‘Black wealth matters’: How an Ivy League grad is helping his community build wealth through education

The racial wealth gap is just one example of the many inequalities continuing to burden Black Americans. As of 2022, white households had average net worths nearly $1 million higher than Black households, according to the St. Louis Fed.

It’s this disparity that inspired Shareef McDonald, better known as Ross Mac, to become a financial educator. Not only has systemic oppression made it harder for Black Americans to build wealth, but there’s a huge education gap that prevents many from finding financial success, he says. 

To bridge that gap, the 33-year-old created the Maconomics digital series where he combines his Wall Street experience and Chicago street smarts to create informative financial content aimed specifically at the Black community.

It started when Mac was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania and realized this Ivy League education was an opportunity that many from his community could never imagine. He refused to take that for granted.

Here’s how he’s using what he’s learned to empower and uplift those without the same opportunities he had.

Learning the tricks of the trade

Mac’s wake-up call to start investing came early in his undergraduate career. 

“I was in an econ 101 class sitting next to a kid who was day-trading in the middle of class,” Mac tells CNBC Make It. “That was the one thing that opened my eyes and my curiosity and made me say, ‘OK, I want to start investing.’”

As part of its National Financial Literacy Month efforts, CNBC will be featuring stories throughout the month dedicated to helping people manage, grow and protect their money so they can truly live ambitiously.

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• These steps can help close the racial retirement gap. ’It’s not what you make, it’s what you keep’

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From there, Mac opened a brokerage account, which at the time wasn’t as straightforward and low-cost as getting started investing is now, he says. But he was determined to get on the same level as his peers.

His interest in investing and wealth management eventually led him to a career on Wall Street. Mac spent his summers during college interning at Morgan Stanley and Barclays. After graduation, he worked for Morgan Stanley full-time as a sales analyst. 

“I truly realized I’ve been lucky because I was exposed to so many different things,” Mac says. “Not only did I have a good job, but the type of conversations that I was around — being able to walk down the aisle and see a senior member on my team checking his 401(k) and seeing two or three million dollars — it’s like, ‘Oh, I need to start thinking about retirement now.’”

In 2015, Mac returned to his hometown of Chicago after three years on Wall Street armed with the experience and motivation to bring financial literacy education to his community.

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