The Mindful Marketplace with Joel Skene

Transforming Personal Finance with Social Justice for Community Flourishing - Part 2

• Joel Skene / Diana Yanez

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Discover the transformative power of integrating social justice with personal finance as Diana Yanez, financial planner, and All the Colors founder, joins us once again for a compelling conversation. We'll guide you through the inspiring efforts of RAD Planners, the trailblazing collective that's rewriting the playbook on financial collaboration and inclusivity. Imagine an investment landscape where local impact takes center stage, and traditional competition is replaced by shared prosperity. Prepare to be enthralled as we share personal narratives that confront the complexities of systemic injustices, and how forging deep connections within financial networks like RAD Planners can ignite hope and challenge the status quo.

Strap in for a journey through the multifaceted world of non-profit financial stewardship, drawing lessons from my tenure as treasurer for Wisdom and Money. We'll unravel the nuances of embracing financial flux with trust and how that philosophy translates into a real-world strategy for growth. Then, we'll take a personal turn, examining an immigrant's quest to balance family obligations with financial autonomy through the innovative approach of a dedicated family fund. This episode is not just about understanding wealth—it's an invitation to recognize that our strongest assets are the relationships we build and the communities we nurture. Join us in reimagining the essence of security, wealth, and collaboration.

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Joel:

What if investing in each other could change the world? I'm Joel Skeen with bizradious, and this is the Mindful Marketplace. Welcome back to our fascinating and enlightening and inspiring conversation with Deanna Yanez, who is a financial planner, she is a money coach, she is a wonderful human being and the founder of all the colors. This is the Mindful Marketplace. Here on BizRadio US, and if this is your first time with us on this program, we talk to the entrepreneurs, advisors, industry leaders, investors and economic experts who are not only solving a problem a market problem to make a profit, but also solving a social problem to make an impact. It's where we learn how to connect our money and our businesses to our values, our community and ourselves.

Joel:

If you did not listen to part one of this conversation yet, please go back and do that on whatever platform you're on YouTube, spotify, itunes, iheartmedia, buzzsprout, stitcher we're on everything now, so subscribe and like while you're at it. That was a great, great conversation. We got to talk about her transition into financial services from social work and social services, how that informed her. Her philosophy on money is not just numbers but as empowerment, and I'm excited to get back into it. Welcome back into the conversation here, deanna, really happy to have you.

Diana :

Pleasure to be here.

Joel:

Joel, I wanted to kind of tell people how we met. We have both been a part of a group You've been a part of it much longer than me, but we have both been a part of a group called the RAD Planners, which RAD stands for radical, which is both radical, but also like cool radical, like with this, like a Bart Simpson skateboard kind of situation To me. There's a lot of exciting stuff going on, but I'm curious, when it comes to this more inclusive and equitable ecosystem of financial services in the industry that we're in, what's most exciting for you right now?

Diana :

Well, rad Planners, the goal is to create a solidarity economy. I think I remember sharing this but Adrienne Marie Brown, who's an author and social justice activist. She talks about social justice being the work of science fiction, because we don't live in that world yet. Rad Planners is a place where we're really playing that science fiction of like. What does it look like to create software that's open source for all financial planners to use? What does it look like to learn how to navigate conversations with wealth accumulators people who are building wealth and wealth accumulators people who are giving away wealth? Right, and I and my I get to work with both groups of people and RAD Planners. It also gives me a lot of hope.

Diana :

There's another quote that I live by, by Reverend Angel Keota Williams. She says that without interchange, without me looking at the way that I do money and realizing that retail therapy I should probably replace with real therapy without that interchange, there could be no outer change. You know I won't stop overspending or whatever it is building up my debt, but without collective change, no change matters. And RAD Planners is the place where we do that collective change right, that collective change of like how to create a financial services system that works for everyone. That's not just taking and taking and taking and hoarding, because that's a lot of what our current system does. That's all our current system does, honestly.

Joel:

Yeah, I love that because it is about the individual. We do have to take individual responsibility of our own situation. We do got to make our own bed, clean our own house, and, at the same time, one thing that I always like to say is you know, we are each other, and, at the end of the day, though, there everything is interdependent, everything is interconnected, and, you know, what I do does affect other people, and what other people do do affects me, and so it's. It's both an in, outside in and an inside out change that really has to happen. If you're going to fight for justice out in the world, you also have to fight for, you know, also fight the injustice that you carry within, within your own heart, in the process you mentioned for your go ahead and let me add a little bit about it.

Diana :

And Radical Planners is a place so it's for financial service professionals who are becoming radical or it's for activists who are joining the financial services space. Often, for me personally, radical planners feel like a place where I just going to step out of the gaslighting, because if you're a financial services professional working in regular financial services, even questioning the system, you get a lot of pushback. We're very much on the fringe, but at Radical Planners it just feels good to be able to say this thing. That would get you so much pushback on the rest of the world. And here people are actually further ahead than you. People have done more due diligence. So it's very much a place where we're again open source, open sharing. We're really building each other up and it gives me a lot of hope. I think I would have left the financial services system if it wasn't for the great group of people I've met there, including mutual oh, thank you.

Joel:

Yeah, no, and I mean it's the same Feeling is even more than mutual. I know some of the things that I'm most excited about is seeing when it comes to local investment and it comes to impact investment funds, seeing the fact that all of these people who work at different advisory firms, who normally would be seeing themselves as competition, deciding no, let's actually collaborate around things like due diligence and let's share our due diligence information, let's share these things that most that traditionally groups have hoarded. They've said no, I don't want to share that with you. I don't want to give my secrets away because you could use it to compete with me, but to see that collaborativeness and to see how that rising tide really does end up raising all ships, I just think is so cool to see. So you've mentioned with your firm too. I wanted to ask you about this. So you mentioned that it's kind of a combination of things. When you do financial coaching with people, where you do some education but there's also accountability and coaching, that happens. I'm curious how do those things work together?

Diana :

Yeah, so I think of myself a lot as a money translator and I always remind people that although I'm an expert on money and I am I'm a sort of a financial planner. I'm a registered life planner, which is the equivalent of a life coach for money. I'm not an expert on my client's life. I can know what it says to do in a textbook, but how people apply it to their own personal situation depends on where they are and what their goals are, what their history is around money. So the education, the translation, is around that fact it's. Also I work with a lot of people who maybe bought a DIY personal finance book and never opened it. There's something that just becomes overwhelming. Maybe they have an internal story that it's not possible for them to do money in a way that's satisfying, that supports them. That's where the coaching comes in, of maybe opening up that story.

Diana :

I attracted my niche is women of color entrepreneurs, and it was very natural Because entrepreneurs people who are transitioning from being employees who had a stable paycheck every other week or once a month, whatever it was, to becoming an entrepreneur and I'm seeing you nodding, joel like getting used to the rollercoaster of income oh my gosh, takes a huge adjustment, right, it takes a huge adjustment. And women, particularly women of color, we have many limiting stories and it's and it's again. I think I mentioned this in the last conversation we had. Maybe no one told us what the story is, but if you look around and you don't see yourself represented in the Forbes 100 list of wealthy people or whatever list it is of women doing wealth financially, you'll end up thinking unconsciously that's not a world for me, right? And sometimes, for example, in my culture as a Mexican, I think a lot of women experience this. You're just told don't worry about it, somebody else will take care of it, right? First your dad and then your husband, and that cuts your own wings way ahead of time.

Diana :

So that's the coaching part of it. The accountability is like we outline where you want to go and then it's actually doing the thing you said you were going to do. And the education is translating a lot of the financial services jargon and also helping people like people don't know what they don't know around finances, and one of the benefits of working with a financial planner or an expert in any field is that they've seen many people's financial situation, not just yours, right? So for us. It's like oh, this is the only like. My money story is the only one I know. But as a financial planner it's like I've seen hundreds of them. I've seen so many different ways that people have solved different problems.

Joel:

Yeah, and I really like what you said about there just being this sort of hesitancy and fear and overwhelm that people feel around taking taking control of their own finances, a lot of times because of that lack of education. I also think it's because there's a certain culture of shame that's out there around things like poverty, around things like debt, especially, like we have this weird idea. Where it's not, it feels like it's morally wrong to have to be in debt. It's morally like you, like it's this shameful thing that if you have debt, but also it doesn't feel like it's morally right to hold someone else in debt at the same time, either. Like we work with my agency works a lot with helping people eliminate their debt faster, and I see this all the time where people just have this. They just don't want to even talk about it or feel about it because it's it just feels like such a shameful thing and I feel like that is something that sort of needs to get dropped and needs to be accepted. Is that like when you realize that, like, yeah, a lot of people are in debt, it's not just me, but that it's it's, it's this collective problem that so many, so many people are facing?

Joel:

And so, yeah, I think, just being able to help people drop the narratives, the stories that they have around how they should be with money, so that, because you can't really I think Carl Rogers, the psychologist, says this you, there's a paradox where you change only happens when you are accepting of yourself. You know, and I think when you only accept where you are at with your money is the point where you can actually change that situation moving forward. I also thought it was really cool on your course here. So you have a course for people and your course here talks about I loved this phrase it said relaxing. It said helping people relax into the flow of money. What does that mean?

Diana :

Well, that course it's called a budget at the loan and La Bouge is the original, the etymology of budget. It's being slid off bag and in French so it's just a little bag. I tell people it's a little bag, it's not a way to like, measure your ability to adult or your self worth, just a little bag to track your IOUs and your points. And la Lune is the moon, and in that course I talk a lot about how, like the moon cycles, sometimes it's full, sometimes it's empty, and as financial, as entrepreneurs, we have to get really used to that flow right? So creating a system, it's kind of like creating levies, so that you can, as things change, so that you have to hurry my dog I don't know what she's going to hear as we talk, she has to be on my lap, oh yeah.

Diana :

Yeah, little lap dogs. Literally that's what they want to do. Oh my gosh.

Joel:

Yeah, she's so cute, all right.

Diana :

So Relaxing into the flow of money. Before you relax into the flow of money, create a structure for it. So that's what the whole course is about. It's a four week course and it's about getting figuring out what is your, what are your food that, what are your structural expenses, your food and shelter expenses? How do you create buffer so that you can relax more into, like sometimes unexpected expenses honestly happen all the time. It's like every month there's an emergency that you never would have thought of. So having that buffer lets you relax in that flow, and I'm also so.

Diana :

I'm the treasure for an organization called wisdom and money and they help people from a culture of wealth which can be financial planners. It can be people who have our wealth holders. However they define it, we help them, like we see money as a gateway to transformation, and yesterday we had a board meeting. So we're recording this in December, but yesterday we had a board meeting looking at our, at our budget for 2024, and I am a very conservative person financially and here I am as the treasure being told to like literally step into the flow of money. Like the organization. It's growing, it has more staff and we're trying to have people donate enough to cover our expenses and they're helping me relax into like we can do this. We can. They've been growing, I think, by like 10, 15%, their donations every single year and I'm like how can you just how can you build a deficit budget all the time? And yet that's where the, at least for this organization.

Diana :

I don't know that I advocated for personal finances, but this organization is just so willing to take a step when they can't see where where they're going to be stepping. So there's a little bit of that too, because in in the course I talk about thinking of what it is that you want. Sometimes you don't know how you're going to get there. Maybe you want to be deaf free. Maybe you want to have a newer car that doesn't break down, whatever it is.

Diana :

Maybe you you want to buy your house for your parents. Whatever it is that you want to do, even giving yourself permission to say what it is, and relaxing knowing that it is, it is possible. You're not asking to land on Mars and if you were Elon Musk, you maybe would be asking to land on Elon on on Mars. You know like it's possible. If you can imagine it, it's possible. That's part of the invitation to relax.

Joel:

Well, that's the thing. If we can imagine the idea of not just landing on Mars but terraforming it, I think we could have. You know seems like we should be able to imagine, you know, doing economics and doing our budgeting and our financing at least a little differently, right, one seems like it might actually be easier than the other, but that's. I love that. It reminds me of the Lynn Twist book, the soul of money, where she talks about how money is, like water, is designed to flow. What did it feel like to step into that kind of space of letting go and not not kind of hoarding and clinging in that way?

Diana :

Yeah, and, and the budget is bigger than I'm, than I'm used to my personal finances. It's not bigger than my clients, but like this is where, like I'm a charger, I'm like signing documents. We started off our board meeting with a literal earthquake here in Mexico City. There was a earthquake in Puebla and I'm two hours away from the epicenter and I felt my little fourth floor apartment shake so much and I'm from LA so I'm used to earthquakes. But in Mexico City people still die from earthquakes because of the way the buildings are made, that the structural strength isn't there.

Diana :

So the president of the board emailed me last night. She's like there was a literal earthquake, like physically there was an earthquake, and then I approved, or I proposed, another budget, a deficit budget, and that also felt like an earthquake for me. And it's also like it's not unilateral. So I'm part of a board of 10 people and everybody was on that board but on that track. So for me it was a moment of prioritizing because we were considering making cuts that could hinder where we want to go, and I talk a lot about not clipping your own wings. So the cuts that we were considering would have clipped our own wings. So I see how we have to just relax into. We have the things set in place to reach our goals. We're not sure exactly Like we're good for seven, eight months. We're not sure how the loss, but that's far enough away where we can do it, and it was just like this earthquake had passed. I checked in with other people in Mexico City. They were all fine.

Joel:

Man, that sounds intense. That sounds intense.

Diana :

Tense board meeting.

Joel:

Yeah, exactly yeah. A lot of board meetings may have something that people would metaphorically call an earthquake, but you guys had a real one on top of it at the same time. So this philosophy that you have of relaxing into the flow of money I know you've also written about and talked about regenerative economics versus extractive economics I'm wondering how these big, kind of large, heady ideas come down into the realities of the clients that you're meeting with and the women of color entrepreneurs that you're meeting with as far as making, as far as in that coaching and in helping them become more empowered through their money.

Diana :

Yeah, and I don't often use those terms when I'm actually coaching, but one example that comes to mind, because extractive means that you're bleeding yourself dry, right, you're working yourself to the point of exhaustion, that you're just pushing and pushing, and that's a lot of, I think, of the way that we harvest resources and a lot of anything. That's, I think, a lot of countries that had colonialism before. They just changed that into capitalism and to continue to extraction, of going into countries and taking away their resources, pushing people as much as possible. Impersonal finances. I'm thinking of an example.

Diana :

I had a client who family was very important to her. It was one of her values, and whenever family she's a first generation immigrant. So you see this often in this community, in my community, whenever her family would call and ask for support financially there was a car breakdown, like whatever it was she would give, but she would give from a place of can I give this? How am I able to do this? And it was a little extractive and there were these expectations and there was this desire in her too to be a service, to help, to acknowledge the fact that she worked in a field where she had a really strong income. Her family had helped her get her there, but it felt somewhat extractive, even without meaning to. Her family was pushing, pulling, or she was trying to push as much as she could and we ended up and I think I don't really remember how we came to this decision.

Diana :

She might've been a suggestion on her own, but she came up with herself of creating, similar to how people create a travel fund like I'm gonna take a vacation, I'm gonna put aside money every month for my vacation. She did the same thing for family. She said every month, this is the percentage that I can put aside into my family account. And she told her mom, like this is what I'm doing. So when you call because it was often her mom who would be the intermediary for, like, the larger family I'll tell you what I have in the account and what I'm able to give. But I don't wanna do more than that because I have other goals. I have retirement. She was putting money together for a house, like she had other goals, but this way it was regenerative or it was generative for her. It didn't cause any constriction inside of her and it didn't cause constriction for her mom, right, and with her extended family, with her values.

Joel:

Yeah, I love that example of kind of how that has actually empowered someone to go from being in a place of disempowerment around money and around finances. Because money, let's face it like a lot of us say that it doesn't matter. But it really only matters when you don't have to think about it. To the people that have to think about it, to like scrape by to pay their rent every month and figure that out, it's everything. The more it's, in some ways, the less control you have over your money, the larger of a space it's going to take up in your life and the more control you have over it, the more you have that mental space and that mental energy to spend on all the things that actually really matter, like your family, like your community and like the things and the causes that you actually care about. With the last minute or so we have here, I kind of want to bring it back to what we talked about with community building in Rad Planners at the beginning of this conversation. How do you see financial planning and community building connected?

Diana :

Well, within Rad Planners, we are community building, right, it's like when I mentioned that quota, without interchanged, there could be no outer change without collective change. We're creating that collective change. So I see that very clearly in Rad Planners. And also money we have to remember that it's very relational, like if I said that this fork was money, you would have to agree that it was money. Right, like we'd have to agree that there was a barter system that we could do. So money can be a lubricant for relationship if we learn how to use it that way.

Diana :

And I think of a book by Jacob Needleman where he talks about money and the meaning of life and that we often will use money as a way to isolate ourselves. Right, like, if I have enough money, I can take care of myself. That's often what we're told to. Like put enough money aside for retirement. Like when, in fact, there's no guarantee of safety. Right, the best way for us to look forward is to build community around us where we can each support each other, cause life goes up and down, whether you mean it, mean for it or not. Right, there's all kinds of things that can happen, both financial, physical, emotional, where other people are gonna be a more. I don't wanna use the word resource, cause that sounds extractive but where other people are gonna be more generative or other people were having support from others is gonna be more helpful than having a stockpile of money.

Joel:

Right, well, it can be a mutual resource. Yeah, yeah, it can be. We can be resources to each other. I think that that's kind of where I think that is. We can leave it there. I really appreciate your time here, deanna, for being on, for tuning in all the way from Mexico City, and thank you so much. I think you're doing fantastic work. You can check her out at her website allthecolorscom. Is that right?

Diana :

NET for network allthecolorsnet net.

Joel:

okay, thanks. Thanks for the correction there, and make sure to subscribe on all of the platforms. And also, please make sure to listen to the other entrepreneur hosts that we have here on bizradious. And until next time, remember, take care of yourself and take care of someone else.