Like most Americans, Yanely Espinal didn’t get money management or financial literacy training during her K-12 education in Brooklyn, New York. And, like many Americans, she went on to college, opened a couple of credit accounts, and racked up a lot of debt.
After graduating from college, Espinal started reading Suze Orman’s “Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny,” which provided her with a guide to financial freedom. She ended up with over $20,000 in high-interest credit card debt.
Espinal, now known as Miss Be Good, a popular financial educator on social media, saw the impact of her early financial literacy on her life. She is now the director of education outreach at Next Gen Personal Finance.
She published her first book, “Mind Your Money,” in 2023, striking the right balance between the cash lessons she learned in her community as a Dominican American girl of immigrants and her personal finance guidance.
Reckon spoke with Espinal about how she became Miss Be Good and why financial education is a path to freedom.
What do financial literacy classes do, in your opinion, to lessen the financial strain experienced by countless young adults?
In the near future, younger people will experience anxiety related to money. They may be motivated to start generating income or to volunteer at home because they feel their parents’ financial obligations are overwhelming, but they don’t know how to help out.
The biggest and best advantage of first contact for young persons is a financial education course.
It’s a social justice concern at this point to ensure that those who need financial education are the ones who are going to be most likely to receive it rather than the least possible because everyone will eventually acquire this knowledge, regardless of whether they come from a rich family or attend a private school.
For example, I can’t tell you how many times I have spoken at high schools or colleges and heard the students tell me, “When I graduate, I’m going to owe $15,000 in student loans.” I’ll usually stop them and request that they repeat the term, “I presently owe $15,000 in student loans” in the present tense.
Because we must delay the financial consequences to prevent ourselves from enjoying the immediate advantages of our economic choices, that is a mental change. Instead of putting off taking a personal finance course until a later time, you come to terms with your financial responsibilities at the present.
That verbal and emotional shift is what eventually leads to cognitive shifts that will increase our ability to save for emergencies, spend more correctly, invest for our future, and pursue opportunities that increase wealth access.
How do our current financial decisions be influenced by our families’ and previous generations’ financial habits and behaviors?
A study examined the behavior of a number of college students when it came to credit card debt and use. Growing up with parents who didn’t talk to you about money at all was the most predictive indicator of bad credit card usage or high credit card debt, according to what they saw.
But, not your kids who showed you how to use a credit card incorrectly, such as buying anything on credit and using it up, but parents who also showed you how to use it incorrectly. Basically, avoiding talking about money totally was the worst thing.
That is actually the history of my life because I grew up in a house where my parents always talked about income and I ended up with a ton of credit card debt myself.
We both repeat phases because we see examples modeled or because there is a void in our attempts to understand it through the tough knocks, which is frequently worse than seeing a negative example.
The only good thing that can happen is to have a family that regularly and boldly talks about money. Parents can accomplish this by involving their children in everyday life activities like, “Hey, we’re going to go to the grocery store and I’m going to try really hard to stick to a budget of $85. Do you want to assist me in sticking to that resources?
What part do you believe parents, teachers, and policymakers should play in promoting financial education training?
As a parent, you have to think, “How can I impart the key, most important, lessons that I want them to have about money”? For me, that tends to look like ideals-based investing. If your home is a faith-based family, you will consider a budget and put wiggle room for tithe because faith-based giving may actually matter to your family.
The individual’s job in school is to provide an objective source of learning to compare and contrast things like the bank versus a record union, a credit card versus a debit card, and to raise questions about some financial decisions. As an instructor, I’m not going to show you what’s better because that’s a specific price view, but I may tell you the differences with facts-based info.
A politician has never had to tell a session in front of 30 or 40 students and has never written a training program. Therefore, they need to be careful when writing financial education policy because they must be careful not to overprescribe the way they are writing it. Their goal is to create the most versatile probable legislation that requires a financial education program in every high school and make it a graduating requirement.