Remember those times when you didn’t have to worry about money? Remember those times when you just acted like a kid with no responsibilities or consequences (unless you have immigrant parents)? Not going to lie with you, but I missed those days. When I think of money, there’s something in mind that I can’t avoid: the bloody stress – to pay bills, get any luxury you want but can’t afford, ration it for food, and heck, even travel to a place you want to visit despite not knowing the language. And yeah, yeah, time to bust your ass to work (the message’s clear). Money was one of those things that I didn’t pay full attention to until my late teens. It was my senior year in high school (warning disclaimer: it was a few weeks before the COVID lockdown) and didn’t know what financial literacy was until my social studies, Mr. Pilios, taught us at least the basics of it [during Google classroom meetings – and how funny that those lessons kept with me unlike the others]. How to save, invest, and manage capital, alongside not getting into debt and being financially unstable (i.e., broke). Barely remember those concepts and it started to come back after an incident that I had to turn things around right now or never, exceeding my expectations, saving some buck for my place, and giving some money to my parents if they struggle back in Honduras. So, I was like, no funny games anymore and time to hustle – suerte para mi, I was getting side money from odd jobs (ni hablemos de eso, porfa), paid internships, football, and those annoying middle schoolers at the Bronx.

But again, I was thankful enough to learn those concepts and more or less practice them daily despite doubts about it, even my godmother called out my BS for being ”financially careless” (which I’m not trying to be), and lastly, taking every advice about money management no matter what (when turning down my ego to learn useful for once…into consideration). Peace out.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.