Britt Baker on how the Dow Jones and Dow Janes are for everyone

For this week’s MVP, we’re chatting with Britt Baker.

Despite its gloriously punny name, the finance education platform Dow Janes—Britt Baker’s book club turned women’s money meeting turned digital hub for 500,000-plus members—isn’t just for women. In fact, smart men would do well to check out its distinctive approach to money management. 

“Money’s so much more emotional than people think,” explains Baker, who graduated from Harvard Business School—something of an old boys’ club itself, though we’ll get to that—then promptly put her knowledge to work for women. With her Ontario-born co-founder Laurie-Anne King, Baker’s Dow Janes is teaching women to examine their spending, put their money to better work and learn from each other along the way.  

I’m so impressed you went to Harvard. Was getting in just like Elle Woods said it would be? 

I actually worked as an admissions consultant afterward, so I was pretty close to the process for many years. If you had asked me a couple of years before, “Would you ever go to Harvard Business School?” I definitely would have said, “No.” I said I’d never go there, it’s not my culture. I went to Georgetown for undergrad, then I worked at Moniker and Deloitte for a few years, so I had the background that they wanted. My essay was all about how I would bring the student body together and bring my personality to their student body. Once I was actually there, I loved it. I met really inspiring people, I had incredible teachers, and it was just a really fun two years.

Tell me how Dow Janes came into the world? 

I graduated in 2016, and I started Dow Janes informally in 2018. I’d been part of a women’s circle in the Bay Area before going to business school, so when I came back to San Francisco, I jumped right back into it. It was just my friends in a living room, really, but now I’d gone to business school.

Lots of them came to me and said, “I know I should be investing, but I’m scared,” or “I don’t know how—will you teach me how to do it?” I didn’t learn that in business school, by the way. There’s zero personal finance taught in business school.

Feels like there’s zero personal finance anywhere. Where did you learn? 

I was lucky that I had an upbringing where my parents and my grandparents taught me about money. My grandfather is actually the one who got me investing in the stock market when I was in college, so that’s what I taught my friends in my living room: the basics, diversification and asset allocation. 

Then every couple of months we’d do a meet-up and talk about our financial goals or budgeting. Laurie-Anne, my business partner, came in and led a session on how you can reclaim budgeting by making it values-based. Have budgeting speak to how you live in the world versus being a restrictive thing. 

It was such a hit that I went to Laurie-Anne and said, “Let’s bring Dow Janes online. Let’s reach as many women as we can.” We launched our program, Million Dollar Year, in January of 2020, right before COVID happened.

You launched just as we were all sent home with unforeseen free time? 

Totally. It was the beginning of everyone normalizing online courses. That format worked for the same reasons my women’s circle did: You feel like you’re all on the same page, you don’t feel dumb for asking a question, you learn from each other. 

Not that we’re anti-men, we love men, but we were really wanting to create a safe space for women. There’s no difference in what we’re teaching, but there is probably a difference in how we’re teaching it. The second step of our program addresses the emotions, your stories and your relationship to money.

Imagine going to your bank and the advisor asked you how you feel about your money. 

Exactly. Money is so tied into feelings, but many people are just uncovering that now. People don’t realize they’re spending to feel something, or using money to try to fix a feeling. The other thing people don’t realize is that they relate to money the same way their parents did. Lots of us just inherit their way of being—whether they’re afraid of money, they’re judging people who have money, or they’re just not paying attention. We get it from the people who raised us, and it goes so deep.

What’s the most common mistake you see women making?

Women tend to be more conservative with their money, so they’ll keep more money than they need in a savings account rather than investing it or using it to pay off debt—both of which are a much better use of your money. 

Generally, we teach people to save three to six months of living expenses as your emergency fund. You technically don’t need more than that. But more women than men keep 12 months of expenses in their savings account. That money should be invested or at least used to pay off credit card debt. 

I’m not perfect though: my story is much more about being frugal when spending a little would actually enhance my life. For example, when I’m cold, I won’t turn on the heat. I restrict myself in ways that I don't need to anymore. Over-restriction is something I’ve been unlearning.

If I’m going to take one (free!) Dow Janes course, which one should it be? 

We do money management, debt repayment plans and investing. We have a great free class called How to Master your Money. There’s also a paid one called Intentional Investing, about values-aligned investment portfolios. But for you, I’m gonna suggest the Million Dollar Year. The idea is that the things you put in place in the course of this year—your “million dollar year”—will set you up for having a million dollars over your lifetime. Women in particular want to feel good about where their money is invested. Maybe they don’t want to invest in, for example, oil and gas, or anything in the prison industrial complex. 

Or maybe they want to invest in companies that really value gender rights. This course helps you build a portfolio that’s aligned with what you care about. We’re gonna help, but we aren’t financial advisors and we don’t do it for you. Part of our ethos is to teach you how to do it yourself—it’s easier than you think.