If someone asked you what it means to be wealthy, what would you say? Well, the conventional answer is a person whom has a large amount of money, property or valuable possessions. And while there’s validity in that definition, at its core, wealth can be so much more when one truly knows self. My journey to self-discovery started from a very young age. You know, as a child I didn’t know I was poor until other kids told me. Yep, my father was a carpenter and my mom worked at a knitting mill. She made t-shirts. And I’m not saying this was problematic, but they were doing the best they could with paradigms that were given to them. But once I realized we were poor, I was determined to break that cycle. You see, I was a smart kid growing up, you know, the honor society type kid. Conversely, I got pregnant at the very young age of 13. My mother said I only had book smarts. I needed to learn a little bit of those street smarts, I guess. To be candid, I never thought it would happen to me, but it did. And despite my situation, I knew it wasn’t going to define me because my pregnancy was only a part of my journey. When I graduated high school, life happened again. And I was six months pregnant with my second child. And I did what I thought was the right thing at the time. I married a man who I knew wasn’t the man I should be marrying. Not to mention, I had a scholarship to Clemson University, which was great, but I couldn’t use it because of my pregnancy. So instead of going to a major university, I went to a community college. Keep in mind, I’m 20 years old with two young children and it didn’t help that I had a philandering husband which inevitably destroyed our marriage. As you can imagine, the complexity of life was knocking at my door. And what do you do when you’re 20 and in a crisis? Well, you join the army. And that’s what I did. I left my children with my mother and I signed the dotted line. Unfortunately, that only lasted a year because they gave me an ultimatum. Give up full custody of my children and not only was it the right choice, but that decision changed the trajectory of my life for the better. I moved to New York City where my grandmother lived, which led me to be an administrative assistant working on Wall Street. That job gave me clarity on what I wanted to do with my life. With that being said, I moved to California and I continued my education. Oh yeah, I got married again for the second time. And before you know it, I had my third child at 27 and my fourth child at 30. So here I was, four daughters, two husbands, and you know what? I still walked that stage with multiple degrees. I got a job working for a CPA firm in Temecula. I worked for two years long enough to get my CPA license and then I started working for myself from home until I bought my own CPA practice. Now, you may be wondering, how was I able to afford this? Well, it came from my retirement. Those two years that I worked at that CPA firm, I was putting the maximum amount into my retirement account. So when I left, I rolled it over. I bought stock for around $28 a share, and eight months later, when I was ready to buy my firm, that same stock was selling for around $65 a share. So obviously, I got the money I needed to buy my first CPA firm. Unfortunately, with all this going on, my second marriage was falling apart. And in the end, it just didn’t work out. In retrospect, I had to step back, look within, and evaluate my life. And as an African-American woman who had to fight from the time I was 13, I don’t have many regrets. I finally found the man of my dreams, and we’re going on 20 years of marriage. I run multiple businesses that can help other people elevate their lives. However, in my 25 years of business, I’ve been dealing with trusts, estates, and inheritances, and I realized that nobody in my family has gotten a significant inheritance from a parent, a grandparent or anybody. And most of the people that I know of African descent that live in this country don’t get inheritances or wouldn’t even know where to start. And that’s what I want to change. I want to teach not just my children, but other parents on how to gain wealth, to accumulate wealth, and how to keep it, so they can share with the next generation and multiple generations to come. That’s my mission. That’s what I want to give to the world. You see, sometimes in life, people don’t get what they want, not because they’re incompetent or don’t possess acumen, but sometimes it’s just that they’re dealing with unconscious incompetence, meaning that they don’t know that they don’t know. And they think they know. And in over 25 years of this industry, I can confidently deduce that people of African descent are lacking the information necessary to create generational wealth. So if you ask me what wealth is, I would say that there is a spiritual side to wealth, which is grounded in love, family, friendship and self-awareness. And because we live in a world where money is necessary to survive, wealth is also the accumulation of knowledge, but more importantly the application of that knowledge with the premise of financial freedom. My name is Ursula Garrett, and I’m celebrating 25 years in the business as a CPA, but most importantly breaking generational curses free in one mind at a time. Let’s change the world together. Let’s change the world together. together.