Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Financial Literacy: The Missing Piece in Social Justice with Courtney Teasley
Money isn't just about personal comfort—it's the foundation of sustainable social change. In this compelling conversation, attorney and business coach Courtney Teasley challenges conventional thinking about the relationship between financial power and justice work.
Teasley introduces her concept of the "DAM community" (Disproportionately Affected Marginalized Minority), explaining how these communities face three critical knowledge gaps: criminal justice literacy, civics, and financial literacy. Without understanding these systems, meaningful change remains elusive. The consequences are devastating—marginalized individuals caught in the criminal justice system face impossible choices between unaffordable legal representation or accepting pleas that permanently damage their economic prospects.
Traditional social justice approaches often fall short because they rely on external funding sources who may not understand community needs or may withdraw support when communities fight in ways donors disapprove of. As Teasley powerfully argues, "If we want to make change on a larger scale, we definitely need money in our pockets to do so." This reality demands new approaches to wealth-building beyond traditional homeownership, which remains inaccessible to most Americans under 50.
The conversation explores practical pathways forward—monetizing expertise through business ownership, strategic investing with newly accessible platforms, and creating multiple income streams. Teasley emphasizes that business ownership allows marginalized individuals to create both profit and impact, similar to socially-conscious companies like Ben & Jerry's or TOMS. By charging their value while incorporating sliding scales and payment plans, business owners can serve their communities without sacrificing sustainability.
For those skeptical of capitalism or concerned about ethical investing, Teasley offers pragmatic wisdom: "Not that we agree with how it is, but this is what it is. We must adapt and create in ways that feel authentic to ourselves." This balance of practical action and principled vision opens possibilities for lasting change that doesn't depend on external control.
Ready to explore how financial power can transform social justice work? Follow Courtney Teasley on YouTube at Black Law Girl, LinkedIn, or Instagram @thecourtneyteasley to learn more about creating sustainable paths to both personal wealth and community empowerment.
Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
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You can find the additional streams on Youtube
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Hello and welcome to Bar Blog, and today I am talking to Courtney Teasley, author, attorney and business coach, and we are speaking about a rather broad topic. But why? Financial power and literacy is actually a prerequisite for beginning to build social justice. Justice and I think for a lot of people, financial stability is not something they think about when they think about social justice. So why is that important and why is it often missed?
Courtney Teasley:You know. First of all, thank you so much for having me here. I'm excited to be here and thank you for that question. It's often missed because in this realm we serve in the social justice realm, where I serve a lot of my time, naturally as a criminal defense attorney, after 12 years, right, and so being with nonprofits, doing all the things, working hand in hand with them, but also having my own business and charging my value because, you know, I was a very good lawyer so I fought hard. I saw that through that.
Courtney Teasley:Then, through unseating a judge and making Nashville history here, I saw that if we really wanted proactive change right, proactive change meaning any kind of change that is going to come before, uh, someone in the criminal justice system is found guilty or pled guilty right, we know, 97 percent of people take police it that's all reactive.
Courtney Teasley:Everything after that is reactive rehabs, all the different things, the programs, prison ministries, whatever. Everything before that is proactive. So if we want to actually put a dent in mass incarceration, right, we actually want to be effective in actually bringing some systemic change here, we have to be more proactive and when we do that we need money to do that. A lot of times you'll see some people who are trying to be proactive, maybe mainly some grassroots organizations, or they have some initiatives, but maybe that money fizzles out. Maybe donors and people don't like how they're fighting, or maybe, whatever the situation is, they can't continue it. It's not sustainable, right, they can only help a very small few, and so when we want to make change on a larger scale, we definitely need money in our pockets to do so.
C. Derick Varn:What do you think is one of the biggest limitations to people having money? I mean, what are the things I think about? I mean there's obviously a million limitations to people having money, but what I think I think about when we talk about, like, left organizations who advocate for social justice a lot of them are fairly well provisioned NGOs but like there's all kinds of things that come with that. If you are, if you're subservient to those donors, basically are you're subservient to a board which you're going to need fairly rich people on, and for a lot of these communities, those people are going to be from outside of your community. So how do you start to build that wealth with the number of systemic blockers that are in place for a lot of these communities?
Courtney Teasley:Yes, so I like that you asked that question. In the communities that you're speaking of, I call them the DAM community, d-a-m-m, that stands for Disproportionately Affected, marginalized Minority. And so when you're talking about these communities and we know that we're systemically disadvantaged from the beginning, right, we don't come in with generational wealth. We don't come in with the legal knowledge or know-how, business knowledge of anything of that nature, don't come in with the legal knowledge or know-how, business knowledge of anything of that nature. So when we think about how, like you said, what you named the nonprofit industrial complex, right, what they look like, what we have to do, all the money, you need people that's normally where we're focusing our efforts we're saying, oh only, you guys worry about fighting the world's largest issues. Right, and you need to. About fighting the world's largest issues, right, and you need to do it all based off the dime of someone else who really doesn't, can't, identify with the issue. You know, probably on some level they care but really don't know. Like, is the money I'm giving really effectively being used? Here is just paying somebody's salary, right, for a couple or another couple of years? And so how we start to build wealth is we transition a couple of another couple of years. And so how we start to build wealth is we transition like we're in a age now where building wealth owning your own business right Couldn't be easier.
Courtney Teasley:Right, you literally can do all types of things, whether you are. You have a skill. You want to do something on social media, which is a billion dollar industry right, the digital industry. You want to do something there. Or, if you want to go over here and you want to, you can write a book if you want to, but you can create courses around it. You can do all types of different things. You can start an actual. I know somebody here in Nashville has a tech school. Right, they created, they used their information and they created tech school.
Courtney Teasley:Like myself, I took my legal knowledge and I created legal courses and legal books and things of that nature. So, whatever your background is in, there's a way for you to make money right, and so what I advocate on behalf of is that people start using their own skills and expertise to create businesses right. You create wealth, you create more ease in your life, you take away that financial pressure that a lot of us live under right, because some, so many of us are not under the poverty line, but you may be above it, but the rates of cost of living is astronomical. So it doesn't matter when you're the high, when you have the most debt, which we know black women carry the most debt, most student loan debt, right and so we know all of these things that are affecting our community. We've gone to school, done all these different things, but we never got business knowledge.
Courtney Teasley:Any lawyer you ask I'm a lawyer, you know is going to tell you hey, no, I didn't learn how to run a business in law school, which is why the ABA showed that only one percent of lawyers were had their own practice to begin with.
Courtney Teasley:You don't know how to run a sustainable practice. So any who? All of this I'm saying is that we have to start owning and grow and build and building our wealth through business right as one realm, using our expertise, and then, when we're doing that, we have the autonomy and ability to be like Ben and Jerry's, to be like Tom's right, to have a mission behind what we're doing. I did it so much as a lawyer, like I didn't need to be a public defender for me to be able to give deals and to create payment plans for people who did not have the funds all up front. So we have that ability and that's that's what I advocate on behalf of is that we create our businesses and we create them to address some of the most systemic issues, and then, in doing that, you're going to create a lot of profit but you have the opportunity to make a lot of impact. At that same time, you have to mandate it, have it be a part of your brand, your mission, your values, right, how you show up.
C. Derick Varn:One thing I think a lot about this is general financial literacy for the way about this is general financial literacy for the way even say financial products that the average uh, average american has access to, such as 401ks, is really low. Like you know, something like six. What is it like? 68 of the united states has some investment in the stock market, but almost none of them really know how it works. So how do you combat that, particularly in a time period like right now, where investments seem volatile, barriers to entry are low but possible consequences are quite high?
Courtney Teasley:I love that question. So okay, and I have to take notes because the lawyer in me, my brain, will go off and sometimes I forget to close the loop. I apologize in advance, but with the financial literacy, this is the big part of the big three that I teach lead directly to mass incarceration is that the damn community disproportionately affected marginalized minority community is undereducated in criminal justice literacy you teach us ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking the law. You don't teach us the law at all, right. And then you have civics. You teach us nothing more than oh go, vote, right. Not how to hold our elected officials accountable, not how to actually participate meaningfully as a citizen. And then, finally, financial literacy right. You keep us when you already are growing up in a marginalized community is possibly is usually impoverished. You don't see a lot and you don't. You have no resources or people that you can trust to teach you about these things. Right, you might know some people were talking about it. It was like I don't really trust that. Do you know what you're talking about? It's a mistrust there as well, and so that brings me to what you were saying. You're saying, okay, we know that the average American so it's not just in marginalized communities. We know that the average American, a white person as well, probably more than likely didn't get taught that in school.
Courtney Teasley:However, what I believe is necessary is, at this time, we are all, we're now millennials, right? Well, not not everyone, I'm sorry. I speak for myself. I am a millennial. Now Let me speak for how I had to bring my way and learn this. I didn't know, like I knew, you know, to have a 401k and I had that when I was working for the federal government and I had all that stuff. But then when I came out on my own, you know, as a marginalized woman and you know women are we have our own issues. We weren't even able to have a bank account until like the seventies, right, and so coming out not having any of this knowledge, and then trying to own my own business, and I went to my bank and I'm trying to have a conversation with the wealth manager and I'm like, hey, you know, I want to start investing, I want to have a retirement account, whatever.
Courtney Teasley:I'm really early on in practicing at this time frame, not recognizing how busy I'm about to get, not recognize. I'm trying to get this stuff set up and I go into us at the doctor, this guy tells me he's like oh well, I think you need to focus on paying down your debt, right. And so to anyone that may sound like, oh, that's smart, you should just focus in there, right, and just do that. And if you just do that, then you can worry about investing. However, comma, when we know systemically, like I was telling you, black people, particularly Black women, who have the most degrees, are very I have the most debt student loan debt and so that is an issue. When you're working a job coming from the state or you're coming from the federal government, you're probably making under $50,000 just coming out and then you're over here trying to build something. So for me, that wasn't the right path. I should have been able to do both. It should have been both and not do this and stop.
Courtney Teasley:And so because of that, I started practicing. I didn't look deeper into how to invest or any of those things. It wasn't until I pulled myself out of the practice Every day when I pivoted to business coaching and I was building my other, my new business. I had time to teach myself to go find credible sources where that were teaching about stock.
Courtney Teasley:One really good book I enjoyed that really kind of just mapped it out, was I'll Teach you to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi, and so that was a good way for my brain to first take, and it wasn't. That wasn't the first book that I was reading about it, but that when I read his book it put it in a different way that I was like OK, I understand that this is what my IRA is supposed to do. This is the type of index fund I should invest in, right, if I want a safe bet, I want to make sure my money this is I'm not a volatile person what is my risk of set All of those different things you start to learn about, and so I didn't get to start learning that stuff until I got older, and so that's where. So, to answer your question now and I am a wordy lawyer and I apologize for that, derek However, I'm coming to the point where I basically we're millennials, you're Gen X, you're whatever.
Courtney Teasley:You know at this age in your life that we were deficient and our education was deficient, so it's time for us to find the credible places right To go. Find the places that we're hearing about that are credible, looking into it ourselves, getting on their email list, learning about it, making sure that this knowledge is matching up and invest in ourselves so that way we can start setting up not only ourselves but our children Right. So it's going to take that type of effort to intentionally train ourselves, to intentionally recognize we're undereducated and then go find credible places to learn about financial literacy Right, and all the things that come to come along with that.
C. Derick Varn:So one thing that this brings up to me. I work a lot with unions and one of the things that I deal with is that most of us I'm a little older than you, so I'm technically barely a Gen Xer but most of us grew up with an image of the economy as a working person based off the 1950s, even though in the long purview of the United States, which doesn't have a super long history, that's actually a weird decade. But that was our assumption that there'd be pensions. There would be not a robust social safety net, but something and increasingly that doesn't actually exist for most people. How do you deal with teaching people to both deal with that and deal with learning how to navigate what can be both counterintuitive and fairly perilous?
C. Derick Varn:Like you know, I'm I'm invested in in the market, both directly and indirectly, and I've worked in. I work in education, worked in education for 20 years, but I used to work in insurance and finance and getting people to understand the risk but also why you might do something in the market. And here's something that complicates this A lot of people I know who are coming out of the working class and want to invest in this. They get caught up in scams, drop shipping scams are. You know, out here in Utah multi-level marketing is still really big, but that's less of a thing elsewhere. But how do you prep people about how they might be financially literate, even enter the small end of capitalism, but not get sucked into scams, multi-level marketing schemes, that sort of thing?
Courtney Teasley:Yeah, that sort of thing, yeah. So again, for me it's all about the and a lot of times I guess this may come naturally to me because I'm a lawyer by trade, but I think that we have to get very comfortable finding what we need, and we have to get comfortable with doing the research right. And so it's like what you can't do is just go based off of okay, somebody told me that this is the right person to go to. Okay, that's fine. In this, like as a business coach, we see it in any kind of marketing or what you're looking at you see that there are multiple levels of entry into a brand, a business or whatnot. You can be on their email list. You're going to be learning stuff there. You can consume their content on YouTube. You can consume their content wherever right. So you have to do your due diligence.
Courtney Teasley:And so, for me, I think that the 1950s thought process and what our parents wanted for us, what it is, you know, they wanted what the times dictated. We're here now and none of it worked out for us, right? We don't have the same setup. We're seeing now that this is not going to work, so it's time for us to start pivoting, right, it's time for us to start supplementing our income. It's time for us to start utilizing our expertise to bring in more money, and that does include investing. Investing is a beautiful way to do it, right? I totally and I mean totally transparent. I know how to invest At this time I'm trading.
Courtney Teasley:I know how to do all of these different things, but I took a year to go learn how to do it right. I took a course with Terry Ijeoma, right, and it's about I think she had. It was called Stocks 101, or how to take your first trade. That's the first thing I did. I consumed that content, which was like a challenge, and then it introduced me into it and it taught me all the foundational stuff and I was like, oh, I like this, I'm good at numbers, I'm good at these things. I know, I can understand it, but I, as a lawyer, if I, when I was so deep, heavy in practicing, I didn't have time to focus on anything else, in my own opinion, at that time, because I was so deep in the practice and I was doing it myself, which is what prompted me to go become a business coach so I could help the other lawyers that I was. I was training to not burn out Right, like I did. To learn how to scale your law practice instead of kind of just meandering around the 100 to 200 thousand dollar mark forever and then now, boom, you drop it down because you don't want to do this anymore. You're moving out. So what we have to do is put on our lawyer thought process Right. So what we have to do is put on our lawyer thought process Right.
Courtney Teasley:We have to recognize that we were not educated. The multitude of us were not educated on the big three financial literacy, criminal justice literacy and civics. But with financial literacy, we have to be diligent about reaching out and finding the places where this education is and finding the places where this education is right. That resonates with how we learn. Everybody does not learn the same and I'm not talking about black or white people, I'm talking about individually. We learn differently, right?
Courtney Teasley:You may be a visual learner. You may like someone like as a coach, some people they like to coach with me, because you know that I'm going to give it to you like it is. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. We're going to have this conversation. I'm going to, you know, really go deeper with you. I'm not just going to kind of like, oh okay, everything, whatever Some people want, that that might not work for everyone.
Courtney Teasley:So we have to find who's teaching in the way that we can consume it right, in the way that resonates with us, and then we have to commit to it, commit to learning it, commit to being a beginner, give ourselves, forgive ourselves for the bad mistakes that we did make in the past for not knowing what we just didn't know. And that's what keeps us stagnant, because it's shame, there's guilt, there's mindset problems in there, right, and so dealing with all of that, calling that to the front, forgiving ourselves for what we didn't know, and then making a strategic plan to move forward and learn it from someone we feel comfortable learning it from. So that, to me, is the first step into how not to get sucked into scams. You have to do your research right. If it sounds too good to be true, sometimes it is right.
Courtney Teasley:Go and consume the content. Take that lower is right. Go and consume the content. Take that lower. Before you jump all in and do the, you know, investing yourself over $2,500, $3,000, $4,000, whatever. How many dollars. Consume the base level content, right. Get in at that. You know, between $100 to $500 mark. Invest in yourself and go see if this is worth it. Go see if this is teaching in a way that you can resonate with. So that's how I, that's how I approach different things that I'm trying to learn about.
C. Derick Varn:Okay, I guess this does bring me to. Maybe we've talked about the big three gaps that we see in most of these communities and I would say at this point these gaps are pretty much you can assume them for everyone who makes less than, say, $90,000 a year in the United States. But what are some of the legal and criminal justice misunderstandings that contribute to this inability to acquire and accumulate wealth?
Courtney Teasley:Oh, wow. So acquiring, all right and I'm just making a note here so I don't lose my thought process. Ok, and so with the criminal justice system, the biggest thing here is what you have to understand is, once you've been pushed into a system such as the criminal justice system, that is so. It's built on nothing but probability, right, it's built on probable cause. Every single thing leading you into this criminal justice system is probable cause. So you probably did something, all right. Well, when you are already making under $90,000, right, and usually even more so under that, when you look at what you're probably bringing home, and then you know, equate a couple of kids and the cost to live in a popping city like Nashville, right, and so when you start accounting for all of that, any type of running with the criminal justice system is going to cost you greatly, because what happens is you need a lawyer. Okay, so I want to hire a lawyer. Now I make too much money to qualify for a public defender, right, I'm right there in that gap where I don't make enough, you know. But so I have to hire a lawyer. That's thousands of thousands of dollars here.
Courtney Teasley:Then I'm caught up in this system for quite some time, and oftentimes because I'm caught up in it for so long. I don't know the law, I don't know what my rights are, I don't know. I don't know how to properly fight. How can I properly fight this case right outside of what my lawyer is telling me? And then how do I account for when my lawyer is complicit, right, or just incompetent, right? How do I account for these things? So all of that leads to lots of pleas. Ninety seven percent of people take pleas in the criminal justice system, and once you are labeled with any kind of criminal record, it does make it hard to make money, right, you are branded from the beginning or you know where, where are. Where are you, derrick?
C. Derick Varn:I'm in utah, but I'm originally from georgia, so awesome.
Courtney Teasley:Okay, so you know, but over there are, is we? Is marijuana legal there? I say all that to just say that, like you know, we're people are still being punished for having marijuana. Right, when people over in Denver I just left a conference, I was hosting a conference over there and people are enjoying life, you know, there's no issue.
Courtney Teasley:So when you can easily be pushed into the criminal justice system, when you know marginalized people are taking the brunt of it due to being over police, all the different things that come along with living in marginalized communities, the having any encounter is going to cripple you. Right, having any encounter with the criminal justice system can cripple you and so, as far and once you've been branded by the criminal justice system, it impacts your ability to make money. So that is why I advocate on behalf of having your own business Right, because that doesn't do you cripple yourself. Right, you had a run in. You did say, for instance, whatever you had something that could be considered marijuana Right, and then you have someone who you got a police officer who's tripping. They want to use that for probable cause just to search your car, and so now they're wasting your time and now they've charged you with unlawful possession of whatever, something that could perfectly be legal here, like hemp, right, because it looks and smells the same.
Courtney Teasley:And so now, after all of that has happened, what do I do now? Right, I'm in the criminal justice system, I'm having to deal with all these different things. I don't want to keep going to court. I got to pay for a $3,000, $4,000 lawyer. I got to go to court for two to three years. I'm just going to take this plea, right, it's easier. I'm going to get it done with. Eventually I'll do probation, eventually it'll come on my record. You're hoping, right? And so all of those different things lead to now I'm looking for a job. Right, because either I'm trying to pay my lawyer, I'm trying to pay some court costs, I'm trying to provide, whatever I'm trying to pay, something that has is related to the criminal justice system, and so that's the issue. So that, to me, is how you can see the criminal justice system affecting someone once they've had contact with it, how it affects them from making money.
C. Derick Varn:Hmm, yeah, there's something that you brought up that I think a lot of people, I mean even fairly educated people, have a blind spot about, and that is how little you actually have to make to get a public defender. You know somewhat of my income, I would. You know I'm not poor at all, but I would have a hard time, um, sustaining a lawyer over a long period of time, one or two, uh instances, not a big deal. I mean. It would be hard but I could do it. But you start talking about, like, a prolonged trial and I'm going to declare bankruptcy. Um, and when you factor that in with the fact that what you know, sometimes I, there's a couple of States, particularly in the South, where both of us are from, where you know, getting a public defender you need less than the poverty line, and the poverty line in America is ridiculously low compared to the cost of living. It's, it's it's not been adjusted and, uh, for inflation very much at all is it like 30 000 right?
C. Derick Varn:yeah, roughly, and it's like, and it was like 20 000 in the 90s when I was a kid, and it's just like when you think about that and you're like, I don't know, I could buy a week's groceries for 50 bucks. I mean, it was hard, but you could do it in 1999 and I can't buy two meals for 50 bucks, hello, uh, for for more than two people. Uh, today, and I, I find that, you know, I find that that disparity um pretty hard to deal with and I think when we're talking about impoverished people, it's even worse because, um, the kinds of things that they have to buy um are traditionally more inflected by inflation and aren't counted into the official inflation count. So, like food, housing, um, uh, you know we can talk about like, oh, you know there's only been three percent inflation until the 2020s and that's when things got bad.
C. Derick Varn:But you know I'd be like, yeah, but housing inflation has been bad for come on now like two, three decades, like yes, um, uh, and particularly for uh, black and poor communities after 2007, where a lot of those predatory loans went away and they were disproportionately targeted towards Black and Latin people anyway.
Courtney Teasley:Yes.
C. Derick Varn:A lot of that wealth has gone. It's one of the things that I think a lot about, like the wealth disparity in America. For Americans making under $150,000 is pretty significant, but if you look at it, it's about $80,000 of wealth disparity and if you actually start plugging in, you're like, well, why is that? It's almost all in discriminatory homeownership things and the results of the Great Recession. You can explain 90% of it that way, and so when you go to these communities who, if they had an access to wealth at all, it was in relatively cheap home ownership.
Courtney Teasley:Yes.
C. Derick Varn:That's not available for most people now, not just most marginalized people. That's not available for most people at all. Yes, that's not available for most people now, not just most marginalized people. That's not available for most people at all Under 50, unless they inherit their baby boomer parents' wealth and that's hoping that their baby boomer parents don't get lost in a reverse mortgage or something like that. How do you help people figure out other ways to build wealth, since the only process most of these people have ever thought about as a means to do that is homeownership, and that really is going to be really hard for most Americans right now?
Courtney Teasley:Yes, that's huge. Okay, I love it. So I think some of the ones that we've already hit Right. So we know the stock market, the that, and that is why it's so homeownership is historically the one where you'll see a lot of people in black communities, you know. Utilize that, and you know I have friends that coach around, that you know and that I know that it's still there's still money there.
Courtney Teasley:But I think that we have to diversify the portfolio right. Like we have to have multiple eggs in this basket Just being Gen X millennials where we are right now. We have to do that. So I think that we have to add the business aspect right. We have to monetize your expertise right. Find something that you actually love. Monetize your expertise in a way that feels sustainable, that's natural, that's in, or twined with your strengths and not your weaknesses, just so you can make money. Right, we want to find something that you can sustain, that can actually bring in additional income, and I'm talking about at least I promise the majority of Americans know something, have lived through something, have done something that they can. They can utilize to bring in at least $50,000 additional Right, if they want to, and so 11 percent of all women owned businesses make under $50,000. Right Between, they make right there, between a twenty five $50,000 mark. So it is very possible, and so I think that, that being one route, and then the next route, let's learn about investing. It's time, right, it just is time. We're not taught it. It is a scary place, but it's time. It's a lot of quality companies and people that are teaching this so much so I know that Black Women Invest is a huge one, right, they had a huge conference. They do a lot of different meetings around the world where people are able to come in a nonjudgmental environment and learn about these types of things.
Courtney Teasley:We also have, like, who I was telling you about, terri Ijeoma. Right, she is another one who has, and I forget the actual name ofoma. Right, she is another one who has, and I forget the actual name of her brand. But you have these people who are teaching you how to make income Danielle Broadway, is that her name? Yes, so, anywho, I'll link these people, but they're great people. Who? Danielle? It's not Danielle Leslie, I'm losing her name. Dominique Broadway, that's her name.
Courtney Teasley:All these people are teaching you how to make money, right, and so they're teaching you how to make money with your investments Ramit Sethi same one I was telling you I'll teach you how to be rich. They're teaching you how to start building money. So you want to have your IRA, you want to have your 401k, you want to utilize that and make money, but you want to also learn how to make money in the stock market, passively, right. Do you want to learn about trading? Do you want to learn about options? Whatever it is, it's time to diversify the way that you are bringing money in the door. And so I think this all goes back to the same thing. You were saying right, yes, homeownership, that's a good one. Yes, you got your job. Okay, that's fine. Right, let's add some other things. Let's add investing, let's add a uh, creating a product or a resource that that can also bring you in money.
C. Derick Varn:I think that's what it's going to take yeah, I mean, one of the reasons I'm talking about this, I, I, I have, I'm a capitalism skeptic but, um, I also, to survive as teacher, have to run a side gig, and I can either run a side gig for someone else or I can run a side gig providing an educational resource for my community, for myself, and that's a reality. My wife and I would have a hard time affording to live here off of just our straight salaries and we are not. And I mean, I live in salt lake city but we are not impoverished at all. Yeah, like and that's what I want to like, get people to understand like, when people talk about teachers don't make a lot of money, I'm like, yeah, relative to other people who have, uh, advanced degrees, yes, but like, in the grand scheme of things, actually we do make a decent living. That's not the problem, right? The problem is, like, if we just follow through and just on that and off of promised state benefits and stuff like that and I've taught for 20 years my state benefits have dramatically declined, wow, um, uh in in 20 years.
C. Derick Varn:Like, wow, the uh, the pension stuff in in utah is okay, but like, insurance availability and cost has gotten worse and worse and worse for us over the past 20 years. Um, uh, the secondary knock-on effects that we're supposed to get, you know, have gotten worse and a lot of people think, oh well, the reason why you become a teacher is because you get all these good benefits and it's a stable job After 2009,. That's also not true. So we've gone through, even though that we're like 20 to 30% under capacity, like we need, and that's for declining population. If we were ever to have a population boom again, we'd be in real trouble. Even despite that, we still go through regular reductions in forces and having to move around in ways that just for most of the 20th century, particularly after World War II, was not the case for this profession.
C. Derick Varn:Now, if you look at the long history of teaching, it very much is. This is actually kind of a reversion to a historical norm. But so I started the podcast. I keep it cheap, I keep a lot of the stuff for free, but I make an okay amount of money and I do invest some of that money, um, uh, to be able to, you know, eventually retire. And it's hard to get leftist, in particular to get over, you know, dealing with the market, um uh weirdly, as a critical capitalism, I actually kind of know how it works.
C. Derick Varn:So like like yeah it gives me an advantage for for figuring out investments figuring out how to diversify my portfolio, having a portfolio in the first place, right and um.
C. Derick Varn:But it also has opened me up to like just noticing when I would look to this and like what kind of if I was going to offer financial literacy to a bunch of uh, um-generation college grads or union members who need to diversify and say like, yeah, you know, we need to fight your bosses for all this pay. I still completely support you in that. I'm not telling you not to do that. But we also have to deal with the reality that you're going to need other forms of income. You all know it. How do you handle that? And you know I have been thinking it. Um, how do you handle that? And you know I have been thinking like, how do you get people to start studying relatively safe? Now what I tell people? There's no such thing as a totally safe investment that's going to pay out very much. I, I will admit that, so you do.
C. Derick Varn:You know I always tell people start small, very small, and and build other income things so you you can invest the additional income. If you have a job and you survive off that job, use your other income streams to start building up investments, because you might lose them. I mean, that's a reality. How do you coach people on that? Because one of the things that I always tell people myself is hold on to your investments unless they're like and like yes, there's times to buy, but like do not automatically respond to a market panic because you'll lose money. Like how? But it's hard to train people to do that because they'll read the news and they'll hear like we're going into a bear market or people are responding to the tariffs. That's the most common one yes or or whatever.
C. Derick Varn:And I'm just like sit on your investments because it probably still is going to increase over time. How do you get people to build up that mentality?
Courtney Teasley:because it is a mentality oh, it's a mindset, it's so, it's so like I love that you named it. I actually um had the pleasure of when I did my launch for my uh YouTube, the black law girl rant, and it's at black law girl on YouTube, I had a um world trader. He had just uh, they had placed in the top world trading. He is a nashville native, his name is tay sweat, and he actually came and I interviewed him. So I had two panels. I had a criminal shit panel, so criminal policy, so I have a black law girl rant. We talk money, politics and criminal shit. Money is financial literacy, politics, civics and criminal shit and criminal justice literacy. So we use African-American English and so I had a judge that I helped unseat. Well, I had the judge that I got into a seat in Nashville and then I had a councilwoman that I also was on a campaign she's also my mentor for that civics and the criminal justice portion. And then we had Tay Sweat for the financial literacy and we had a great turnout and he really talked about how the discipline needed around this right and that mindset he was talking about. He compared it and I thought it was so it was really on point for the audience. So he compared it to me and cheating right, he was like. He always tells a man like if you can't, you know, discipline yourself. You run around you chasing this tail all over the place, you trying to do this. You know what I mean. You're not going to be good in the stock market. You're not because you don't. You know as soon as something happens, you just you don't know any discipline. You don't have any kind of discipline about yourself. He compared it to weight loss. Right, he compared it to any type of discipline. You're learning, Right, If what's needed in when you're learning how to invest, because the stock market is so volatile, it goes up, it goes down. For so long it was up and was doing great and then you know, but to not move it. So I think, a combination of things. You need people who are. You need to be in community, Right. I think there was a US Surgeon General report talking about a loneliness loneliness epidemic and how a lot of the US population is experiencing it. Right, and so community is huge right now. It's also very profitable, Right. So having a community and that you feel comfortable in, where you can go and learn TasteWet has his own community. Again, I'm named multiple people, but going into these communities and they have resources right that deal with mindset.
Courtney Teasley:So if I was coaching someone around this, my thing is always we need to know what your ultimate vision is Right. Like, what do you ultimately want to do? Let's look at the numbers. Like you, what's your current reality? We know what you're bringing in and what you're living right now. But like if there were no hope no, no, no, no, no restrictions on you. If you could have it your way, what would you be making? How would you be living? And then let's unlock that first, Right. And then we unlock that. Then it's OK. Now let's think about how do we get there? Right, what are we going to do? How are we going to get there? We may map out, you know, if they do want to start a business, we'll map out that process. You want to do investments? You want to start investing in the stock market? Well then I would probably depending on if you were a woman of color, I'd probably put you with Black Women Invest first, because they have a very bare minimum accelerator.
Courtney Teasley:That we studied the psychology of money Good book to read, right. Listen to the psychology of money and it's going to help you realize why you feel this way, why do you want to move, that you know, and why it's not smart to right, and so you. The point I think the over harshing point I'm making here is you got to want to do this. This is work, right? It's just like when we were in school and we were being forced to learn stuff that maybe we didn't care about, right, Except now we have to learn these things. We have no choice. It's for our children's children. It's for us to be able to live better lives, right. It's for us to not just be working until we die.
Courtney Teasley:And so I don't conform to any of the titles, right? I don't feel like I'm a capitalist. I guess maybe I fall into this social entrepreneur type thing, but I feel like we know the world we live in, we know what this is right. I mean, we want to eat. I love to eat, I'm a foodie, I want to eat. Well, right, I want to be comfortable. I mean you have all of these things. You want your children to go to these schools.
Courtney Teasley:So, not that we agree with how it is, but this is what it is, and so we have to live, and so we must adapt right, and we must create it in a way that feels authentic to ourselves, right, Authentic to what our ultimate vision is. So if our ultimate vision is for you to live well and you're not concerned with anybody else, well then that's on you. You know, let's create that pathway. But there are an abundance of people who are like you know what I care about this, I want to do this and I want, but, but I first need to get myself together, and I think that is important. So if we can get you out of a struggle right, you're making good money, right, You're living your life Then you have way more energy and power to create right, Innovate different things that are going to create a lot of impact. So I think that and hopefully I answered your question in there, I think I did earlier on I think that and hopefully I answered your question in there.
C. Derick Varn:I think I did earlier on. That actually does bring up an interesting thing. It is commonly said that there's no, you know, ethical consumption under capitalism, blah, blah. You hear this all the time and I to some degree sort of believe that. But I will say, like, how do you invest with any kind of like moral valence to it, like because there are going to be people who don't want to say I don't know, fund arms dealings in the Middle East or super gentrify a community or something like that? Is there a way to take that into consideration with investing? I find it particularly hard to do, but how do you deal with people in your communities who want to consider that?
Courtney Teasley:How to deal with who and what to invest in.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, and for ethical reasons, right For ethical reasons.
Courtney Teasley:So my thought, so this is okay. Can I be real with you, like, listen, be ethical, then you know, just that's it. Be ethical, like, and it goes back to your values, right, what is your mission, vision and values Like? What do you care about? Like, do you care about you know what I mean your children having a place to live in the future? Do you care about the clean air? Do you care about? You know, like, what do you care about? And then what do you care? And then it's different if we're just talking about just investments, versus you have a business. What do your clients care about? I mean, what care about as well. What are the people you serve care about? Do you even look at them as people you're serving? Which?
Courtney Teasley:For in the lawyer world, the criminal defense industry, so many lawyers don't even look at their clients as their ideal client. They don't treat them that way. It's not ethical at all. But let me get back on track, because I will go down a rabbit hole, that one. But just be ethical, that's it Same thing.
Courtney Teasley:When people are looking and they're like well, how could you? Well, you want to help people. Why don't you go work for the public defender's office. What? Because that doesn't make no sense.
Courtney Teasley:There is an abundance of people who don't even get public defenders. There are people and if you're actually from the damn community disproportionately affected, marginalized minority community, you don't want the free option. All we've ever had is people stuffing the free option down our fucking faces and it's not good for us. Nobody's helping. You're giving us whatever you want us to have. You act like we don't know anything. You know what I mean. You don't consult with us, you don't help. Let us aid in our defense. You barely work the case. So all of those things are going on is a huge mistrust. So people don't want just that free option, right? That's the misconception here, that if I'm helping these people who are marginalized, they only need free stuff. But the problem is they want quality. They just want to be able to afford it. Right, they want to be able to have it in a way that they can afford it. There's a way I can pay on it. And me, when I was a lawyer, I recognized that early on I don't need to go work for the public defender's office. I charge my value. And then when there are people who come to me and they have issues and they can't pay what my price is. Well, guess what I've charged my value enough that I have the ability to offer you a sliding scale. I have the ability to organize and get other people to assist with me on your case.
Courtney Teasley:So these are the things that we can do when we own the business, when we own the practice, when we make the decisions. We create what our brand does, we create what the vision is, we create our mission, we create how that lives in the world. So I think that we have to start stepping into our CEO energy, right In everything we do, our big CEO energy, and recognize that we have the power to shift systems if we decide to do so. Right, I look at Tom's, and we know that Tom's is like a great. Tom's is like, okay, cool, if for every shoe you buy, we're going to donate a shoe. That's the model. Look at Ben and Jerry's. Ben and Jerry's literally speaks through their missions. Right, they're like, ok, we get, you know. Hey, we care about environmental protection, we care about any mass incarceration. Oh yeah, we got some really good ice cream over here too, you know.
C. Derick Varn:and so that is the power that we have if we choose to step into it. There's one thing that I hear, undergirding a lot of what you're saying, that I think we do have to focus on and make a little bit more explicit from everything from trying to get your life in order to investments and not wasting a bunch of money by freaking out all the time to, uh, dealing with financial education, uh, and being able to learn what you need to learn to both you know, try to empower yourself in these systems and make ethical decisions with them, our political decisions with Um, but that is discipline. And I feel and I I know there's a lot of conservatives who use this to brow bit people, and I, I this is not what I mean. I don't think this is necessarily people's inherent fault, but I feel like we live in a society that, particularly for poor people and other marginalized people, we do not encourage them to have discipline. How do you, do you agree with that and how do we? How do we address that?
Courtney Teasley:Wow. So that's huge right Not encouraging, uh, marginalized people to have discipline, and I guess um how that can show up how that can show up.
Courtney Teasley:You know, derek, for me, I think that people could have discipline, but I think that when they're marginalized, we have to go into the systemic issues. What is the reality of their lives? Let's just be a buck, and I'm, you know, I'm from the damn community, unapologetically, so not all you know. I know it on a real level. You live in a community where you're overworked. You have to work, work, work. Everything around you is maybe a fast food restaurant, very low paying jobs, very low paying places. You see a lot of the parents who are working day in. They're working day out. They don't have childcare. They're doing the best they can. People are coming together to help raise people. You have them, then again, still trying to execute on some sort of mission our parents had for us to basically go to school, go to, you know, get in all this debt so that way we could get a better paying job that eventually never comes. So all of these things, we have to recognize the systemic portion around it. It's a rat race in the damn community, right, it is a rat race, and every single day you're just trying to survive and you don't have much time for a lot of things such as eating healthy, a lot of poor nutrition because there's so many food deserts. Remember, I was just telling you about a place that I lived in. My parents, uh, my grandparents uh, raised me because both of my parents were a product of the crack epidemic and so on the where I grew up, um, I remember nothing but fast food restaurants, and so I was doing an interview of a girl from memphis who is a holistic killer and she was just talking about how it's even stacked. You got a food place, you got a CVS to go get your pharmacy stuff and you got a dialysis center all of these different things. So this is what we talk about when we're talking about food. So I'm saying these things that I want to take you to what it looks like to be in this community and all you're doing is you're not working, usually just 40 hours a week. You're working another job as well to make ends meet right, and then so, with all of that going on and doing the best you can and trying to raise your kids and give them opportunities that you never had, trying to move around and find different things for them, I think that discipline, that they have discipline. They have discipline to keep going to work, right. They have discipline to keep trying to protect their children. They have discipline for the basic necessities right, that's what they have discipline for the basic necessities.
Courtney Teasley:However, when coming over here and you're adding something additional on something that probably should have been taught to them while they were in school how to be financially literate, where can they find the time to do that? They, you know, maybe let their dreams go forward Like oh, I didn't go to law, I didn't go to a school so I could raise you and you could have this opportunity. So they never, ever, made time for themselves to do anything, so focused on raising someone else I know that was my grandma, my grandmother did, you know? Not, she doesn't regret it. They don't regret it because you know they're basically giving their lives and sacrifice to the next generation, almost Right, and just getting you all to the point where you can go, get this information and bring it back, right, and so that's what I feel.
Courtney Teasley:I don't feel that the issue is. I think that if you unburden people, I think if people are being paid more money so they don't have to work as many hours, I think if they don't have to worry about the safety of their children. You know, all of those things are met. I think that then, yes, then people can easily find the discipline to go to a financial, to learn financial literacy, to learn how to better themselves, to learn other options for themselves outside of the societal expectations that we all have come to know right. So that that, and I think hopefully that answers the question it does.
C. Derick Varn:I mean, I think about this a lot. I uh, I remember reading, uh, hillbilly elegy, which is a very reactionary book, just want to like it's extremely reactionary, but but I remember agreeing with its objective descriptions of poor, white working class life, but also going like, yeah, but we need to like it's not just character. That's why these people don't have self-discipline, you know. So when I when I raised that question, I want to be very clear because I do think it's a real problem. I actually don't think a lot of people who lack it that is entirely their fault. There are some superhuman people who overcome it, for sure, and I say superhuman because it's not much harder for them to do. But I'm with you, like when people, you know people smoke and drink less when they move up into the middle class because they have less stressors and that also frees up more money, and a lot of people will go oh, you know, they're smoking, drinking.
Courtney Teasley:That's why they're poor and I'm like, no, they're smoking and drinking because they're poor.
C. Derick Varn:I talk about this with, like, gen Z's like bizarre investment when they were like buying luxury items. I'm like, well, they don't believe they have a way to invest, they don't believe they ever own a house. I mean, hell, you're trying to convince them to finance a pizza. Why would they make long-term planning financial decisions? Because you have created a world and a vision where there doesn't seem to be a way. Make long-term planning financial decisions. Because you have created a world and a vision where there doesn't seem to be a way that they can get ahead in that. And there are ways, I mean, for individuals to get ahead.
C. Derick Varn:It is, but most of these people don't know them and when they go on TikTok, they'll be given. I don't want to sound like I'm coming down on tiktok, they'll be given. I mean I don't want to sound like I'm coming down on social media. There actually is good information out there, but unfortunately you have to know good information to find good information, because otherwise you're just going to get spiraled out into various themes that the algorithm is going to throw at you because they're paying the algorithm to throw them out there. I do think that's a real problem, particularly with young and marginalized people and poor people in general. I want to remove the stigma. When someone says, well, you don't have self-discipline, I think we need to say, yeah, that's true, you don't. Let's not make excuses for that in the sense of like saying that you know sometimes, sometimes leftists and liberals will be like, well, they, they can't do any better.
Courtney Teasley:And.
C. Derick Varn:I'm like that doesn't help anyone, but let's also not blame you, because there's there's a thousand reasons that are actually, if we put ourselves in this, in this like, like mindset, why this was a logical bad choice. It's a logically maladaptive choice. Um, and so this is something I'm thinking about, like, like, uh, trying to convince people to invest because investments are, and I will say, the barriers to investment are way lower than they used to be.
Courtney Teasley:Yes, yes, they are.
C. Derick Varn:You know, like when I, when I started, when I worked in finance briefly 20 years ago, even 20 years ago it was kind of hard. You'd have to figure out a brokerage. You need a financial advisor. The brokerages were a little bit more closed off than they are now. I mean now, like almost anybody can open up aab account if they want to and just invest in index funds and start building some, and they can do it with as little as $200.
Courtney Teasley:Yep.
C. Derick Varn:So they do need to look at the fees and pay attention to that stuff, but it is a lot easier to do. You're no longer telling people well, you're gonna need three grand to pony up to even get into this market. That's not the case anymore yeah um, uh, how do you?
C. Derick Varn:okay, how do you like? What are you showing people to help them get into the, let's just say, the less deep end of the pool, so that they can start to build this wealth and take some of these risks without it being socially devastating? Because we do know that a lot of marginalized people are not going to be like Donald Trump. When he gets to declare six bankruptcies, they might get one. So you know how do we help them with that.
Courtney Teasley:Yeah, I love the question. By the way, when you were talking about how people go on TikTok and find information you're so true about, you got to know good info, to find good info, right, actually have a uh course. Uh, we had a course to be coming off soon on the uh tiktok that we did called criminal justice literacy 101. We did that when it was uh, I remember you, tiktok was going viral, was a human talk craze, and so we jumped on that and, uh, I would definitely recommend anybody want to learn about legal literacy to pop over there and kind of check that out. But I I think that, how I I'm, that's what I specialize in, right, like I literally specialize in helping people take those first steps, right, baby steps. What does that look like and how we do that? We've done it through the Black Law Girl Rant. So we do that through our.
Courtney Teasley:When we have our events, usually we're doing in-person events and we're actually having these real unfiltered conversations around things we have not known and things that we no longer need to be ashamed about, right, because we weren't taught these things and so, like I do, and again, the stigma around, like you said, not this or not having discipline, self-discipline in certain areas, right, certain areas where they're uneducated, where we are all uneducated and I, when I was talking about my story, you know you would look and be like, oh well, you're not disciplined. You're not disciplined in this area, you don't know how to do, you're not disciplined here, and it's like, well, I don't know anything about this area. And at this moment, I'm working like over way, over 40 hours a week in my own law practice. I'm trying to figure out how to own a fucking law practice. First of all, I'm trying to keep trying to keep my clients happy, right, and do all this. I don't have anyone helping me on this, and so, in my mind, the most important thing is not like to take the time to learn this area, because I know it's going to take me time, which is why I gave myself a year to go learn it right, when I had unburdened myself with practicing so heavily. However, I didn't feel like I had that kind of timeframe to adequately learn it from and find quality sources to learn it from, and so I think many people may fall there in that area, but I think the way to get into the less deep end of the pool, to get into that shallow area and start moving around is through different initiatives, like we have the Black Longer Rant.
Courtney Teasley:We do an event called Profitable Possibilities Virtual Retreat and basically what we do is we kind of again, business coaching is something somewhat of a phenomenon to certain industries and certain people who have never utilized them. So we break the barrier down and we come in and we just do the work right throughout a week, learning how to take our expertise, learning how to build a business, learning what we really want in life, allowing ourselves to dream unapologetically right, even if it's something that we don't know how we're going to attain at this moment, and so we do that in a very easy, digestible way, and so I recommend that for your investing. But you find those communities, like I had at the Profitable Possibilities virtual retreat, I had Shello Collier, who is the one who created Black Women Invest and she has a very easy, bite-sized course right, and so she came and she talked about the bite-sized ways, those little ways that you start, the ways that you get into right this process, the ways that you get into helping learning how to invest, and then you can learn about all types of things. You want to learn about hotel investing. You want to learn about something else? You can do just that. You have that opportunity. So that is my thought process of how people break into this, especially when you can do so much. Now, like you said, there are no barriers to entry, right. You can get in at any time. You can open up your phone, pop up Robinhood account and you can start investing.
Courtney Teasley:A lot of people don't want to do that because they want to make sure they're making an informed decision, which is smart. So go find community right, reach out. If you know somebody who's investing and you want to do it too, reach out to them. Who are they learning from? How did they learn right? Are they willing to sit down with you and kind of walk you through what those first steps are? Make that introduction to the community they're in. Those are the types of things we have to do as we are moving more into, you know, learning more about financial literacy and dismantling that sort of stigma around. I don't know it right, we don't know it, and so, because we don't know it, we feel very vulnerable. We feel we, you know we should know this. We feel wrong, we feel like we did something wrong, even though it's not our fault, right? We're not taught that. Our families were not taught that they did not have that information to pass down. So let's unburden ourselves from that and actually actively go seek the information.
C. Derick Varn:Well, we've been going for about an hour and I've really I think it's helped for this conversation. Where can people find your work and, more importantly, your resources if they're interested in this financial education, particularly for people who may be skeptical of capitalism or may come from marginalized communities that might want to learn this stuff? Where would they do so?
Courtney Teasley:Yeah, Thank you so much for asking, and so, again, you all can follow us on YouTube at Black Law Girl. It is the Black Law Girl rant. That's where we discuss financial literacy, criminal justice literacy and civics. You can also find me on LinkedIn, right, so hit me up on LinkedIn, courtney Teasley, and I'm also on Instagram as well, at the Courtney Teasley, so you have multiple places you can find me.
Courtney Teasley:The work that we're doing, uh, you, uh, it is with mfn, wwwemeffencom, and so in that or on our socials, you'll get to our link tree and you'll see an abundance of things that we do, right, and one of the ones, if you'd like us to come out, you want, uh, you, I often host uh conferences or I'll do. I work for a company, a multimillion dollar company, coaching company, called Hello7, where we help a lot of women founders marginalized founders scale businesses from zero to seven plus figures, and so you'll be able to interact with me either on LinkedIn or again in my inbox. Shoot me a message on Instagram or here on YouTube and let's talk, right, let's talk about ways to bring this type of workshop to your schools. Let's talk about ways to talk about this more in our communities, our churches, right, and all the places where we actually are making change. Right. Let's add financial literacy to the agenda, because that amplifies our missions. Right. That amplifies all of the vision and all of the impact we want to have here in the world.
C. Derick Varn:All right, and I will put any necessary links down in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time and I hope people got something out of this. It's a little different from a normal programming, but I think it's important that people know how to become financially semi-independent. So thank you for coming on.
Courtney Teasley:Thank you for having me.
