Last month Jewel Tankard hosted a mixer for her Millionaireness Club on a Yacht in Detroit. For a few hours, the attendees enjoyed dinner, music curated by a DJ and motivational words from Tankard as the boat took a trip around the Detroit River. The financial expert is known for the Bravo TV show Thicker Than Water which chronicles her family life with musician husband Ben and their children. The club is her platform to help women become financially empowered. In that space, she shares personal and professional advice to her members with the goal of helping them become or stay debt-free, improve credit scores, trade multiple currencies and grow wealth through their individual business ventures. The event was an opportunity for the members who came from around the country to interact with Tankard and network with each other. Tankard spoke to Kick Mag about the club, contemporary wealth strategies and how her faith is connected to her work.
“I wanted the average woman to know she can live her dream”
What is the Yacht Mixer?
I started an organization called the Millionaireness Club and the whole purpose of starting the club was to teach women particularly how to develop and short and long-term wealth strategies. Most women don’t trust their own financial gut they depend on their husbands and boyfriends to make decisions for them and not that the guys have bad intentions it’s just not good to ever turn your financial future over to somebody else when you could cultivate that gift and develop that gift.  We teach every wealth strategy that’s out there. As I learn new ones I bring it to them and we talk it out because a lot of them don’t think they can do it because they’re a mom or a wife. But the reality is your children need you to be wealthy. When you don’t have money it impacts everything where your children go to school where they don’t go to school it impacts what they eat it impacts whether they go to the Boys and Girls club for summer camp or Europe. At the end of the day, I want to see women particularly we have men in the club too, I want to see them live their dreams.
How do you incorporate the bible into your wealth teachings and practice?
People don’t realize it but there are over 200,000 scriptures in the word that talk about money.  I think this was a derivative of slavery that money is the root of all evil and they just focus on that. If you just focus on that you don’t ever get to the scripture that says money has its own things. Money makes a horrible master but an amazing slave so it’s simply a tool. Money itself is not wealth it just facilitates the ability to buy goods and services and the value that you think it’s worth. The bible talks about that the bible talks about that he wants us to live an abundant life. He wants us to live a good life nothing about God is small. So I incorporate some of those foundational principles that I believe and live by and there’s also another scripture that says he will teach you how to become wealthy if you let him.
Can you give more details about the Millionaireness Club?
We created a platform where we do two webinars a month it’s just $29 a month so the whole purpose was that I wanted the average woman to know she can live her dream. It’s two live webinars and I get on there and teach them. Sometimes I’ll get on there and tell them about the challenges that I’m dealing with cause what stops a lot of people are the challenges or their personal issues, family issues. And so I might tell them something intimate that’s going on in our family to let them know listen we’re just like any other family. We have issues too but you can’t let an issue become bigger than your dream. Sometimes I will talk about challenges sometimes I will talk to them about emotional toughness. Sometimes I will talk about real estate investing or buying gold and silver and I will bring on other experts and celebrities. Recently I had Zane on and she talked about the film industry and Hollywood and how many hours in a day she works sometimes. So we’ve had celebrities come on and share their stories what success looks like for them and the cost they had to pay. I don’t think most people realize there is a cost to success it’s commitment, it’s sacrifice but it’s so worth it.
What are some things you teach women about how to build capital?
I teach them they need to learn how to trade foreign currency, they can do that on their phone. We teach people how to trade the British pound, Japanese Yen, gold, oil, Swiss Francs, AUD, so every currency pair that exists we teach them how to trade them and everything happens on their phone.What are the three principles of the new money rules?
What are the three principles of the new money rules?
The old money rules are not working so you’re traditional 401K nobody’s getting wealthy off of that unless you have a large initial capital investment. You need to do things like trading foreign currency, trading futures, buying gold, buying silver, so your traditional bonds, CDs, there’s still some good stocks out there. But the traditional bonds and CDs, annuities, are very very slow-moving. On average though to grow your money four to eight percent a year on average and you’re looking at inflation 11 percent. Warren Buffet says, in order to really become wealthy whatever financial product you invest in you need to be making at least 20 percent per year.
“I want them to know there are no limits”
You’re married to the musician Ben Tankard and you talked about Zane coming to one of the webinars. Do you find that creatives think about money differently?
My husband is creative, he’s brilliant he’a genius, He’s created a whole genre and now he’s on two Billboard charts right now. The thing that I want to say about that is most of them just think about creating, they don’t really think about long-term they don’t really think about the profit and loss kinds of things. They think of what they want to produce. When Ben and I got married he was in a crazy amount of debt he had made millions of dollars but he had spent everything. We had to get an agreement and say “Babe, let me manage the money you keep doing what you do, let’s get out of all this debt.†And that’s what we did, Ben was real teachable, he acknowledged, “I am not strong here.†He could stay in the studio 36 hours and I have to make him eat and he makes amazing music. He’s produced Kelly Price, Fred Hammond, discovering Yolanda Adams, that’s what he wants to do so he’s gotten good at money because of my influence. And he’s taught me to be more creative. Most creatives don’t think about money most creatives are horrible money managers. It doesn’t have to stay that way they can develop. It doesn’t mean they will become a master but they need to at least connect to someone who’s a master because the master is still a student. I’m still a student I’m still learning.
What do you want women to walk away with when they leave the mixer?
I want them to know there are no limits. When you look out on this beautiful water and you see the sailboats and hopefully they will look out and say one of those boats belong to me. Maybe I want three different kinds of boats maybe I want a boat in Detroit and a boat in Miami and I want a boat in New York. I don’t want them to see limits. You look out on the water you don’t really see limits the capacity is huge. My prayer is that they will leave here and exposed, inspired, and really ready to change the world.
Is there anything else you want to add?
Yes, I think partnership is key. You can have tons of great ideas, you can be brilliant but if you don’t have the right partners most of my success is partners I have a partner in real estate. I have a partner in a transportation business. In every business, I have there is a partner. I have 13 businesses everything that I own there is a partner.
How do we find our partners?
Joining organizations like The Millionaireness Club we are just recently launched the Black Card Credit Club and we are helping people get their credit score to 720 in 30 to 60 days. We are helping them get secure funding up to $100,000. We’re helping them discover if they’re LLC Corporate S or Corporate C because credit affects everything. I would say you have to join organizations and once you join the right organizations you just have to be willing to trust. Some of my partners I’ve known a long time some I’m just meeting but I go off my gut. When I meet you I know if I want to do business with you and we all have that but it has to be put to use.
Keep Up with Jewel Tankard on her official site, Â Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram @JewelTankardÂ
