News — Black Millionaires

Prophet Mboro is a charismatic yet controversial church leader from South Africa. He is adored by his thousands of followers and renowned as much for his dancing as he is for the `miracles' he performs. Boasting a collection of expensive cars and wearing an array of jewelry, Mboro has emerged as a millionaire from the boom in Pentecostal `mega-churches'. The question that lingers is if Mboro can possibly be a messenger from God. In such a case, his followers seem to praise him more than they praise God. What do you think?

Chicago-based entrepreneur Jeff Badu, a former gang member, became a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and a millionaire by 26. Now, he’s giving back to inner-city youth through his summer financial literacy program.

“I didn’t have someone to teach me about money and finances and prepare me to live the best abundant life possible,” Badu told the Chicago Sun-Times. “With all of the violence going on in Chicago with our youth, I guarantee you that if they had more financial education and empowerment, they would be able to stay out of trouble. They just want to sustain themselves and get out of poverty.”

Former Gang Member Becomes Millionaire Accountant

Born in Ghana, Badu came to Chicago’s Uptown community when he was 8 years old. He fell into Chicago’s gang life, seeking protection and guidance from the streets. After visiting family in Ghana, he was determined to get his life back on track.

“Between 8 to 16, those were the toughest times of my life. I was surrounded by so much negativity,” Badu shared with WGN TV during an interview. “I was literally trapped, I couldn’t walk certain places.”

Badu’s comeback was nothing short of impressive. In 2014, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in accountancy from the University of Illinois. In 2015, he went on to earn his Master of Accounting Science degree. Then, he started his career at Big Four accounting firm, PwC.

After a year of work experience, Badu obtained his CPA license and started Badu Enterprises. He reached a million-dollar net worth at age 26. Now, he leads a successful multinational tax practice and is a real estate investor. He owns a portfolio of 118 housing units on Chicago’s south side, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. 

From Gang Member to Millionaire Financial Literacy Advocate

Badu doesn’t want other youth to experience what he did growing up in Chicago. That’s why he’s offering a four-week financial literacy summer program to youth ages 6-18 years old.

“If you don’t have the resources to create abundance, then life is likely going to be tough. I want Chicago’s youth to think more abundantly,” Badu shared on his website.

His Badu Foundation will be a key ingredient to transforming the opportunities available to underserved youth in Chicago. The foundation aims to provide valuable financial literacy education, scholarship training,  and a $500 scholarship to jumpstart their educational goals.

Badu aims to raise $100,000 to fund scholarships. According to Block Club Chicago, he plans to use $20,000 of his own money for this initiative. He is raising additional funds through a GoFundMe Financial Literacy Scholarship Fundraiser. You can check out the Youth Financial Empowerment Program and application on Badu’s website.

James Hunt is known as “The Celebrity Credit Guru.” The millionaire is a celebrity wealth management expert who is credited with helping some of America’s biggest athletes, entertainers, and scores of ordinary people with their credit cards and finances.

Originally from Chicago, Hunt was homeless when he was only eight years old. He would roam around the Buckhead community of Atlanta seeing luxury cars and dreaming of owning one in the future. The dream of driving a luxurious car urged him on to start his business.

Learning everything he could about credit, Hunt recalls starting his entrepreneurial journey with a ‘cheap laptop’ and operated in a Starbucks during the day and a local Fed Ex during the night. Things took off for Hunt when he got his first celebrity client and cleaned up that client’s entire family’s credit, he tells Global Millionaires. Today, some of his clients include Bruno Mars, Akon, Tank, Taraji P. Henson, Larenz Tate, Tichina Arnold, Tyrese, Usher, and Shaq.

Hunt has elevated himself from a homeless boy to becoming one of the most sought-after people in the credit repair industry. He has been able to do this through his credit and financial concierge company New Rich Productions, based in Atlanta, GA. His staff includes homeless or disadvantaged young Black men.

The wealth management expert is now focused on developing young Black entrepreneurs to become successful like him. He has established a new company called The Hunt to teach young Blacks about entrepreneurship. “I think that so often we are encouraging people to be entrepreneurs, but no one ever teaches you how to hunt and how to properly go after what you want,” he tells The Black Wall Street Times.

“Becoming a millionaire or becoming successful at all requires a certain mindset and unwavering focus. There are various techniques to hunting down success. I teach things like strategy, knowing how to approach clients, knowing when to pull the trigger, knowing when to lay and wait for your ‘prey’… knowing when to make your move and when to actually be silent. Many of our young black men aspire to live a luxury lifestyle, but no one teaches them how to actually achieve it. That is what I am doing with The Hunt.”

Hunt says his career as an entrepreneur has been motivated and driven by his knack for success and goal setting. “Taking on new ideas and accomplishing goals is something that I set out to do on a daily basis,” he says. “That daily challenge to get up and accomplish what you set out to accomplish for that day is literally what drives me that day.”

He also describes himself as relentless. For him, failure is not an option, and he has therefore been persistent in everything that he has accomplished. “For me, it is not enough to just be successful, and the goal is to reach the top. If there is one word to be described, it is being completely relentless in my pursuit of success.”

Todd Baldwin was raised by his single mom. Now 27 years old, he is a millionaire with multiple streams of income. What’s more, Baldwin saves 80% of his earnings and does not engage in frivolous expenses.

The serial entrepreneur started working when he was only 12 years old. He would save much of what he earned as he considered it as not only a sound financial management practice but fun. “It’s actually really fun being able to buy something and then choosing not to,” he tells CNBC.

The African-American entrepreneur now brings home $615,000 annually ($305,000 after business expenses) from his multiple businesses. His mixed-income comes from rental properties, his day job working in commercial insurance sales, and the extra cash he makes as a secret shopper.

He owns six rental properties with his wife, Angela, which brings in the majority of the revenue he makes. For instance, they earn $460,000 per year in rent and keep about $150,000 of that per year after expenses such as mortgage payments, taxes, insurance, and utilities.

“Although our net worth is seven figures, we don’t do a lot of the typical things that most people envision millionaires doing. We are super frugal,” says Baldwin.

The entrepreneur says he is able to save as much as 80% of his income because he keeps his expenses so low. He does not pay for entertainment like movies or restaurants because he gets paid for that as a mystery shopper. He gets paid for dining out, grocery shopping, seeing movies, and visiting hotels and casinos.

“There are a lot of businesses out there that want to know how their employees are doing and how the market is responding to their products,” he explains. “So those companies will hire mystery shopping firms to find independent contractors like me to go pose at their establishment as a regular customer, buy the product or service and then report on it.”

Baldwin started mystery shopping while he was in college and has so far made $30,000. Since he started mystery shopping, Baldwin and his wife spend around $25 on food. Another thing Baldwin tries to avoid is spending money on needless bank account fees or credit card charges.

Despite being very conscious of what to spend his money on, the serial entrepreneur has no qualms about spending on his wife. Even that, he needs approval. He recalls spending $500 on a designer purse for his wife but she took it back and exchanged it for a $60 purse.

“My wife is more frugal than I am!” he says. “A couple of years ago, I bought her a designer purse for like 500 bucks. But when I surprised her with it, she immediately took it back, exchanged it for a $60 purse at Macy’s, and then we invested the difference.”

Yassin Hall is an entrepreneur who sells mainly on Amazon where she manages four successful six-figure stores. Her journey began after she took to selling clothes online following a difficult divorce.

She started Let’s Journey into Fashion after many of her social media followers showed keen interest in her business. Her website subsequently caught the attention of Amazon and she was offered the opportunity to open an e-commerce store on the platform.

One of her four Amazon stores belongs to her daughter Yamisha Young. Having become a successful seller on Amazon, she decided it was time to also share her expertise with others as the C.E.O of B.O.S.S. Amazon and Ebay Classes in a bid to help them increase their earnings or bring in extra income.

She teaches How to Set Up an eBay Store From Your Classroom to Earn Six Figures a Year; How to Sell on Amazon; Creating the Mindset for Being an Entrepreneur; and Understanding How to Manage Money.

As a mental health advocate, Hall also teaches students with learning disabilities how to be financially savvy, including her autistic daughter, who made some $155,000 when she turned 18.

“The lessons being applied in the curriculum are what I have created in my B.O.S.S. eBay and Amazon classes,” said Yassin. “Children are proving they are far more technologically advanced than we were at their age so it was no surprise that when I offered the class on August 31, within minutes about 60 students enrolled.”

Hall has made over $1 million selling online and believes that the coronavirus pandemic has taught many the need to create alternative incomes and home-based businesses. She is teaching middle and high schoolers at Genesis Preparatory Academy near Atlanta how to profit from Amazon and eBay.

“We are delighted to have found the BOSS CLASS LLC’s eBay course that aligns with our curriculum expectations that will bring awareness and exposure into entrepreneurship, problem-solving, and critical thinking,” said Iris Blevins of Genesis Preparatory Academy.

This may be Hall’s first time teaching at a school in Georgia but her bestselling book in which she chronicles her experience living with a violent bipolar schizophrenic mother has been on the curriculums of several schools as reading material.

Hall is a mother of four — three boys and one girl. She was born in the Virgin Islands as an only child. She completed Charlotte Amalie High School in 1988 and obtained her first degree in computers and fashion from the National Education Center for the Arts.

Her life journey has not been smooth but Hall has managed to weather the storm to be where she is now. God is always the center of what she does, she said.

“I firmly believe that God has been building and preparing me to be the mother, entrepreneur, business coach, teacher, speaker, writer and B.O.S.S. (Built on Self-Motivated Success) that I am today,” she told.

Besides being an entrepreneur, Hall is also known for her philanthropic activities. She made donations to hurricane victims and also supplied students in the U.S. Virgin Islands with laptops to help them attend online school amidst the pandemic.

Nigeria has emerged as the second biggest market for bitcoin, trading over 60,000 bitcoins, valued at $566 million, between 2015 and 2020.

Since 2017, the volume of bitcoin trade in Nigeria has increased by 19% while the highest volume of trade (20,504.50) was recorded in 2020, according to reports.

The West African nation and Africa’s biggest economy trails only the United States on Paxful, a leading peer-to-peer bitcoin market place. The sharp rise in bitcoin trade, particularly in 2020, has been attributed to the lockdown and the “End SARS” protest across Nigeria.

During the End SARS protests, the Nigerian authorities accused some foreigners and members of the Nigerian diaspora of funding the protest. And in the government’s quest to end the demonstrations, the Central Bank of Nigeria instructed private banks to freeze several organizations’ and individuals’ accounts to stop the flow of funds supporting the protests, according to Human Rights Watch.

To bypass the restrictions, the protesters switched to using bitcoin in order to raise funds to sustain the pressure on the federal government to act on police brutalities and other human rights abuses by the country’s security forces. The change to bitcoin was in no small part due to explicit advice by Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, who supported the protest to the anger of certain officials of the Nigerian government.

According to reports, bitcoin accounted for around 40% of the nearly $400,000 raised within a week.

The coronavirus-forced lockdown in Nigeria also saw the bitcoin trade skyrocketing, recording a 37% increase in new registrations. Paxful, which controls 52% of the bitcoin market worldwide, is the most popular bitcoin platform in Africa and Nigerians make up a quarter of its customer base with 1.3 million registered accounts.

“They mostly use the platform for peer-to-peer and arbitrage trading,” says Nena Nwachukwu, Paxful Nigeria regional manager. “Remittance is also a popular use case.” Nwachukwu says bitcoin transfers are “much cheaper and faster than using traditional money transfer operators.”

Also, cross border challenges in money transfer accounts for the growing using of bitcoins, according to Paxful chief executive officer and co-founder Ray Yussef. “Africa’s largest economy has problems and restrictions in sending and receiving money from inside and outside its borders.”

The U.S, which tops the bitcoin market, recorded a 32% decline in the number of bitcoin trades executed in 2020 while the Philippines recorded the biggest increase with 7,339% more bitcoin traded in 2020 compared to 2019, according to bitcoin.com.

China traded $181.3 million worth of bitcoin in the last five years, Canada $131.1 million and the UK $119.4 million to complete the top five bitcoin trading economies.

White billionaires have doubled in America in the past quarter-century, according to the Washington Post. This reflects the widening economic gulf and racial disparity as the percentage of Blacks and other minority households worth more than $1 million remains below 2% since 1992.

The trend of Whites accumulating wealth is set to continue and will continue to outperform Blacks and Hispanics in key indicators of wealth: homeownership and equity, investments, and inheritance, according to data cited by the Washington Post.

On the corporate ladder, Black CEOs make up less than one percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and around three percent in senior management positions, a report by the Center for Talent Innovation said. Brian Lee, a digital ad executive, wants to change that by offering a platform that aims at increasing the number of Black millionaires in the next decade.

Lee is the founder of Black Health & Wealth and has a passion for entrepreneurship and healthy living. He’s responsible for digital advertising campaigns for some of the largest brands in the United States. Black Health & Wealth was created to amplify Black wealth and economic opportunity and in the process, create more Black millionaires.

One of the ways of achieving this is to partner corporate institutions to commit to their diversity policy, Lee said. “There has been a lot of talk from corporate America about standing with the black community, but now it is time for action. Black professionals would like to see investment directly into black talent and black suppliers. They also want professional development and to see diverse people in company board seats and in the C-Suite,” the business executive was quoted by Black Business.

As a seasoned ad executive, Lee has worked for renowned brands like Verizon, Microsoft, and many more. Black Health & Wealth was inspired by his own struggles through the corporate ladder. Coming from a humble background, he aspires to create one million Black millionaires in the next 10 years thereby creating a modern-day Black Wall Street.

He however believes that building Black Wall Streets globally will start with a digital approach, hence his platform is “building the technology” to power communities.

In effect, Lee’s plan to increase the number of Black millionaires will be executed in two phases. The first phase will see Lee provide education and professional development to professionals within the network while phase two will centralize Black businesses to have access to each other while committing major corporations to their diversity policies, according to We Buy Black.