Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality with life. Before we get into today's topic, I have 1 request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it. It helps more people learn how to have positive impact through values based business. Thank you so much.

Today, I'm thrilled to introduce you to Angie Matthews, it, and our topic is how to become a successful investor based on your values. Angie is an intellectually driven entrepreneur, an investor who is passionate about disrupting traditional ways of creating wealth by developing strategies and multidimensional financial solutions for everyday people. With she is a founder and investment coach at Happy Investor Method. Angie, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

It. You're doing great work, and I'm really excited to introduce our listeners to what you're up to. But before we get into what things look like now, Andy, just give us a what would somebody who's listening, doesn't know who Andrew Matthews is, what would they need to know a little bit about your backstory to kinda get a sense of the context or the foundation of the work that you do now.

So I created a company called The Happy Investor Method, and I created it because Wealth wasn't a conversation that I grew up around. And initially, when I started investing, I had $40,000 in debt. With Nope. I was making $40,000 a year with 6 figures in debt. And I knew off the bat that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I knew what the stats with for being a person of color and receiving outside funding would be, so I decided that I had to start thinking about money in a different way, and I did. And not only did I start investing, but I was able to use my investments to not only pay off my debt, but really increase into a 7 figure net worth with by investing in things that I truly believe deserve to exist on the planet. And that's pretty much how I started, and now I am dedicated with to teaching people how to become wealthy on

their terms. One of the things as I was doing my research, Angie, on your website, it says, with our clients choose to be wealthy. Our clients choose to be wealthy, and it's not just about the money. This is really it it's both about what that opens up, but there's a deep dive you've done on why, especially the folks who are your clients, it matters when your clients and people like them become wealthy. Tell us a little bit about that part of what you're doing.

But I do think a lot of things that we do with are based in choice, and sometimes someone might not want to be wealthy. They may not choose it based on the apprehensions that they're coming to the table with. Maybe they think you have to be evil in order to acquire wealth and amass wealth. Perhaps they think that if they acquire wealth, They are now indebted to the world or maybe they think that they just can't have it because it's taking away from someone else. So it's really powerful to with Enable someone to have the power to choose it and what it comes with it. So I do think with great power comes great responsibility, with And my goal is to build an awareness in people from jump that, hey. If I'm going to help you build this wealth, It's to not only lighten your burden, but to really lighten the burden of the

world. So before you got into this focus on impact and investing, you did some work in more traditional places like Goldman Sachs. So what did you see where maybe impact and values weren't quite as robust it as what you're doing now. Like, why is that such a focus, and how is that different than what might be happening in the impact I'm sorry, in the investing world in general.

It's really interesting because when I started at Goldman, I thought it. I was gonna learn how to make a lot of money because, supposedly, they're the best folks at making money. Right? Number 1 investment banking Institution in the world, and this was also right prior to the last recession and the great collapse of the banking system. It. And I actually like to think that I'm making up by teaching folks how to do more aligned investing for regular people. With Because I'm sure when I was at the big bank, I didn't know who I was working for or what agenda I was pushing. And it was really all under the guise of, hey. With You wanna make money, and we're hiring you to help our clients make money.