10 AAPI Financial Influencers You Should Know About
May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month! As a biracial Filipina financial therapist myself, in addition to the excuse to eat everything ube, I’m highlighting some of my fellow AANHPI folks in the personal finance space to celebrate. Not only do these creators provide actionable personal finance tips, they all include elements of their lived experience, talk about causes that matter, and aren’t afraid to take a stand to find ways to make personal finance more inclusive and accessible.
To support them (and me, wink wink), follow them on social, subscribe to their podcasts, read their blogs, and advocate for them to come and speak at your organizations!
Let’s dive in to meet, or re-meet, some amazing AANHPI personal finance content creators.
Berna Anat
Berna Anat is a Financial Hype Woman, which is her way of saying she creates financial education content that is not only easy to understand but fun and shame-free. She shares money advice from her lived experience, which includes paying off $50,000 in debt and coming from an immigrant household. While you might love her for her hot-and-approachable money takes, I love Berna for her BTS stories of her hanging out with her family and attending dance classes. Before she became the face of her brand @HeyBerna, Berna was the Teen Community Lead at Instagram, the Teen Programs Director for the YMCA of New York City, and a freelance writer and video producer.
Website: HeyBerna
Book: Money Out Loud
Podcast: Money Please by Betches
Ramit Sethi
Ramit Sethi is a money expert that believes in teaching people how to focus on $30,000 decisions instead of $3 ones. In other words? How can you earn more and drastically reduce the most common expenses, such as housing and transportation? He asserts that too many people focus on whether or not they can buy a coffee and not enough on making decisions that will take them much further in their Rich Life journey. I love how he acknowledges that money is political and doesn’t regurgitate old tropes about the importance of “rugged individualism” like so many other folks in the personal finance space. Ramit’s also unafraid to speak out about how money intersects with politics. He said, “You can simultaneously acknowledge personal responsibility and real systemic problems.”
Website: I Will Teach You to Be Rich (includes a book, podcast, and Netflix show)
Paco De Leon
Paco de Leon owns a bookkeeping agency for creatives, but more than that, she teaches money advice that you can actually understand. She combines practical advice while empathizing with the systemic issues that impact most of us. Paco knows this inherently as she was an educated financial planner and was flat-broke. She shares her story of riding her bike to work to save money even though she was doing financial planning for folks with high net worths (read: 7- and 8-figures). She started doing the emotional work (hey-o!) to unpack the money messages she’d received as a daughter of immigrants and queer person. With time, she learned how to rewrite the narrative to create her own story.
Website: Hell Yeah Group
Book: Finance for the People
Podcast: Weird Finance Podcast
Vivian Tu
YourRichBFF is Vivian’s way of educating the masses on personal finance jargon, concepts, and hacks. She does this all for free on various social media platforms. A daughter of Chinese immigrants, Vivian shares with her audience she learned knowledge from being a self-proclaimed former “Wall Street Girly,” with her down-to-earth and snappy takes. Vivian started her brand after her friends and colleagues kept coming to her asking for her thoughts and advice on all things personal finance. Vivian isn’t afraid to talk about how laws and policies impact our wallets–she’s addressed everything from abortion to the pink tax in her work.
Website: Your Rich BFF
Podcast: Networth and Chill
Julia Menez
Julia Menez is one of the go-to people in the world of travel hacking. Travel hacking is the art of leveraging points and miles to get free and reduced travel. What I love about Julia’s approach to travel hacking is that she acknowledges it can be hard to find people “in the game” who you identify with. Julia also knows how overwhelming it can be to get started and the anxiety that comes with wondering if you got the best redemption or opened up a card that makes the most sense for you. Her take? A points strategy that works for YOU is the best one! I had the privilege of joining Julia on her podcast to talk about travel hacking anxiety that comes up (yup, its very real) on her podcast.
Website: Geobreeze Travel
Podcast: Geobreeze Travel Podcast
Paula Pant
Paula Pant is a podcast host, writer, speaker, and media commentator on financial independence and real estate investing. She’s the host of the Afford Anything podcast that consistently puts out episodes with experts in the field of personal finance and answers listener questions. She draws from her experience earning between $21,000-$31,000 before she hit burnout and looked for a better (read: an actually sustainable) approach to work and money. While she focuses a lot on real estate investing, she covers so much more than that on Afford Anything. She also practices what she preaches. She talks about the importance of educating yourself on the things that matter, and Paula has been busy educating herself as the Knight-Bagehot Business and Economics Journalism Fellow at Columbia University!
Website: Afford Anything
Podcast: Afford Anything
Max Do
When a graphic design job brought native Californian Max to Chicago, he had to figure out quickly how to save money flying from the Midwest to Cali. He stumbled upon travel hacking and became excited to share his love of what seemed like magic (flights for $11?! Free lounge access?) with others. He set up travel hacking notifications on his Twitter, and started creating Instagram Carousels breaking down tips on plane travel, hotel stays, and racking up points via travel hacking, and has grown to have a successful YouTube channel, too! Max does a great job explaining what travel hacking is, shows the realities of the BTS of some of those “glamorous” redemptions (and whether or not he thinks they are worth it), and creates binge-able and understandable travel hacking content.
Website: Max Miles Points
YouTube: Max Miles Points
Catie Takimoto
Catie works as an art director in tech (she’s currently at Canva, and has Facebook and TOMS shoes on her resume as well), is transparent about how her high income helps her move toward her financial goals, is a thrifting QUEEN and is sharing with her audience how she’s moving toward FI, or financial independence. She started on her journey toward FI while living with her parents and did a spending challenge where she cut back on buying, and realized how much she had saved. At that time, she also learned the power of compound interest in retirement accounts. Catie started crunching numbers and realized that with the lifestyle tweaks she’d made, she could retire at 35 with $1.5M invested. Housing, transportation, and food are the biggest monthly expenses for most people. For Catie, she’s almost always had roommates or lived with her parents to reduce that high expense, especially in California. She skimps on the things that she’s not interested in, and isn’t afraid to splurge when it comes to having adventures on her way to FI.
Website: Millennial Money Honey
Phuong Luong
Phuong is a Certified Financial Planner and Educator at Just Financial who loves providing education and planning that emphasizes closing racial wealth divides and finding ways to practice economic justice. Phuong’s focus on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing means she believes in helping shift capital from extractive industries to ones with a stronger emphasis on community, restoration, and solidarity. In her financial planning for individuals and families, in addition to emphasizing ESG investing, she also helps her clients understand the power of community loan funds, land trusts, and co-ops. Her passion on the topic of restoration shines through in her column for Morningstar Financial, where she covers everything from student loan debt, the myth of the “Asian” client, and ways to invest outside of your 401k by investing—literally—in your community. Talk about investing in alignment with your values!
Phuong’s Morningstar Column
Jason Vitug
Jason Vitug is the author of two amazing books about money, “Happy Money, Happy Life,” and “You Only Live Once,” and the founder of the personal finance education business phroogal. Jason shares that he believes money is important, but it shouldn’t rule us. After seeing enough broke and wealthy people with similar sentiments of dissatisfaction and unhappiness, he made it his mission to help people by having a new, holistic approach to finances, that includes eight dimensions of wellness. Because at the end of the day? Our time is finite, but we can find ways to improve our time on this Earth.
Website: Phroogal.com
Get in Touch!
As a part of your anti-racism practice, it’s imperative to add to the voices you’re learning from, especially in the personal finance space. I’ve linked all these amazing folks’ work above, so please follow and hire them!
If you’re looking for a social-justice-oriented financial therapist who happens to be a mixed Filipina to talk to your organization about financial wellness, you can learn more about my work, the types of speaking engagements I love to do, and get in touch with me here.