Full Transcript for First-Generation Wealth Building with Pamela Capalad, CFP®, AFC®

parents are doing good job of fulfilling stereotypes over here, you know, right. Teacher was another option for me, okay, and also my dad threw in prostitute, so you know, he's like, if it's good enough for humanity since the beginning of time, it's good enough for my daughter. Right. But that is like sex positive and that's why, right, Yes, exactly what was your upbringing like with your extended family? Did you have aunts and uncles that also immigrated here, and what kinds of jobs they hold and how did those you know, how did observing all of that inform your decision to study finance? Yeah, so it was actually, uh, we're actually pretty isolated because most of my family was in the Philippines. I'd say when we first moved to the US, all of my family was still in the Philippines, and so we went back there every year. We tried to go back every year, and then my grandparents would come and visit us for like three months at a time, you know, So that was kind of the I didn't think about it this way, but there was a little bit of like intergenerational living going on because they would come and stay for so long. Like there's like memories of me like crawling into their bed when I was really young and being like, you know, my grandparents are here. Yay. Pretty much all of my family was in the Philippines until about a decade maybe until I was about ten. We had one uncle who got the ability to move to Vancouver, Canada, and so that was the first family that we had in the US, and I remember we visited them. And he also he was like a big time architect in the Philippines and he ended up working at home depot for like basically his whole career in Canada. So yeah, because he couldn't Yeah. Yeah, and just now I'd say, like twenty years later, he's you know, doing freelance architecture. But what's amazing is that he has two girls. And one of my cousins is now does interior design Oh cool, yeah, at at an agency. And then my other cousin is a teacher. So so yeah, so they came and found the Canadian dream in a way. But he really did have to. He sacrificed like a pretty thriving career in the Philippines to come here and give them. That's I can't. I think about this a lot, like, and I'm sure you feel some sort of pressure to like come, you know, be in America and quote unquote succeed. You know, like when you think about these stories of folks who are giving up a thriving career to go to another place and hope for the best, oftentimes in the name of the next generation. I just can't wrap my head around doing that. Like, if I chose to do that today, I feel so ill equipped. But I'm sure you know, they figured it out. I'm sure we would figure it out if that's something that we had to do. But yeah, do you feel Tell me how you feel about the fact that your parents went through all that, the fact that you've seen your uncle make that sacrifice. Do you ever feel a sense of shame or maybe maybe the proper term is guilt. Do you ever feel guilty that you know, you you

made it to America where you had the opportunity to build a career and build a life, and not everybody gets that opportunity. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, I said earlier that I don't know if my mom ever liked nursing or enjoyed it. She always seemed tired and a little upset. I think about that a lot. I think about the fact that, like, my mom kind of did all the right things. You know, She's saved, she maxed out her for one K, she learned about investments, she stayed at her job for as long as she could, she got the pension and all of that. And I remember the first year she retired, she was like, I'm too tired to do anything. And she loves traveling, and she was too tired to do that. And she, you know, she gave up a lot to do a career that she maybe felt ambivalent about so that I could be here. And you know, I think back to like the types of things that I complained about as a kid, Like I wasn't allowed to like go out. I wasn't allowed to hang out with friend ends, Like the first time I went to the movies with someone other than my parents. I was like eighteen in college, you know, and I feel like I was very much straddled between like two different cultures and two different lifestyles. And I don't know if guilt or shame is necessarily the word that I would use, But you know, I've been doing a lot of I've been taking care of my own mental health since the pandemic, and also learning more about mental health and the context of personal finance. And you know, I took an interpersonal neurobiology course for practitioners of color last year, and I mentioned this because one of the things that we unpacked was just like what our parents' capacity was in survival mode versus the capacity they were able to give to us, right, And so there's a lot of frustration that I have, potentially, like in the short term, around like how my parents are and like, you know, their limitation in terms of being able to talk about you know, what I consider like deeper issues or issues that you know, go above like the Maslow hierarchy of needs of survival where we're able to talk about, you know, more transcendent things. And I also, while I have that frustration, I also recognize that they gave they gave me the opportunity to be able to build that capacity right and to be able to have the capacity to like go to therapy, to think about my mental health, to think about what makes me happy. You know. One of the things that I think about all the time is like, when so I have a literature degree, surprised, what, Yeah, you were like studying finance And I was like, I didn't study finance, actually, But I think about that all the time because I remember telling my parents I wanted to study literature and my dad's reaction was literally like, you know, we could just buy a car instead of sending you to college. And my mom was like, do whatever you want, huh. And that was a moment for me where I was like, oh my gosh. She was like, I'm going to keep you as safe as I possibly can in

the way that I know best for eighteen years and then go go to college. Study whatever you want. I will pay for it, you know, will apply for all the loans, whatever it takes, right, And she didn't even blink an eye when I told her that I was going to study literature and like read books for four years. Wow, yeah, and I think that was huge. So you did you studied literature? You read books for four years? I did. I did read books, put on plays, learned printmaking. I went deep full of real arts. Huh, what's your water? You see, Santa Barbara? Okay, nice, I hear there's a party school too, so you probably got a good amount of partying. It is a party school. And I also went to So there's this little college within the university called the College of Creative Studies, which is exactly what it sounds like. And it was a school within the school where like I didn't have any prerequisites I could take every class, pass fail, I could drop a class up until the last day. I had no grades unless I wanted to. I could change the past fail or grade structure up until the last day. So it was like the type of freedom that I never experienced in like academic life before, because I was straight a student except for PE, you know. But yeah, and yeah right, you know, I had to pick. I had to pick math or PE, and I guess I pick math. But like to go to a school and not have to worry about my grades and like take anything I wanted. I definitely remember, like taking a couple of classes, and I remember I took one class and like I wanted to like my friends, we're planning a trip to Cancoon and it was during the final of one of my classes. So instead of taking the final, I just dropped the class and went to camacoud a good time. Yeah that's great. I mean you landed on your feet just fine. You're out here running your own business and things seem to be going well. So yeah, I can't fault you for that. Too shabby, right, So how do you get this literature degree and then you make this to me what sounds like a one eighty and you're like, let's get into financial services and study for this really hard exam and become a certified financial planner. What happened there? That actually happened in college too. So I answered an ad on Craigslist for a summer job. I was looking for something where I could stay in Santa Barbara during the summer, and I answered an ad for something called the Money Camp and it was financial literacy camps for kids and teens between ages ten to seventeen, and I you know. I did it for a summer, and I remember having to learn all the content as I was teaching it, right, I was learning about budgeting and saving and credit cards and entrepreneurship and the stock market and real estate, all of these things, like for the first time ever in my life. My parents never taught me. I never got in school, like maybe I learned how to write a check and in high school, I don't know. But for the first time, because I had to teach these kids about money, I was learning about money and I was like, oh my god, I don't have a credit card. I didn't know what a credit score was. And so I was like nineteen, like going in and learning all of these things. And that was the beginning of me being like, wait a minute, Like why didn't I get this when I was in school. Why did my parents know to teach this to me? You know, because my mom learned all this stuff the hard way, but it never occurred to her to like teach me any of it, you know. And so I did that for three of my four years in college, and I was doing teacher trainings. I was training other people how to run these money camps, and that's really what set it off, and in my last year money Camp, one of the camp counselors and I really hit it off. And she was a teacher, and so she taught me a lot of new things actually about teaching kids, and she and I hit it off to the point where we started our own company together as we were finishing Money Camp, and it's called Pockets Change, and it is in its current iteration it's a hip hop and finance program for youth. But it started off as us looking at each other and saying, this should be in every school in America. And really we just started writing curriculum and we just started writing what we learned. And as I left Money Camp and went into wealth management, which is the whole reason why I moved to New York was to really start my financial planning career. Here. I got my foot in the door at a financial planning firm, at a wealth management firm through one of the people who I trained in a teacher training. I reached out to him and I was like, Hey, I'm moving to New York. Do you have any job openings, you know? And he said, yeah, why don't you come an interview. Let's see if they'll see if something's here for you, and I started doing operations in the wealth management firm and writing this curriculum at the same time for teachers. And you know, she and I spent two years writing it's like three hundred page curriculum, and we went to present it at a big teacher conference with like six thousand teachers and we were like, Oh my god, we're gonna sell so much curriculum. This is amazing. We got an opportunity to present there and we exhibited it in front of all these teachers and every teacher came by was like, oh my god, that's a great idea. And then they found out they had to teach it themselves and they were like, oh that's not for me. Yeah, and we sold not one curriculum. No, oh well, it sounds like an invaluable fail, you know what I mean. It was. It was it was that if you build it, they will come. Thing. It's not true at all. So we went back to the drawing board and we just said, listen, why don't we teach these ourselves. We're still passionate about this. We know how to teach these things. We wrote the curriculum for it. So we just started reaching out to organizations. And this is all while we had full time jobs in our respective industry. So she continued to be in the education space and I continued to be in

financial services, and we started just like reaching out to organizations and seeing if we'd go teach the actual curriculum that we were teaching. And then around twenty fourteen, i'd say, we brought in my husband Dialect to do a guest teaching spot because he's a hip hop educator and actually had a hip hop curriculum that was also a job and career program, a job prep and career program, and an organization had asked us to teach a career and job prep workshop and we of course said yes, even though we did have one, and so luckily we brought him in and the program director loved him, and that's really where we saw the beginnings of hip hop and finance as a concept when teaching youth, and so that's where Pockets changes now. But brunch and budget came in a little bit later down the road. I'm gonna be honest, I really hated my first year in wealth management so much so it sucked. It was kind of boring, it was hard, it was and you were an OPS. I was an OS, so like my first project was like I spent the first like four months transferring, like an insurance agent had left one agency and came to our agency and took a thousand clients with him. So you know, I was filling out a thousand applications to open new accounts, like the first four months I was there just like every day, that was what I was doing. Yeah, in two thousand and eight, I remember because I was working at a financial planning firm. In twenty ten, I remember to open up one account for one client, the OPS team would walk over to my desk and give me like a twenty five page stack of paper. They're like, the client needs to sign in seven different spots, and I remember being like, do you want the money or not? Because you're blocking the dollars by giving me twenty five pieces of dead tree paper that I need to put into the computer and then get an older person to sign. Like it never made sense, but we're we're way, way, way way beyond that now. It's incredible. Yes, thank gosh, oh my gosh. Yeah, I remember we sent a lot of FedEx documents out with all those tabs to make sure they didn't miss a signature all that stuff. So I had to like tab up paperwork and all this stuff, and it was just like, what am I even doing here? I'm supposed to. My plan was to like be here for two years and like then go teach kids about money, and like a year in I was like, what is happening? Is the kids education program? Is that a nonprofit or for profit? First question? It's both? Actually now it's both very smart hybrid, of course it is. I expect nothing less from you. Okay, that's very smart. Hey, Son, I was thinking about buying some stocks while they're low. I've heard this is called buying the dip and that it's a wise money move. Hold on, Dad, that phrase is punchy and it does sound tempting, but it's important to be cautious when it comes to investing in the stock market. What do you mean, Son, Buying the dip means attempting to buying investments like stocks or funds when the price is low and the hope that

the price will rise again. But the stock market is unpredictable and there's no guarantee that you're buying it when it's at its lowest, and oftentimes By waiting for a dip to happen, you could miss out on gains that none of us can predict. Oh, I see, so it could be risky to buy the dip. Exactly. It's important to do your research and understand the risks before investing in the stock market. Instead of trying to time the market, you could use a dollar cost average buying strategy. What's that? A dollar cost average buying strategy involves investing the fixed amount of money at regular intervals, regardless of the stock price, for example, investing two hundred dollars or ten percent out of every paycheck. It can help spread out your risk and minimize the impact of market fluctuations. Well that's a good idea. Thanks for the advice, son. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle weird finance. I guess my next question is do you get to like Is that what really is exciting for you? Or have you been lucky and blessed and really manifested your dreams? I suppose in terms of feeling like lit up by all of your work, by the fact that you do get to teach kids, but you also get to work with clients one on one. I guess what I'm getting at is does one subsidize the other or is it all the same? To you? That is a great question. So what's interesting is so I was I got the opportunity to apply for a financial planning associate job I'd say like two years in at my wealth management firm, and that is where things really shifted for me, and that's where the idea for Brunch and Budget really came for was I went from doing ops to actually like looking at client's financial plans, being able to sit in on a meeting, sit in on calls, and really seeing the financial planning happening. And at the same time, our friends didn't know anyone in finance, and they were coming up to me at parties and asking me questions about like what's an IRA, Like what is you know? How do I save money? What's my credit score? All these things that I was like teaching these kids and now I was like talking to adults about it. And that is really where the idea for Brunch and Budget came was. I was sitting around at a party with a friend and we were buy a fire pit in Brooklyn, classic scene, and she came up to me and said, Pam, I've never checked my credit score before in my life, but I'm so afraid to look. And I just said, do you want to do it over brunch or something? And her whole body relaxed and she was like, oh my god, like a brunch and budget And that's literally where the name came from. But at that moment, I remember I had that I had that brunch with her, she made me food, we checked her credit score, and immediately afterwards, I emailed like as many friends as I had email addresses for, and I was just like, hey, if you want to help with your finances, like, just make me a meal or buy me a meal and let's talk right because I realized that like my friends did it, not only did it know who to go to, but were so terrified because they didn't even know questions to ask. They were worried someone was going to judge them. They'd never even talked to their friends about this. And so that's really where brunch and budget came from. And it felt like brunch and budget and pocket change were satisfying, like two ends of a spectrum, you know, where it's like. Of course, my friends didn't get this information because I never got it. And then on the youth side, it's like, oh, and if we can start teaching the next generation now, then maybe they won't have to be in the same position that we were. And I don't know actually teach kids anymore. That is actually Dialect is now the director of pedagogy there and also co owner. I would consider him like the co founder of this iteration where it's hip hop and finance with our eed and longtime friend Andrea Ferrero, and so they actually pocket Change is fully like its own thing, teaching kids about finance, and I will come in and guess and be like the CFP like in the room, or like teach about casual projections or some complex things. And I still love getting the opportunity to teach kids, but I feel like I've really moved into this space now where I'm trying to, especially after everything I learned in interpersonal neurobiology, like trying to like understand like what inner child in us is like is where that shame and fear and embarrassment came within us that certainly happened in our childhoods and our young adulthood, where now we need to unravel and unpack all of that and really understand that the behaviors that we have today come from this history and potential trauma that we had around money when we were younger. How vulnerable do you want to get today, Pam? Oh my god, so vulnerable? Give it to me. Okay, I want to know. Because I did this crazy like self hypnosis last December. December, before this last one, right before my book came out, I was starting to feel scared and I was starting to be like, oh no, you wrote a book with a big publisher, which means you're asking to be seen, you know what I mean. You don't like sign a deal with Penguin to not be seen. And so I was like trying to find ways to feel okay, like to feel right within right, to feel like I'm going to get a one star review on Amazon. Someone's going to say the book is a garbage and I need to feel okay about that. And so I did this like self hypnosis where you know you're supposed to go like in the subconscious and you know, try to explore an early memory. And something that came up for me which has been impacting my finances, which is jarring and shocking and amazing, was that I felt like this really really early childhood wound that I didn't deserve safety and security, And it came from a lot of different things, Like it came from the dynamics in my household, it came from being queer, It came from being brown in a white world, short in a tall world, a woman in a man's world, all those things. And since I've really

worked on addressing and healing that, I've noticed that, like revenue streams have gotten like, you know, money is coming from places I didn't think it would come from. I'm making more money and I'm feeling less weird about spending. And so that's me putting my nugget on the table of one of the gnarly crazy, you know, wounds that I found in myself, and I want to know what's yours. Oh my gosh, I love that you brought this up because I am currently working with a thematic eating coach right now and we have not talked about food once. Wow. Yeah, that's not true. She we like talked about food maybe for like one session where she was like, do an experiment out something, But for all of the sessions that we've had, the thing that you just said is what came up for me. So we talked a lot about my childhood and like kind of constantly being in what she called a hyper vigilant state, and so safety feels like being in control, being hyper vigilant, always being able to like guess what the needs of the room are, right, guess what the needs of the family members are. And so that is how you know. It's served me in a lot of ways. It was very much a survival tactic, in a survival instinct. But because that to me equal safety, it feels unsafe when I'm not hyper vigilant, right when I'm not always knowing where every dollar is going where, I'm not always like in full control of like how the money is coming in, where it's coming from, knowing exactly what like my team members are doing at all times. And that's something that I realized I had to start letting go of in the last couple of years just because it was impossible. But there was always still something. There's always this gnawing feeling of like, oh, but what are they doing right now? You know, even though I would filter myself with them and working with a semantic eating coach and understanding like the relationship that I had between like this hyper vigilant state and needing that to feel safe is something I'm still working on it. I'm just aware of it now, ye right, I haven't really unraveled it, and I feel like I'm still in the midst of in that like limbo state of this is who I was. I can see who I might become over there, but like right now, I'm like, who the fuck am I? Yeah? So that's where I'm at. And I think that it's showing up in my money in a lot of ways too. And I think that it's showing up in my business in a lot of ways. Do you work with clients in this capacity? Do you help them kind of unpack what these things are? Right, let's just call them core wounds. You can use other language if you'd like. But is that something you do as a financial planner or do you roofer that out to like a therapist? How does that work? So we are also kind of in this in between state as well, because we do a little bit of that work. But it started getting to the point where it was like we should we be doing this kind of work, right, And this is why we took this interpersonal neurobiology course, and in particular in our Sea Change Program, which is financial planning specifically for people of color. We wanted to understand how to help people unpack these kinds of things and how that's related to money, and also understand what we could equip ourselves with and where the line was for us in terms of like okay, and that's something to talk to your therapist about. So we are in the midst, I would say right now of creating more formalized programming around that, because we've found ourselves doing it informally because we found it coming up. You know, a lot of clients like would jokingly say like, oh my god, that was like a therapy session, and we had to be like, no, it wasn't, but I'm glad you enjoyed it. Because those kinds of things would come up and we would walk them through that and talk them through like, hey, this is why that's happening. And because our team has met with so many people, we've been able to see patterns and being able to say, hey, it's not just you, You're not alone. This is very common, right, This is something that comes up a lot. And so that kind of sense of relief that you bring someone and also like and also these are the solutions that have worked for other people, try out what works for you. I think that the work that we're moving towards is let's uncover this, but we are not your therapist, so let's also figure out the financial action steps to take to address this and also acknowledge it, but not let it keep you stuck. Because that's where we were at with clients last year. I'd say, is we help them acknowledge it, but we weren't sure how to help them kind of get unstuck. And so that's the evolution that's happening this year with the course that we took that was going to be Actually my next question was, because I struggle with this in my work too, is how do you just simply acknowledge that marginalization is real and there are all these impacts to like living in a racist system, but not to dwell on it right and not to like get to to two identified with being a victim. And that's been an interesting I think it seems like a lot of people are waking up to this idea, or at least kind of scratching the surface and trying to recognize that the acknowledgement seems like when I say it a lot of them, like it seems weird that that's what a lot of people are looking for. But I see that reflected in my own audience, Like so many people are so excited about my book just simply because I'm like, hey, guys, it's fucked up out there. Huh yep, Like cool, I mentioned that, but like where's our agency? So it sounds like you're you're also trying to find your footing in that space as well. Yeah, that is really the other side of it, And I think that that is also why a lot of folks joint the change was because we actually just mentioned the racial wealth divide and said like, hey, this is a real thing. This is a real obstacle that you have to deal with, Like the system is designed for you to fail, by the way, you know, And I think that we had

the action steps to get people out of it. But the other barriers are things that we're working on addressing now. And it comes down to like the simplest things, like or what we think in the financial industry are simple, like filling out an application, getting some paperwork in you know, Like we've started looking into paperwork anxiety, and that took me down the rabbit hole of the history of paperwork and how the history of paperwork. Yeah, yeah, and it's of course it's racist, of course it is. But the paperwork started off as something that a business filled out for you to make their back end easier. It would be a relationship builder and also something that's efficient on the ops side. And the switch really happened in the twentieth century when large social welfare program started being created. The government decided to put the onus of completing the paperwork on the people receiving the social welfare benefits, which of course largely affected communities of color. And then paperwork went from like a relationship building tool to now a barrier to access because now you fill out paperwork and if you don't, oh well, if you feel it out wrong, oh well, you know x y Z. Like I think about everything from like why we have to do, you know, do our own taxes when the government already has our information all the way down to like why did we have to fill out like a student loan forgiveness form when they know how much debt we have and they know our tax returns, They could have just like done it. They couldn't know we had to fill out a form, a simple form, right, you know, excuse me, an idea we should have like paperwork parties, you know, where we're just get on a zoom and everybody fills out paperwork together, and it's just like we're all here suffering and we're you and I are just energetically being positive, right, And oh my gosh, I love that because we do forms of that in Sea Change and in our one on one program Budge, where we actually we call it financial advocate calls, but we'll literally sit there and do paperwork with clients or and accounts with clients because or like call a customer service with clients, right, Because even those kinds of calls, it's like vocal paperwork. That's like verbal paperwork. Yea. Even knowing how to as the right questions is on a phone call. I notice some of my friends they'll hit me up and they're like, hey, I'm getting screwed for a thing. You know, I don't know how to get out of this. Can you just help me? And I'm like, wow, yeah, okay, Like let's get on the chat and I'll tell you exactly, like you know what to say, how to say it? You know, my collections. Background definitely comes in hand sometimes, yeah, totally well, and the paperwork parties thing, I'm like, those are the kinds of things that go beyond acknowledging that the system sucks, right and that you know that you are, that you are like a cog in it or whatever. Is like, how can we take agency over it? How can we bring joy to things that people

have taken all the joy out of? And I think that's such a huge part of that's such a huge part of our work, and it's really like the evolution of our company in a lot of ways, Like this year for us is all about like getting shameless about money, and that's a big part of It's like, fuck, yeah, I'm growing to a paperwork party. You want to come? Yeah? I love it, Pam, I'm so enamored with your program See Change, And for a lot of reasons. I love that it's a group program. Am I correct in saying that it's a group program, right or yes and no, because that's that's been an evolution too. I feel like the last time we spoke it was a group program, it was a slighting scale, right is it's still on a slighting scale? So I did I did some research around like what people are calling group programs in financial planning, and if you don't mind me going down the rabbit hole with you, let's do it group financial coaching, group financial planning. From what I found, our small cohorts or a very short period of time, usually between thirty days to three months, And with sea Change and with all our programs, we found that it takes at least a year to really start to feel like this work that you're doing is integrated into your life, right, And so we started off doing group in sea Change when we were beta testing it, but we realized was it was more about community and one on one. So it's about being able to have access to a coach to like message them to ask a very specific personal question, but also to be able to go to a group or community in a community setting and ask questions of the community or hear other people's ideas and things like that. So we have a group setting. But what's interesting is that it's not like the group is like learning all of the same things together. It's that everyone is going through their own individualized process within a community where we're all doing the same thing. If that makes sense. I love that. Yeah, and sane changes, specifically for people of color who are trying to build wealth. Correct, Yes, yep, exactly. I mean I think I already probably know the answer. But what prompted you ultimately to create something like this? Yeah, it was really just like beating people for brunch. And you know, when I was in wealth management, we had four hundred clients and I can think of one client in my head who was not white. And when I started meeting with people for brunch, I was meeting with way more people of color. And I realized that my certified financial planner designation did not equit me for being able to serve them, and so I had to learn a lot of things on my own and also use the strategies that I learned in a different way. For instance, I like to say that our clients of color all first generation something right, first generation in this country, first generation to graduate college, first generation to have a professional salary, first generation to be able to buy a home right. And so all of these things combined often meant that our clients of color had more student loan debt, they were the financial safety net for their families. They didn't have a history of homeownership in their family, and so there was this like extended family planning. That aspect of it alone was like something that the CFP not only didn't teach you how to do, but kind of discourage you from doing. You know, they were very like nuclear family focused. I started noticing more and more patterns around like working with our clients of color and also dialect deny. We started a podcast in twenty fourteen also called Brunch and Budget, and as we started doing more and more research for the podcast, we started running into the racial well divide and all of these stats. We started learning about these stats that proved anecdotally what I was seeing with my clients, and we realized there isn't a space for people of color to really talk about this because one, we were taught in our communities that it was taboo to talk about money, and for a lot of our parents, they didn't know how to teach us, and they got us to the point where're like, Okay, you went to college. Now you're going to be the one who can help us, and so where can you go where you can really learn about your personal finances through the lens of someone who's first generation something, someone who has more debts, someone who has more financial obligations and not have a financial planner tell you like, oh, we'll just cut your family off, then you'll be able to save money, which has literally happened to a number of my clients. And to have someone understand like, hey, your core values are different than the core values that I was taught as a CFP, and so let's start from your core values and go from there, you know. And I think that is really where this idea for see Change came from. So is it enrollment on a regular basis? Do you have like windows where people can sign up? Tell us more about how people can sign up for the program. Yeah, you can join anytime. That's one of the reasons why we shifted it from a group program two more of a community base and one on one program is because we had we used to have a closed We used to have a closed enrollment and people would wait for two three months for the enrollment to happen. It was like, oh, wait, but I needed it three months ago, and now I'm in a different place, or now I actually can't afford it anymore. And so we wanted to really catch people again, meeting people where they are and catch people when they needed us, and so you can enroll any time and just start integrating yourself into the community. We have weekly brunch club Q and A, so you can come and talk to a financial coach for an hour. You get assigned a financial coach. You can message anytime one on one. You can ask questions of the community at any time, and this year we're actually going to start hosting block parties. Virtual block parties. We're gonna have experts come in and chat with our sea Change members about specific

topics. Put me down for one, I'm inviting myself. Yes, oh my gosh, I was going to ask you that offline, but thank you for saying that out loud. So yeah, it's perfect. Yeay. I appreciate you taking the time and getting vulnerable with me and sharing your store, your path, where you've been, where you're going. I just want to say I'm really, really grateful somebody who's equipped and as smart as you with all this experience, is giving back to the community. So before I let you go, Pam, I do want to hit you with some rapid fire questions. If you've if you're if you're ready for them, I'm ready. I think I'm all right, Okay, So My first question is do you have anything that you purchased that you feel like was money well spent. And maybe it might on the outside look really frivolous, but to you, it's it's really meaningful for whatever reason. Dice in vacuums I remember I was like, yeah, you know, right, But I bought a dice in vacuum when I was twenty three, not thirty five. First of all, I've only seen it in the wild. I've never bought one or used. Well, but tell us why it's worth the price tag? Oh my god, And it seems ridiculous because I at twenty three spent three hundred and fifty dollars on a vacuum, which is right, I know, I know. But the thing about Dyson's is they're just so satisfying to use. They are, and I hate cleaning, so I'm not someone who's like, oh I love cleaning, Oh my gosh, vacuums are so great. I don't like vacuuming, and I always think vacuuming doesn't do anything, and like it's a show. I know, right, But my mom owned a Dyson and I remember using it at her house, probably when I went back from college and I was like, oh my god, this thing is amazing. And now I've evolved to the Dyson cordless vacuum. Yeah, don't even get me started. It will change your life. How much was that Pam? That was also three hundred and fifty dollars because I did the frugal thing and bought the model right before the new model that came out. So what I'm hearing is the financial planner is giving you advice to spend money on something that is satisfying and the quality is really great and you can still find ways to be frugal about it. Yeah. I love this. I would have never pegged you, as a dice in vacuum kind of a person, what's one piece of advice, financial or otherwise that you'd give to your younger self. So I would tell my younger self to start therapy sooner and look for a woman of color therapist. I did therapy in college, just like situational therapy, for some things that I was going through in college, and it was a great experience. And then I tried looking for a therapist when I came to New York because it was a big life transition, and like met with three therapists and kind of hated them all, and I was like, Okay, I don't need therapy. I could just talk to my friends. And then the pandemic happened and I started seeing a therapist during the pandemic and she was great. But then I started seeing a therapist who was a Filipino woman, and that was the game changer for me. If I had possibly started working on these things sooner in my twenties, in my early thirties, than I don't know if I would be in a different place, but I feel like I would be a little bit more at peace. Heal your wounds, y'all, heal them all, right. Next question, Pam, did you have any financial superstitions growing up? Am I allowed to share my parents superstitions. I don't know if I believe them, but the things that come to mind are the money. Frog Frogs are apparently a sign of prosperity and money in Chinese superstition, and so when I was growing up, my mom would always buy frog figurines. I had no idea, but we just had so many frog figurines in the house. And finally, I think when I was a teenager, I realized it was like a sign of money and prosperity. I just thought it was like my mom's favorite animal, but like, no, it was about that. And then the other thing that she had was she had a lot of laughing buddhas around, and she would tell you to like rub their belly for like prosperity and money and things like So, yeah, your mom would make you rub the belly. Yeah, I love. Yeah. How many frogs are we talking? Just for context? I wouldn't even know, because, oh my gosh, that's a really good question. I don't think I've ever counted, But I would say, because my mom loved figurines in general, but I would say, like at least a third of the figurines were frogs. Wow, okay, yeah, a lot of frogs. A lot of frogs. Last one is do you have any financial fumbles that you can look back on and laugh at? Yes. I feel like the biggest one that I had was I moved to New York with like a thousand dollars in the bank and like three thousand dollars in credit card debt and no job, which, like that happens, right, people do that, sure, But when I told my mom I was moving to New York. I told her I was moving or a job, and she surprised me with a visit to help me move in. Oh no, and so I had to pretend to go to work. No you didn't while she was here. Why did you go to the library to McConnell. What did she do? Well? I actually did have some job interviews, so I did be like, you'd have to go to job interviews, but I had like two and she was here for like a week, so I just like went to the park. Oh my god, for like I'm so, I just remember sitting in Bryant Park for like hours. Wow, Like, okay, this is New York. Oh my gosh, Pam, that's hilarious. Thank you for sharing that. It has been an absolute joy, pleasure chatting with you about money, about your journey. Where can the people follow along and where can the people find you on the internet. Yeah, so you can find Brunch and Budget at Brunch and Budget A and D on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok. We're starting on TikTok and Brunch and Budget dot com to learn more about everything that we do. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Pam. Yeah, thank you for having me This was honestly so fun one of the funnest podcast conversations I've had. I'm so flattered. We'll have to have

you come back sometime. I love it, Queen Fine funess. And now it's time for the economic update with financial astrology Susan Goodell. Susan is our resident economic cosmonaut that does what many humans have done before us for thousands of years. She looks to the stars to better understand our economic present and to predict our financial futures. Susan, welcome back for another economic outlook. March was a doozy. Can you walk us through some of the things you thought that were going to happen, or maybe some of the things that you didn't expect to happen, But tell us all about how hindsight is twenty twenty for sure, for sure, for sure. Nice to be here again with you, Paco. Yeah, when we talk last time, who would have thought that we'd have a bank crisis to have to deal with? I didn't, you know. That's the nature of market moving events. Do we really see them coming? Not necessarily, but when particularly from astrologers. You know, astrologers are fantastic. Monday morning quarterbacks you know, when something happens, you can go back and look at a chart and go, oh, look that made all the sense in the world. But did you see it coming? Not necessarily? And I'm in that crowd too. In March when the Silicon Valley Bank had grabbed all the headlines, its stock was halted on March ten and the day it got taken over by regulators. So that's when you start looking at the charts. And what I found really fascinating was that the incorporation chart for the bank from nineteen eighty three had just had its first of three exact Pluto square transits to its natal incorporation chart. Now this is different than its first trade stock chart. You look at the incorporation chart for things that happened to the company events, and its first exact Pluto square was on February twenty four, the day that its auditors had given its a clean bill of health. Two weeks later, it's taken over by regulators. A Pluto transit is this first Pluto square is a transit of a test of your transformation. It's a test of survival. How have you been doing in this first twenty five percent potentially of a two hundred and forty eight year company life. How have you been doing? What's the report card have? Do you need to make little tweaks? Or is this like, oh boy, big collapse? And when I saw it, it rang a bell because I had worked for a company once that went bankrupt at its first Pluto square, and so, oh, isn't that interesting? So now I'm going to start watching companies. They're having Pluto squares on an annual basis, but for Silicon Valley Bank it gets another one on July twenty of this year, and then January one of twenty twenty four, So there may still be some storyline involved with this, but anyway, Pluto squares something to pay attention to in the financial world. I had no idea what a Pluto square was until this moment, So thank you for walking us through and educating us. Sure, how are things looking for April? Well, the big news in April is Thursday and Friday, April twenty and twenty one, and it's kind of jam packed together and really interesting together. On the twentieth there's a new moon solar eclipse at twenty nine aries. Now this matches up with the new moon the previous month on March twenty one at zero aries. So you know, like you have a blue moon. When there's two full moons in a month, and you have two new moons in the same sign in a month, it's called a black moon. The new moon in Aries is still about new things, new ideas, new aggression, new moving forward in some way, and so it relates to the one on March twenty one, which is right when the Fed raised rates by only a quarter point because of all the bank issues going on the previous week and hinted that maybe it could take a new little take, maybe there are other things that it could do. Okay, well, I think that's going to get revisited now with this new moon solar eclipse on the twentieth, particularly because the lips is about having even deeper passion and more passionate about this new idea, like you grab onto it more. It's more intense. Well, and that's all well and good, except that four hours later, four hours after the moon and sun are conjunct at twenty nine aries, the Sun moves into Taurus. Not Taurus. Is like, okay, let's chill, let's see, let's take our time. And so the Sun moving into Taurus right afterwards, and then in another twelve hours into the new moon, the Sun squares Pluto in Aquarius. So right after the new moon is passionate, more even more committed. New moon, you get the Sun that says, hold your horses, and is squaring Pluto that says, oh, maybe not so fast with this transformation business stuff. Let's hang on, let's see. And then Mercury turns retrograde the next day, so much action, susan, and so Mercury says, slow down, let's review, let's really see what this is. So I think, even though that there could be real intense market movement and things going on on the twentieth, it slows down really fast by the time Mercury hits its rotrigrade the next day, on the twenty first. So and I think you have to wait until it's resolution for Mercury to the Sun to figure all this out, until mid May, pretty much the whole time the Sun's and Taurus. Mercury doesn't go direct again until May fifteen, and not out of its shadow until the twenty fourth of May. I think we're going to be in a period of review, and the FED meets during a Mercury retrograde period in early May, and OPEC just decided to reduce output. It looks like Crudeau prices are rising, which means that energy prices could rise. They're a big component in the inflation rates CPI, and but you don't get April CPI data until mid May while mercury is still retrograde and we're doing all this reviewing. So I think we're kind of in a limbo period with markets really in what could be next until we get through the mercury intrograd Well, I was just appreciating this little rally that we've had over the last several days, but I will cool my expectations and not get too excited about anything around the bend. The other thing that I think it will be fun to watch in April is Venus, the planet that rules money, goes out of bounds on the eighteenth, and that means it's outside the parameters that the Sun typically travels by declination. And what it means is that Venus has free rain to do kind of whatever it wants. It can do very unexpected things when it is out of bounds, and Mars has been out of bounds for a while, and both of them will be out of bounds from April eighteen through May, if through when the FED meets in early May. And so Venus and Mars are often trigger planets when you're looking at prices and that sort of thing, and so to have them both out of bounds setting up I think for a really potentially volatile period until they calm down a little bit. This isn't like, you know, sometimes I wish I didn't know these things, because I'm just sitting here, ignorant and happy watching my portfolio go up a little. And now you're telling me Venus is going out of bounds. Didn't even though that was a thing, didn't even know that was a possibility. So I mean, in the same way that March stunned me with the bank run, a cute little bank run, I will again keep my eyes peeled, my ear to the ground, and you know, expect things to get a little out of hand around April eighteenth through April twentieth. Yeah, yeah, exactly, And we'll see how a week come through it. But I think it'd be really interesting. You know. Eclipses are always good in terms of potential volatility. They make for exceptional excitement. Great, well you heard it. Hear folks on Weird Finance exceptional excitement in the near future for the April Economic Outlook. Thank you so much for guiding us looking to the stars and helping us understand the financial markets a little bit better. Susan, You're very welcome. See you next time. Goebye, take care. Here we are at the end of another episode of Weird Finance, which is an iHeartMedia production and is simply not possible without the help of many wonderful, impairing and hardworking and talented individuals like my wonderful super producer Ramsey Youngs. He produced, edited, did some sound design, and sang a little bit on this episode. Thank you so much Susan Goodell for her astrological reading and economic insights for this week's segment called the Economic Outlook. Thank you to my friends Jenna Parker and Gabe Senna for lending their voices for this week's DSA. Our theme song was written and performed by me and my dear dear Jenna Parker and Andrew Parker. If you have any comments, maybe suggestions, if you want to be part of the show, or if you want to ask me a question about money, give us a call. At eight three three, asked Paco. That's eight three three two seven five seventy two two six, or you can send us an email at weird Finance Pod at email dot com. All right, well that's it. We'll see you here next time, and in the meantime, take care,