Luis Barajas argues that Latino parents taught survival skills like hard work and frugality, but not wealth-building. His book Finanzas con Corazón offers concrete steps: emergency funds, retirement accounts, investing basics, and better financial decisions to pass to the next generation.
You know, our parents taught us how to survive. Now we have to learn how to build. Now, if you grew up in a Latino family like I did, our parents taught us some incredible lessons about money, right? Work hard, don't waste, take care of your family, be grateful for what you have, and when things get difficult, you figure it out. Now, those lessons helped generations of our family survive, and we should be proud of that. But then there's another lesson that many of us were never taught: how do you go from surviving to building? How do you build an emergency fund? How do you start investing? How do you prepare for retirement? How do you eventually build wealth? And maybe you're listening to this thinking, Luis, nobody ever taught me how to do any of that. Well, exactly, and that's where we start. And that's one of the reasons why I wrote my new book, Finanzas con Corazón: The Latino Journey to Financial Dignity. Because before you can build wealth, you have to believe that building wealth is possible for you. You have to change the way you think about money. You have to move from simply surviving to believing that you can actually build something. And you don't have to become wealthy overnight. Start with your first dollar in an emergency fund. Put your first dollars into retirement. Learn how investing works. Make one better financial decision and then another. Maybe our parents couldn't teach us how to build wealth, but we can be the generation that learns how. And guess what? And we can— once we learn, we can pass that To the next generation, please follow me for more finances con corazón.
