In today's episode, I'm speaking with Maria Kamila González, the co-founder of Finanzo, a non-profit organization in Toronto that believes in making newcomers financially aware and has impacted the lives of 100,000 immigrants in the US and Canada.

Maria is a psychologist by training, which means that when she talks about money, she doesn't start with budgeting or spreadsheets. She starts with your childhood, your parents, and the patterns you inherited from them, as well as the patterns your culture or society drilled into you about money.

In her words, "How you treat money is how you treat everything else." Worth pausing on that for a bit, people.

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Maria and I chat about:

• The baseline assessment every newcomer should do before anything else
• How banks profit from immigrants' ignorance about how credit works
• How to handle "black tax" and family remittances
• Why financial planning is best done progressively
• The Finanzo origin story

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Dozie's Notes

A few things that struck me as I listened through this week's conversation:

1. With money, we're often struggling with the money habits we inherited from our parents and our culture's relationship with worthiness. To solve bad money patterns, one needs to tackle these two layers; the family and cultural layer. The family layer, which is what your parents modeled for you as a child, consciously or not. And the cultural layer, which is what colonisation embedded in entire populations about who deserves wealth and who doesn't. Money is tied closely to our identity.
2. Most people know the right financial move. Where it falls apart is actioning it. Most of us already know that high-interest credit card debt isn't great. But we keep collecting those credit cards like the souvenirs we buy at the duty-free shops. This behaviour is why Maria treats financial literacy as therapy.
3. The first step in taking control of your finances is understanding your baseline. Before any financial tool works, you need to understand where you stand, not just financially but psychologically. How much debt do you carry? How much are you sending home? But also: are you afraid of money? Do you feel you deserve wealth? Do you repeat the same financial mistakes every few years?

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Official Links

✅ Connect with Maria Kamila González on LinkedIn

✅ Check out the Finanzo website

One Ask

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