Show Me The Money: Flau’jae, Wyclef Jean are rapping about personal finance

•  PETER COY

NEW YORK: Flau’jae, the 20-year-old star of basketball and hip-hop, does not manage $1.3 trillion in assets for clients. She also does not have an army of financial advisers and economists at her disposal. But when an organization that does have all of that — the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, known as TIAA — needed to reach young people and minorities, it was Flau’jae and some of her fellow celebrities that it turned to for help.

Listen to “Paper Right,” a recently released hip-hop track recorded by Wyclef Jean, a founding member of the Fugees, with guest appearances by artists including Flau’jae, Pusha T, Lola Brooke and Capella Grey. Those may not be household names to you, but to TIAA’s intended audience, they’re huge. Proceeds from streaming of the track go to First Generation Investors, a nonprofit that aims to increase investing literacy among underserved high school students.

I wrote on Monday about a program that teaches math through personal finance and personal finance through math. Which is great. But there’s also a psychological aspect to managing money. Saving for the future requires willpower and vision. You have to keep your eyes on the prize — and to know that there’s a prize you should want in the first place.

That’s where celebrities and influencers can do good. When TIAA’s people approached Jean about writing and producing the song, they told him that 54 percent of Black Americans don’t have enough money saved to maintain their current lifestyles in retirement. That shocked him, he said in a video breaking down the lyrics. “Because guess what? It could have really been me.” (The figure was based on data from 2016. The figure for white Americans — 48 percent — wasn’t a lot better.)

Jean immigrated with his family from Haiti at age 9. Before his musical career took off, he worked unglamorous jobs, including plunging clogged toilets at a Ramada Inn. One night while working as a security guard at a Donna Karan store, he fell asleep. “Years later I go to a Donna Karan event and I bring her a check,” he said in the video. “What is this for?” she asked Jean, who responded: “Yo, when I was young I worked at one of your places and they robbed the place. I fell asleep.”

Now he’s rapping about building generational wealth. “This is part of your economical freedom,” he explained in the video breakdown.

I’ll get to what Flau’jae told me when I interviewed her by email, but I want to detour briefly to talk about another man who grew up poor, achieved success and is trying now to influence a younger generation to get on the right path. That’s James Keyes, a former chief executive officer of both 7-Eleven and Blockbuster.

Keyes, who is 68, spent his early years in a three-room house in central Massachusetts with no plumbing. His parents, both factory workers, split up when he was young. He had five older siblings. “We had too many kids, too little money,” he said. Keyes’s father died young, but before he did, he took Keyes to a savings bank and showed him how to make deposits and withdrawals.