The entrepreneur, TikTok star and author of the personal finance book “Cultura and Cash: Lessons from the First Gen Mentor for Managing Finances and Cultural Expectations” shares her tips for setting money boundaries with those you love most, and the importance of defining the driving values and “why” of your money plan.
Follow Giovanna on instagram @gigthegirstgenmentor and find her book, Cultura and Cash here. If you liked this episode listen to How Alejandra Campoverdi Traced Her Family’s Invisible Inheritances and LEVEL UP: How to Secure Your Financial Future Starting Today.
Alicia Menendez : Before Giovanna Gigi Gonzalez was an entrepreneur and dishing out financial advice on TikTok as The First Gen Mentor, she was broke and she was lost. Then she started educating herself largely by reading financial literacy books.
Those texts, they gave her a lot of basic language and skills, but they did not account for the unique and sometimes subtle challenges of being Latina and being first gen. It's why Giovanna's new book, Cultura & Cash: Lessons from The First Gen Mentor for Managing Finances & Cultural Expectations, fills in that gap.
I am neither first gen, nor am I at the beginning of my personal finance journey, and I still found Gigi's book and this conversation really illuminating when it comes to setting boundaries and defining the why behind your wealth.
Gigi, thank you so much for being here.
Giovanna Gonzalez: Of course. Hi, Alicia. Thanks for having me on.
Menendez: Gigi, we all know you now as someone who is not only financially literate, but is helping other people in our community become financially literate and feel financially sound. That is not your origin story.
Gonzalez: Not at all.
Menendez: I want you to take me back to the period during which, as you write in the book, you were feeling broke and confused.
Gonzalez: So I would say most of my financial challenges didn't happen until my 20s, my early 20s. I had nightmare roommates, I had toxic bosses that I worked for. I had harmful boyfriends that I live with. All these situations that I couldn't escape out of, and I was very much trapped in because I didn't have enough money to leave.
It was very frustrating for me to realize that I was living paycheck to paycheck with no savings, even though I had done everything, quote, unquote, "right." I had been told to go to college to get a good degree, to get a nice office job. I checked all those boxes, but I was still scraping by. And it was then that I realized it's because I never learned how to manage my money.
Menendez: I love that you start there because those are often the financial structures that leave people in financial ruin, a divorce, getting sick, having terrible roommates and needing to move out. It's not always that people don't have resources because they're going on luxury vacations and eating out every day.
Gonzalez: Absolutely not.
Menendez: Give me a picture of what corporate Gigi looked like. What were you doing and how were you managing your money at the time?
Gonzalez: So I spent my 10-year corporate career working in financial services, so I always dealt with money in some way or another. I worked for an auto insurance company processing auto claims. After that, I spent the majority of my career, seven and a half years, working in investment consulting/investment management, specifically doing investment performance reporting.
We were managing institutional clients' portfolio. I mean, I would see how much money was in these clients' portfolio and my personal finances were a mess. And again, that's because they don't teach you this stuff in school. They don't teach you financial education in school. And if you have immigrant parents like I do, you probably aren't getting taught it at home because your parents are just busy trying to survive.
Menendez: As you start to develop knowledge around money, values around money, how does that attitude that you're developing either sync up or clash with the values that you were taught at home?
Gonzalez: Yeah, that's the heavy part. I have to be transparent and say that the way that I learned how money worked was by reading personal finance books. And at the time, the majority of what was available was ran by white, mostly male authors. There were some white female authors, Jean Chatzky, Suze Orman had a bunch of books that I read, but majority white male. So when I tried to implement-
Menendez: Which, let me say, is useful vis-a-vis learning terms that I didn't know because I read all the same books, terms that we didn't grow up talking about, some basic functions and mechanisms. There is a value in that, but there's also just a values component and a voice that is totally missing.
Gonzalez: Yeah. So I always like to acknowledge that I learned the ABCs of handling money from those white authors, but there was an educational gap and that was how to handle my money with my Latina family because what none of those books acknowledged was that there's different money cultures in existence.
The way that money is handled in America, it's very much an individualistic way where you pull yourself by the bootstraps. If you get into any sort of financial hardships, you don't tell anybody. You charge it on a credit card, you take out a loan, you figure it out. You don't really go around talking about your financial struggles to others. Whereas Latina, the first people we go to is family when we need any sort of financial support. We don't go and run to the bank or charge it on a credit card.
So when I tried to implement this white male financial advice with my family, there was a culture clash. It was not pretty. It was not pretty. And I didn't realize that as a bi cultural Latina who's Mexican and American, I had to learn how to balance both many cultures.
Menendez: Give me an example, Gigi.
Gonzalez: David Bach, who I learned a lot from, and I probably read all of his books several times. I credit very much Smart Women Finish Rich to that book being the one that finally woke me up and said, "Okay, this is important and I have to learn about money." David Bach has also though, put out this narrative that you are not a bank. So if your friends or family ask you for money, you are not a bank, don't loan it to them.
And that just doesn't land with my culture. If you straight up say no to people all the time, you're very much labeled as malcriada or you're whitewashed, you forgot about your roots, you're ungrateful. So I had to find the balance.
Menendez: Well, you also distinguish between someone saying, "I have a co-payment on a doctor's visit that I can't pay," and, "I want to throw a super sweet quinceanera." There's a difference.
Gonzalez: Yeah, no, of course. I mean, for me, I think it's important for my reader and my audience to know that it is okay to support family on your terms when you want to and when you can. I call it the Quiero y Puedo Approach, where I think the traditional Latin American values are, you say yes to family no matter what.
Or for me as a bi cultural Latina, I say, don't cave into the pressures of giving money to family just because that's what you're supposed to do. Evaluate whether you truly want to give support, because it does feel beautiful to financially support family when you want to, but when you're having your arm twisted to do it, it doesn't feel good and it leads to resentment.
Menendez: Gigi, can you give me a sense of what a boundary setting conversation around this might sound like for someone who is breathless right now because you were describing their reality? How do you say that in a way that feels firm, but fair?
Gonzalez: So the example that I use in the book was one time that I was approached to cover one of my grandma's thousand dollar eye surgery. And although I love my grandma, and of course I wanted to be able to support in that way, I knew that if I gave the thousand dollars, I may not see it back and I couldn't afford to gift it.
So the way you said you can have that conversation with family is saying, "I'm so sorry to hear that grandma's not doing okay. Unfortunately, I don't have a thousand dollars that I can send to support you, but I have $250 that I can Venmo you right away. Does that work?"
If you don't have money, but you're able to support in other ways with maybe your time or resources, "I don't have money at this time. I have a lot of financial priorities that I'm focused on, but I would love to support you and grandma by finding resources online of how we can get this covered." It's just offering other ways of support. There's different layers to it, and it just depends on your finances and what you feel comfortable with.
Menendez: You walk your reader in Cultura and Cash through a lot of different skills and practices, a peace of mind fund, a spending plan, eliminating debt, hacking your credit score, learning the basics of investing. I actually want to zoom in with you on your thoughts around how to build a spending plan.
Because you're also really clear, you need a spending plan when you are 22 and it is your first job and you are paying off your student loans. And you need a spending plan when you are me and you're 40 and you have two kids. The need to budget and have a spending plan never ends. Where do you start?
Gonzalez: It very much starts by looking inward and deciding on your money goals and your money values, because that's what's going to anchor you and help you actually stick to your budget. If you just put yourself on a budget, but you don't understand your why, why it's important for you to build savings, why it's important for you to get out of debt, why it's important for you to get your spending under control, you're going to lose interest.
There's so many parallels between getting financially fit and being physically fit, where you're not clear on the reason why. You'll stick to it a week or two, and then you'll get lazy and you'll stop.
Menendez: Can I ask you what your goal was when you started doing this?
Gonzalez: Yeah. I love this question. I actually went back to my former high school to do career day, and I shared my career path with the students in the Imperial Valley. And the advice that I gave all the kids, I said, "If you go to college, make sure that you do studying abroad." I missed out on that because I said, "Oh, I don't want to add another $10,000 to my debt." But I said, "That's an experience that you will never get to do again, where you get to be that young with no responsibilities in a foreign country with people that are at the same stage of life."
So I left that day feeling very energized, talking to the kids, but then I reflected and I felt a little sad for myself because I still had that wanderlust. So my big dream, my why that kept me anchored to reach my financial goals was this big dream to quit my corporate job and travel the world for a year. I calculated that I would need about $30,000 to do that. And to keep me on track, I actually bought a huge world map that I put on my living room, and I saw it every day. So every day my goal was present and it helped me with those spending habits.
Menendez: How long did it actually take you?
Gonzalez: Well, you know what's funny? I was about $20,000 into my $30,000 goal, and then the pandemic happened.
Menendez: No, no.
Gonzalez: So I kept saving, and then that's when the opportunity to be a full-time creator came about and I said, "Let me use these funds to start my business and explore entrepreneurship." And here I am two and a half years later.
Menendez: When you say the opportunity came about, it was an opportunity that found you or that you set out to find?
Gonzalez: It very much found me. I went viral on TikTok. I was already a volunteer financial educator at my local nonprofit, and I was mentoring several kids through my alma mater. So I was already doing these things in my personal life and I said, "Hey, let's add these same tips on the internet." TikTok was my choice of platform.
So March of 2021 was when I got started. I was very consistent with the content, and then I went viral in April. I gained 100,000 followers overnight, and with that large following and exposure was when I started getting paid opportunities. So people started sliding into my DMs saying, "Hey, can you come teach our college budgeting 101?" Or brands started asking me, "Hey, what is your rate for a sponsored video?" Or people said, "Hey, do you do money coaching?"
So those kinds of opportunities started pouring in, and because of the job that I had in investment management, I wasn't allowed to take those paid opportunities while still working for the firm that I was at, which is why I had to make a choice. And to be honest, my first choice was going to be to just stop TikTok altogether because I really liked my career, but it was friends and family actually that encouraged me to explore it.
Menendez: I want to go back to talking about the Imperial Valley and having grown up with people who didn't get the same opportunities that you got and who have not been able to do the things that you've done. I mean, I'll say for me, as I have made more money and grown more wealth, there's always a fear that I am moving farther away from the people and the place I come from.
Gonzalez: Yeah, and I know you've interviewed my friend, Alejandra Campoverdi, right?
Menendez: You guys are going on tour together. I cannot wait.
Gonzalez: Yes, yes, yes, yes. We're going to be in LA and we're going to be in Chicago soon. But yeah, I believe she calls that the breakaway guilt.
Menendez: Yes.
Gonzalez: My community on TikTok calls it first gen guilt, this notion of knowing that you have access to opportunities and lifestyles that your immigrant family will never get a chance to.
Menendez: Well, there's our immigrant family, but there's also just our peers. They're just the girls I went to middle school with.
Gonzalez: Yeah, and you know what? To be honest, I live in Chicago now, so I don't get to go home as often as I used to. And to be honest, my life in Chicago is so different from the people that still live in the Imperial Valley or even my family in Mexicali, which is who I go through the Imperial Valley to go visit. There's dogs on the streets, stray dogs, skinny dogs, so it does take a toll.
But that's why for me, I find it very important to find time in my schedule to give back. I give myself an allowance of one volunteer event per quarter. I'm not a nonprofit. I'm a for-profit business. I have to keep the lights on, but it's still important for me to share my wisdom and make it accessible for those who need it.
Menendez: I love that so much. Gigi, there was something I noticed about Cultura and Cash, and having written a book myself, I know what goes into this, which is in the subtitle, you refer to yourself as a first gen mentor. And I was curious about that positioning, about not wanting to position yourself as an expert because there's so many people out there who are very happy to claim the mantle of expert. How did you land on mentor?
Gonzalez: So The First Gen Mentor name came about from TikTok. So remember I mentioned I started posting content in March of 2021, but I still didn't have a brand name. For the longest time my name I think was Curlygio05.
Menendez: The number at the end is how you know that you never thought you'd be famous.
Gonzalez: Yeah, for the longest time. And I said, "I can't change the name until I know it's something that's going to stick." And I kept brainstorming names, and finally, The First Gen Mentor is what resonated with me because that's what I am. I am a mentor to the first gen community.
So that was through the mentorship I was doing with the kids at my alma mater and through other mentees that I've had, and that's my approach to sharing my wisdom and financial knowledge with others. It's not like finger wagging and telling you this is what you need to do, but it's kind of like your older cousin that's been around the block and is giving you a heads-up on what you should do to get ahead of things.
Menendez: When you sit down, Gigi, with someone who still feels like they are lost in the woods when it comes to their finances, what do you tell them?
Gonzalez: I think my number one tip would be to start learning the language of money. So start learning financial literacy because the more comfortable you get with the language and all that new jargon that you're going to have to learn, you will feel more empowered to tackle your finances. Once you tackle your finances, you're putting things into action, things are going into motion, and that's when you see the change.
But I think a lot of us, and I did it for a long time, I would just stick my head in the sand because it was overwhelming and I didn't even know where to start. I know that that language can be intimidating to the layman. So it was very important for me, both in the book and in my content to stay as jargon-free as I could.
Menendez: One of my favorite sections of Cultura and Cash was how you pace us through, was it Patty and-
Gonzalez: Oh yeah, Privileged Patty, Average Amy, and First Gen Gina.
Menendez: I felt very red as an Average Amy, where I was like, "Oh," because-
Gonzalez: And that's okay.
Menendez: But that is part of it, right?
Gonzalez: Yeah.
Menendez: I feel like it's a conversation we also don't know how to have within the community around the fact that it's like ... You lay out three different tracks while knowing there are like 30 variations within that. But I remember growing up in Union City, New Jersey, it's a one square mile town, urban, working class, and being average meant I was super-duper wealthy. It meant compared to most of my peers who were first gen, I had my own bedroom.
Then I went to high school with a bunch of these Pattys and they had their own bathroom, and when they turned 18, they got their own car. And it fritzed out my adolescent brain that wealth is such a relative thing and privilege is such a relative thing. And I thought you did a really wonderful job of articulating how those challenges and opportunities build over time.
Gonzalez: Yeah. No, I'm so happy to hear that. And that is the first chapter of the book was very hard for me to write because I had to write about the privilege that I always lacked. I collected anecdotes from my real life Privileged Patty friends that have had all this generational or financial support, institutional knowledge that I never got access to.
But I get over and over in my DMs that people love that section, and I thought it was very important for me to paint that picture to my reader because when you're aware of where you truly stand, hopefully you feel more activated to want to catch up and put in the work because for me, I had this false sense of security. When I graduated from college, I thought, "Now I'm in a level playing field with everybody else."
Menendez: Oh, no, sweet Gigi.
Gonzalez: I was a 21-year-old kid, what did I know about the world? And I know that that's how a lot of my audience feels because they're younger, they're gen Z. So that's why I want to pass on these teachings to them that, yes, you've accomplished something beautiful and what a beautiful way to honor your parents' sacrifice to be able to finish that college degree. But guess what? You're still behind.
Instead of just throwing data at people, I really wanted to create those archetypes to do some storytelling and show how privilege plays a role in your financial journey.
Menendez: Gigi, thank you so much for taking the time to be with me.
Gonzalez: Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me on.
Menendez: Thanks for listening. Latina to Latina is executive produced and owned by Juleyka Lantigua and me, Menendez:Menendez. Virginia Lora is our producer, Kojin Tashiro is our lead producer, Tren Lightburn mixed this episode. We love hearing from you. Email us at ola@latinatolatina.com, slide into our DMs on Instagram or on Threads and TikTok @latinatolatina. Check out our merchandise at latinatolatina.com/shop and remember to subscribe or follow us on RadioPublic, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Goodpods, wherever you're listening right now. Every time you share this podcast, every time you leave a review, you help us to grow as a community.
CITATION:
Menendez, Alicia, host. “Why Giovanna ‘Gigi’ Gonzalez Wants You to Have a Wealth ‘Why’.” Latina to Latina, LWC Studios, March 25, 2024. LatinaToLatina.com.