WENDY OF INVESTED MILLENNIAL

Wendy graduated from UCLA in 2016 and has built a career in cleantech. She is currently a tech business analyst where she works on projects related to internal logistics. She created the Invested Millennial community on Instagram and YouTube to document her investing journey, but soon after launching she realized there was nothing more empowering than sharing knowledge and encouragement to help other women (especially minority women) learn the importance of investing. She switched her approach from sharing her personal investing picks to doing research for her community and creating bite-sized posts that spark interest in investing and ways to use the market to build long term wealth. Wendy’s goal is to provide peer-to-peer support and strengthen women's camaraderie on social media to continue to strive toward closing the gender investing gap. She is currently working on launching a digital platform where women can find free investing resources, blog posts that focus on market trends and tools to connect with her to help her audience with their investing journey.

““When I was building my YouTube channel, I did not have a lot of engagement, I actually had a lot of criticism from guys. People, especially men, really feel threatened or uncomfortable hearing a woman talk about the market and investing, but that drives me; I want to continue putting more content out there.””

— Wendy Cartagena

What inspired you to start Invested Millennial?

I wanted to document my investing journey – I was thinking about investing in individual stocks, but I was holding back on doing that because I was afraid; I didn't know where to start, how to do it, or how to not lose money in the market. I'd heard so many bad things. I went through the '08 crash; I was just heading to high school when that happened, so there were just a lot of things that made me hesitant to start investing.  

A lot of the information that I got was online, primarily from YouTube and other male investors who shared their journey online; I thought it would be cool to do the same as a woman of color, because, especially on social media and YouTube, there are not a lot of women actually talking about their investing journey specifically. There are a lot of finance Youtubers, but those who are women typically focus on budgeting, how to live a frugal life, saving hack's, etc, but I really wanted to just be a fresh face and share kind of my journey to building a 100K investment portfolio. 

I’ve received a lot of support because as a woman, I'm able to share my view of how I invest. I'm not a risk taker; I like to think about things long term, and I think that really resonates well with women looking to invest, but not necessarily be extremely risky at the beginning so they can really understand the benefits of holding and investing for the long run. So I just wanted to document my experience, and to be transparent and motivate and empower other women to actually learn about investing.

What are some standard investing practices or tips that you think all women should know?

I believe women need to understand the different types of trading options that exist. When we think about “investing”, some [women] are not familiar with what that really means. You think about making short term buys and sells, so you would buy what they sell the next day; I think a lot of women don't understand that there are different approaches. Now there’s a passive way of investing, there's a way of generating additional cash by how we invest in dividend companies, and there's a way of investing in slow growth companies that are ideally better for those thinking of holding for five, ten plus years. 

I think women need to understand the fundamentals when it comes to investing, not think that it's just one thing, and to take profits, because there are so many different ways to make money in the market. But there's also different approaches and different time periods in which you can actually make your money grow. It's not just day trading. It's not just options trading. It's not just dividend investing. There's so many different ways for you to invest in such a fine line that you feel comfortable with and that's timely. That’s the most important thing for women to know.

What are your personal go to resources to find information about investing? If there are any that are tailored to women or women of color specifically or women of color, please list them as well.

Ellevest, I'm sure you know of it, it was created by Sally Krawcheck. She had that awesome blog where she talks about investing and how to be smart with your money. I have yet to come across another female specific investing platform where you can find content and information.  

But another great resource online is Investopedia.com; it’s like a dictionary for investing and finance related terms and just understanding how the market works; they have workshops, they have a blog post, and they have everything that you might want to understand about the market. You can literally put a term in their search and find either an article, a blog post, or a video explaining the term in detail. I think it's just a great way for you to understand what's going on in the market by simply doing a search through another.

Also, people who are trying to start an investing journey have to keep up with market news by far. That's one of the most important things.

People think that you should just invest in companies that you like and that you think will have success down the road, but if you don't understand how the market impacts that particular company, that particular industry, how they're doing now, what trends do these particular companies have, then you might make a bad buy. So keeping up with market news is important. I particularly like to keep up by listening to Yahoo! Finance. They have an online broadcast that they have on the market, so I listen to that when I'm working. I have double screen: on one side, Yahoo! Finance, and I'm doing my job on the other screen. So I just keep up with my news, and that really helps me understand what wouldn't otherwise make sense about investing in or just how the market is doing overall.

What challenges did you face in starting Invested Millennial, particularly as a woman of color?

I think one of the biggest challenges that I saw at the beginning was just interest, and I don't think it's necessarily because I'm a woman of color, it's just because I'm a woman. 

When I was building my YouTube channel, I did not have a lot of engagement, I actually had a lot of criticism from guys. I got some really ugly comments saying, “Why are you talking about investing? You're a woman. You should be cleaning and cooking.” These were horrible comments that I got early on, and so many of my videos are just my ability to talk about the market or my experience. It's just me sharing my tips I find on my personal journey. 

But people, especially men, really feel threatened or uncomfortable hearing a woman talk about the market and investing specifically, but that’s driving me; I want to continue putting more content out there, because it’s really those types of people, who think we're not smart enough to actually be able to manage our money through the market, who are some of the reasons why I think women might not feel like they're smart enough to invest or understand how the market works.

But I think over time I've been able to change my channel: right now, I think I have like forty five percent women [subscribers], and the rest are men. At the beginning, it was mostly men, but now women are starting to notice like, oh, well, investing doesn't have to be complicated. You don't have to you don't make these complicated technical analyses to invest your money, you can literally buy an index fund or an ETF and invest that way, and you know that your money is going to grow and you don't really have to put too much research into it because not everyone has time to really understand and do financials. 

What future developments do you see in the field of female investing?

I think we're becoming more conscious; just drawing an audience on YouTube, I realize that a lot of women are really, really trying to go after that movement, and I think investing is becoming a very important part of that movement. Initially, it was pay off debt, save money and retire early. But now I feel like investing is starting to be noticed because of people like Sally Krawcheck, because of her platform and because of how she's able to empower women. I feel that that's moving forward. We're going to see a lot more female investors that are confident enough to display their trades and talk about how they manage their portfolios. I think it's a very exciting time to be talking about these topics, especially because of what's going on at a global scale with this economic downturn. I feel like women and people in general are taking the time right now to understand “how can I make more money?” or “how can I make my money grow into more money?” So I feel like, 2020 and moving forward, we're gonna see a lot more pages, especially on social media of women talking about investing. 

I've seen this trend actually in the past couple of months where there are just a bunch of investing, female investing pages that are following me now. When I created mine, there was literally nothing, maybe a few budding pages. But now everyone wants to create a page about investing, which I am all for, because the more women we have talking about investing, the more we can actually close the gender investing gap, which is by far one of the most important things which correlates with the gender pay gap.

What advice would you give to other young women seeking to bridge the gender disparity in investing?

I'm all about being public about certain things; in order for us to really close that gap, we have to empower and support each other. [We have to] be vocal about how we're investing, how much we're earning, and really be up-lifting.

I think using our social media to spark conversations around investing and the gender pay gap are some of the ways to really open people's eyes and maybe ignite some type of action that translates over into their lives. Using the power of social media and our conversations in the hopes of impacting people's lives in a positive way.

Who's a woman leader that you look up to?

Sally Krawcheck. Sally has built one of the most powerful [platforms] for women, that's probably one of the reasons why I created Invested Millennial or my YouTube channel. Because she was one of the first women [to create a platform like that]. She’s a go-getter, she really wants to change things for us younger women. I was inspired by her, and really wanted to, in some way, be a part of that movement by creating my own platform where I'm hopeful and transparent about what I'm doing to try and set myself up for success. 

She was at Bank of America before and went to Columbia Business School, and just used her experience of being a woman in finance to create a platform that has helped thousands of women actually start investing without complicating their lives. That’s very very admirable because no one else has thought about that. No one else had been clever enough to actually create a platform for women looking to invest.