Moneda Moves

If there’s any entrepreneur who can speak to the power of navigating multiple worlds, and tapping into her inner creative as a business executive it’s Jessie Medina, Founder of diverse creative space FEMX Quarters. Jessie, a Dreamer from Argentina, is no stranger to embracing being a multi-hyphenate. She’s gone from being an immigrant to successful corporate executive, to podcast host a Forbes Nex...

On this episode of Moneda Moves in partnership with adidas, we are speaking with Mario Argote, Chief Marketing Officer of Up2Us Sports, helping bring sports to underprivileged communities. He calls it a gateway to further opportunities. Opportunities like new skills, networks, and mindset. And it’s especially a game-changer for those who don’t have access today. Sports are a big part of US popular...

Today we speak with Geraldine Ridaura Schumacher, a Latina entrepreneur based in California and a self-proclaimed numbers person. In 2016, she set out to start Holy Matcha, one of the first businesses selling the powdered green tea drinks in San Diego. By last year, following the start of the pandemic, she had stretched herself far more, all to help her business stay afloat. On this episode of Mon...

Meet Roosevelt Giles. Today, he is President and CEO of Atlanta Life Insurance Group and alum of AT&T, where he built network protocols for the Pentagon and Special Forces. But growing up, he and his nine siblings grew up picking cotton alongside his sharecropper parents. The plantation owner cheated his father, and, being illiterate, his parents had no way to prove he was keeping more of thei...

Priscilla Esquivel Weninger is a Texas Latina and daughter of immigrants from Mexico and Peru. She’s also a jefa, boss, who landed her dream job working within professional services as a human capital strategy consultant, having earned an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin with a full-ride scholarship — it’s a journey she embarked in her mid-twenties, when she realized that the salary she...

Today we’re going back to our roots in journalism. We spoke with Kori Hale, who is CEO and co-founder of CultureBanx, redefining tech and business news for underrepresented communities using music. Once an investment banker, Kori quickly developed an eye for news. She became the first Black woman to anchor a daily news show from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, covering the intersection o...

President Joe Biden called the $2.7 trillion American Jobs Plan “a once-in-a-generation investment in America...the largest American jobs investment since World War II.” The details of the plan are still coming to light, but elements include childcare, paid family leave, investing in community college. What will this plan and Biden’s administration’s plans at large mean for the Latinx community an...

It’s financial literacy month, mi gente, and that means we are diving in deep to personal finances. Today, we speak with Founder and CEO of Debt-Free Latina, Mayra Alejandra Garcia. She is a financial coach teaching women and families how to get out of debt, grow their net worth and claim their financial independence. In 2010, she was stressed out about our bills, living in a house she couldn't af...

Early in her career at Google, Eliana Murillo learned she had “rookie smarts.” When she first heard this from a manager, she was perplexed. Was this a compliment? Less so? Little did she know this flexible and hungry mindset was an absolute asset and that it would set her up for success in her 10 years at the company. Rookie smarts, a term written up by leadership expert Liz Wiseman , explores how...

Today, we meet Rita-Soledad Fernandez Paulino, an educator at her core.  This is the story of a former math teacher turned personal finance guide. At some point in her life, speaking about money with Soledad’s family was difficult, and she had a hard time envisioning beginning to invest.  Now an aspiring Certified Financial Planner, Soledad is taking followers on her debt-free and learni...

Meet Latina entrepreneur, Beatriz Acevedo. You may know her as the Co-Founder of mitú, the digital media brand for young Latinos. Her career started in media at a young age, first on radio and later on television in Mexico. She later went on to co-found and chair LA Collab, a Hollywood initiative aimed at doubling Latino representation in Hollywood. Acevedo’s latest co-founded startup is set on cl...

Today, we are going to talk about the “Mexican Beverly Hills." It’s what one culture writer calls the city of Downey, the California city with nearly twice as many Hispanic residents than any other race in ethnicity. Here, residents are also higher-earning than other neighborhoods in Los Angeles with similar ethnic makeup. In his piece for The New York Times, author and Downey resident Erick Galin...

Have debt? Perhaps a better question is: Who hasn’t?  Today on Moneda Moves, we will talk about a Latino and Black-led fintech company Qoins helping users pay off more than $15 million dollars of debt at this point. I speak with Co-Founder and CEO Christian Zimmerman who not only was named Forbes 30 Under 30 for social impact but also raised $1.5 million in its first institutional investment...

We are speaking with Ramona Ortega, founder of personal finance platform My Money My Future. As daughter of farmworkers and the first generation in her family to attend college then build wealth, she is on a mission to help other underserved millennials have a roadmap to wealth. In 2020, Ortega was named One of the Most Notable Women in Financial Advice by Crain’s New York Business.  In the f...

Hi, Moneda Moves listeners! When we think of the holidays, we think about sharing some laughs, drinks, maybe a good game or two with our loved ones. That’s the kind of feeling founder Carolina Acosta set to elicit when she created Tragos — a card and drinking game that celebrates Latino tradition and cultural-isms. It’s got quite an impressive history too. Latino run and self-funded, the game has...

Let's talk Latinos and business in 2020. At the start of the year, you could say our demographic was ...crushing it. I remember this story from USA Today titled: “Puro Cash: Latinos are opening more small businesses than anyone else in the US.” In a country with roughly 60 million Latinos, Latino business owners grew 34%, compared to 1% for all business owners in the United States and they were ap...

On this episode of Moneda Moves, we discuss unpaid internships, what's wrong with them and how we put an end to them. More than half of graduating students who held an internship will receive a job offer by graduation. This is an abnormal stat: Less than 20% of students overall usually have a job offer at graduation, per a 2016 Rudolph Foundation report. And yes, students and graduates have it tou...

We are coming to you at the end of a busy news week, in part, courtesy of the Supreme Court. LGBT rights advocates had a big win at the Supreme Court Monday, winning a sweeping decision from the justices that protects gay, lesbian and transgender employees in the workplace from being fired, demoted or paid less based on their sexual orientation -- a 6-3 victory to those arguing for anti-discrimina...

This is the end of what will be the longest week for many, though this is really what our black communities have faced for years on-end. Across the country, there are uprisings happening in the name of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Lorenzo Dean, Eric Reason, Pamela Turner and so many others. As former President Obama explained in his Medium post, the call-out is explicit for the “reform of...

I’ve been thinking a lot about food in my kitchen lately. Why, you ask? Here’s one reason: US grocery costs have jumped the most in 46 years. So while our spending may not go to purchasing air travel, experiences or that new bar in town, I knew I couldn’t be the only one watching my spending at the grocery market. To learn a bit more about how we can manage our food spend, I reached to Dannielle R...

We’re nearing the end of the month, and this is something on all our minds: bills. Experts see the jobless rate to approaching 20% in May with another 2.4 million workers having filed for jobless benefits last week.  Meanwhile, Latinos already have the highest unemployment rate as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics earlier this month. Nearly one in five Latinos are unemployed. So if s...

It's no secret that the pandemic has disproportionately hurt minorities in the the U.S. Meanwhile, the average cost to treat a hospitalized patient with coronavirus is a crippling $30,000 as reported by CNBC. But at SOMOS Community Care, they can get tested and seen at no cost and with no questions asked on citizenship status. Dr. Ramon Tallaj, who is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic himse...

It’s no secret that that federal aid put forth by the Small Business Administration has been met with its fair share of critique. The two big programs you’ve heard about are the SBA’s Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Take the $660 billion Paycheck Protection Program, which was meant to extend help to small businesses battered by the pandemic, allowing...

Let's talk about essential workers in the era of coronavirus. These are our health care, agriculture workers, bus drivers, grocers, to name a few. And when we look a bit closer, they also tend to be minorities. Take New York City, for instance. A study from the city comptroller here found that 75% workers here working on the frontlines are minorities. More than 60 percent of people who work as cle...

In 2020, no is immune to the side effects of COVID-19: not physically, mentally and for most, financially.   In our inaugural episode, we are joined by Jully-Alma Taveras, creator Investing Latina. On her page she shares personal finance tips and her own money experiences. As a contractor in the fashion industry, she’s lost 50% of her clients. But she has a money plan. She tells us a little m...