in our community who are building great corporate
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careers.
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Right?
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But they don't realize that that is one linear way of over indexing, that having a four zero
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one k may not reach your retirement goals.
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So I think a big part of it is to realize that whatever our initial thing is that we're doing,
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the lane that we're deciding to build in is likely not the complete picture.
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And so I think it's important to say, yes.
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I've done this thing really well, but what else am I curious about?
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How else can I round out what my investments look like and what my capital is moving
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towards?
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And then I think the third thing is to get into community.
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It is scary and intimidating.
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I mean, when I first started, no one wanted to talk to me, and I found myself raising hands
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and feeling like, unlike you, Melinda, like I had missed the class.
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I was like, where was that class?
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Why was it not offered to me?
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And then to realize that, oh my gosh.
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We've all picked lanes of expertise.
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Just because I don't know something doesn't make me an idiot.
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It just means that I chose to learn something else.
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And so how can I both stand in my greatness and also be curious?
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And so I think being in community, being vulnerable with each other really helps to
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close those gaps to realize these things are within possibility for us.
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I really appreciate you saying that because I feel like people that have businesses, they
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think their business is gonna sell, they might be building a business they can't sell.
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There are people in corporate, I don't know about you, but I feel like I have so many
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friends in their 50s who have been pushed out of corporate America in the last eighteen
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months, women, and they're too young to retire, and they're trying to figure out, okay.
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Do I try to go get another good 6 figure corporate job?
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And those jobs just aren't even out here, especially for women of color.
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And I my big response to them has been, girl, buy a business.
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Like, don't like don't be chasing another you don't want another boss.
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Be the boss.
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Go buy a business.
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Buy a franchise.
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Don't sit here.
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You know, if you're 50 to 55, you can't retire yet.
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You probably got kids you haven't put through college yet.
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Like, you you gotta figure something out.
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Even if you're sitting on a 500, six hundred thousand four zero one k, you you still need to
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do something else.
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And really working a job is never gonna make you a millionaire unless you get in the C suite
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and people don't keep those jobs but eighteen to twenty four months.
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So I really want people to think about entrepreneurship through acquisition, investing
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in businesses, but with the eye towards exit.
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Like don't invest in another business and think you're going to spend the next twenty years in
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it.
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Invest in a business you know you can grow, that you have the skills to grow and exit.
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Exit in five to seven years and get paid and go do what you really wanna do.
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Because I don't know about you, but I set my goal.
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It's a house in Costa Rica.
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It's not being here.
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I know what it is.
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But again, I think that people are afraid to recognize what their skill sets enable them to
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do.
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And it's not that they can't do something else, but if you've been in corporate America twenty
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to thirty years, why in the world would you go back?
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If somebody let you be free from that, why would you go back?
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Absolutely.
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I mean, I think that it makes such a good point here which is, and this is another great
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example of this Melinda is that we are living through one of the highest eras of where we're
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thinking about longevity.
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And so if we are here today thinking about, hey, I might be out living '95, January, maybe
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even 01/2005, then our capital has to go further.
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But also it means that we're gonna need stuff to do.
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So when it comes to looking at how do we fund the next forty, fifty, sixty years of our life
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and then also how we think about holding our interests.
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We have to be thinking in terms of like you mentioned, not just the first act, not just the
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second act, but what are the third and fourth acts.
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Right?
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Yeah.
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What's the third act?
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And so I think that that is a really important underscoring here, which is it used to be that
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you would, you know, 65 retire, have your, you know, have your pension, and that was gonna
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somehow fund you to maybe 80.
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You know?
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And that was sort of the cap that people were thinking about.
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But these days, we are living so much longer.
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And so not many of us can actually afford to be risk averse.
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Like we're gonna have to push ourselves beyond the status quo of what we've been told our
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society about what's possible.
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I can't I mean my godmother is 91 years old and she's the mayor of the little town that I grew
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up in.
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She's the
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mayor right you know I mean like so you know and she was a homemaker her whole entire career
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right?
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So she never worked outside the home, did all this volunteer stuff, but she is the mayor of
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the little town and they had a run for reelection.
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Mean, so people are living full lives until January.
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It's not like everybody, certainly if your health breaks down, you end up in memory care
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or assisted living and all this kind of stuff.
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But if you are healthy, like if you take care of yourself, there's a whole bunch of stuff you
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can do.
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And now that I'm over 50, there was all this, 50 is the new 40.
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It's true because if you took care of yourself and you have your health, yeah, I don't look
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anywhere near 50.
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I feel like I can tell your age when you don't look it, right?
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But here's the thing that I want you to talk about.
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You believe in people getting rich together.
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You believe that it's not about being a Scrooge McDuck and keeping all of your money to
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yourself and just enriching yourself and your personal family.
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Your thing is cooperative economics.
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And I really want you to talk about that because I don't think enough people think about
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that and think about that in that way.
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And I want you to talk about how community and collaboration can elevate all of our wealth
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goals.
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It's a beautiful question.
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When you were speaking, it reminded me of this one woman recently posted that she has dense
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breast tissue and was recently diagnosed with stage two, three breast cancer.
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And one of the big reasons why that happens is because there was not enough funding for
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research to be able to make mammogram screenings for dense breast tissue easily
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available.
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And in fact, the premiums around that are so expensive.
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And at this moment, there are now companies that are developing technologies to make it
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really easy to be able to screen for dense breast tissue.
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Now, I mentioned that because when we think about fueling the future and we think about
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looking at how we need to be investing in the future, it's going to take not just big
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institutions to see that, hey, we actually should be investing into women's health.
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It takes individuals like us to say, hey, we actually want to take a step forward into a
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future that we believe in.
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And so when it comes to the collaboration around fueling industry, those who will benefit
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from that industry tend to be the ones to fuel it.
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Right?
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There's a reason why these sorts of things have not been heavily researched.
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It's because there haven't been enough powers at hand to have the capital to fuel that
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research.
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So even from a science and technology and researching standpoint, you know, mobilizing
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our capital to the things that matter to us the most can actually have such huge outcomes when
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it comes to our health and the technologies that end up being developed.
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Now one of my favorite, you know, things to think about in this world is how do we double
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down and be more of ourselves, who we are?
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I've realized in my own personal transformation, I don't wanna be doing what you
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do, what someone else does.
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I wanna do what I do, and I wanna do it excellently.
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And in that way of showing up in excellence, I believe the pie grows bigger.
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I believe that as a society, we've been too caught up in, oh, Sally over here likes vanilla
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cupcakes.
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I think I want vanilla cupcakes too.
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Right?
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As opposed to saying, oh, Sally likes vanilla.
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I know enough about vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate to go, you know what?
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I actually really like strawberry.
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And so when we actually start to realize our unique preferences and differences, we start to
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actually create a larger pie.
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We're not fighting over the same assets.
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We're looking to be collaborative and cooperative as we're looking to double down on
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what we want and who we are.
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Because at the end of the day, each of our values are so very different because we've had
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different lives.
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And so I think a big part of that is self responsibility, but also self respect.
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What is it that I uniquely want that's not a dream that anyone else is chasing?
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So in this way, I think that we can start to look at the future of the world if we can all
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contribute to our highest selves and what we're most uniquely set at doing can actually lead to
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a more prosperous world because we are all doing the things that we do best and I think
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that goes with investing you know what do you invest in what's in your lane and it goes with
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what you do professionally
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tell me about the conference that you're having in May for women seeking information on how to
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grow and invest their money
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Thanks for asking, Melinda.
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So May 14 at Mastercard in New York City, we are hosting our annual gathering of the Wealth
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Catalyst Summit, and this is a pure led room.
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So that means that incredible women are in the room or on stages, and we're hosting a whole
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series of conversations that really, really engage women with how they think about their
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money from a very candid perspective.
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Non transactional, not trying to sell you into something, but really an opportunity to say,
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I'm curious as to what it looks like to start a business in my forties, fifties, or sixties.
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I'm interested in different real estate strategies right now.
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I wanna think about investing in women's sports or deep technology or entertainment.
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So we don't pick a lane at this conference.
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We really have your peers on stage, not celebrities, no fancy keynotes, talking about
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the candid things that they're doing to build, preserve, and deploy their capital.
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And in this way, when we create trust and have lots of different kinds of conversations, we
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realize money is three sixty and we can do it collaboratively and we can do it successfully
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together.
22:18
I love it.
22:18
I love it.
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So what do you think how do you think women need to start having conversations about wealth
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and financial literacy even within families?
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Yeah, you know, it's a really, really big one.
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The person closest to you, a partner, a parent, a child, whoever is sort of the next person
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closest to you in your family is a great place to start by asking about what money means to I
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think sometimes within families, we think that money means the same things, but actually money
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means all sorts of different things.
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You start to stop and think about your own money story and why it is you operate and do
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the things you do, you can look no further than to your parents and and the ways that you were
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raised.
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So understanding values around money, I think, help really to start bridge the conversation
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around what people use their money for.
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You know?
23:12
But before we say, hey.
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Let's look at the budget.
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Let's look at how we're spending it.
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Let me teach you about investing.
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It's important to share what does it mean to me, and how do I see my money actually doing
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something in the world?
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What are my priorities?
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Some years, Melinda, cash is heavily outflowing.
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You know?
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It's like this year, my priorities are buying a house and starting this.
23:35
Those are obviously not gonna be just moving on up the train here, but some years, the money is
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coming in.
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And so what I find is that money goes like this.
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And so if you're not having constant conversation about what it means to you and
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what's important to you, then knowing the numbers coming in and out can only lead to just
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fear.
23:54
Right?
23:54
And then also, I think grappling over things when really we wanna make sure we're aligning
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our values towards the outcome of what that capital is meant to do.
24:03
I love it.
24:04
I love it.
24:04
Alright.
24:04
Last question.
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What is the best business advice that anyone has ever given you?
24:09
You know, one of the things someone told me recently is, don't change your goal, but you
24:15
might need to change the way you get to your goal.
24:18
And and that was actually really recently.
24:20
And I really valued it because I think that knowing that the goal stays the same, what I
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want, but the circuitous paths in which these things can sort of arrive, you just don't know
24:34
how you're gonna get there.
24:36
But if you know what the there is that you're wanting, I really think anything is possible.
24:41
Thank you so much, Shama Bunton.
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He is the founder and CEO of the wealthcatalyst.com.
24:58
Subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and join us next Wednesday for
25:03
more fantastic information and interviews.
25:06
You can find more sources and small business success strategies by visiting Melinda's
25:11
website, succeedasyourownboss.com.
25:14
Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next week.