💸 Welcome to 2025 💸

✨ January Themes ✨

Our money themes help ground us each month and remind us where to focus on our intentions throughout the year.

🔍 Clarity

Get clear on what you want to accomplish this year and how you want the year to feel for you.

🧘🏾‍♀️Refresh and Reset

Rest! Everything doesn’t have to be accomplished all at once. Give yourself a moment to rest, reset, and refresh.

✅ Vision and Goaling

Allow yourself to daydream, then start drafting out what would be needed to make those dreams a reality. Remember, an elephant is eaten one bite at a time.

🔍 In this Issue

• Why It's So Hard to Plan for Retirement

• Welcome to 2025

• My Final Two Cents

• Introducing Something New

Need to catch up? Read our latest issues here.

This Week’s Money News

👛 Wallet Watch

• 🟤 I finished my December reflections. You can see them here. Have you finished your reflections yet? If not, you still have time to reflect and reset during this quarter.

• 🟤 Tiffany, our favorite Budgetnista, discusses why it’s so hard to plan for retirement. Watch the Money Glow Up episode here. This video talks about income percentiles. If you are wondering about yours, the Motley Fool has listed income percentile stats here.

• 🟤 There’s no such thing as generational wealth without proper estate planning. Here’s why estate planning is so important and how to start having those critical conversations with family.

Fiscal Focus

💸 Welcome to 2025! 🎉

We hope you had a restful, fulfilling, and joyous holiday season. We’re happy to be entering this year with you.

Ed. Opal launched last June, and since then, we’ve been on a mission to create a space for Black women to learn and discuss money in ways we don’t often get to. We built Ed. Opal with the mission to develop the products, tools, and resources to support high-earning Black women in our journies toward financial clarity.

We’ve been working behind the scenes to ensure 2025 continues to deliver for you. Here’s what’s in store this year.

📣 The Ed. Opal Speaker Series | $45
Money can be a loaded topic. For Black women, money is personal, emotional, and political. It carries a historical context that’s unique to us. Our speaker series is designed to bring in experts from the personal finance industry, academia, politics, and wellness spaces to help us connect the dots between money, policy, history, and our individual and collective goals. We’ll be holding speaker series events on Thursdays at 6:30 pm Eastern. We’ll announce events via our newsletter and socials, so stay tuned for those!

💪🏾 Ed. Opal Power Hour | Free
You know what you need to do. You have things mapped out in your head. All you have to do now is sit down and get to it. Our Power Hours are for you! Sometimes, it’s just easier to get things done while in community. Join Ed. Opal for our free Power Hours. This is dedicated time to help you get from ideation to action. Stay tuned for dates and registration information.

ℹ️ New Ed. Opal Directories | Free
If you’ve been with us for a little while, you know that every week, you can expect new money vocabulary, mindfulness prompts, and history snippets in your inbox. We created directories for those who want to reference these items without needing to search your emails. We’ll launch our new directories at the end of the month. Stay tuned! 

👩🏾‍🏫 New Ed. Opal Workshops | $45
Learning is at the core of what we do at Ed. Opal. This year, we’re launching our Foundations and Boundaries workshops. These workshops give you the time and space to get organized, get focused, and create healthier intentions around your money.

In addition to the above, we’ve launched monthly themes to help keep you organized for the year. January’s themes are all about getting clear, resetting, and allowing ourselves to dream big and create a vision. Our January newsletters will support you in all that. It’s going to be a great 2025.

Vocab, Mindfulness, and Quick Facts

💰 My Final Two Cents

💬 Money Vocabulary:
Estate Plan: Estate planning tasks include making a will, setting up trusts, making charitable donations to limit estate taxes, naming an executor and beneficiaries, and setting up funeral arrangements. Read more here.

🧘🏾‍♀️ Mindful Money Prompt:
Check out the December reflections here.

📠 Money Quick Fact:
Back in 2022, the U.S. minted a quarter in celebration of our great Maya Angelou. Did you get your hands on one? If not, you can check it out here. Between us, I don’t think it looks much like her, but I’m still glad she was honored.

Celebration Syndicate

🎉 Introducing a New Way to Celebrate You

Did you get a higher-paying job, pay off a credit card, or meet a savings goal? No matter what your money accomplishment is, we want to celebrate you! Share your money wins here for a chance to have them featured in future newsletters and on Ed. Opal socials!