GUEST POST: Our genetic pool

By Bianca

It was not your run-of-the-mill first meeting. True, there were muffins and sodas and a lot of getting-to-know-you questions but then Joe posed this query: “Who are your parents?” And he did not mean their names.

Joe explained that we are our parents – how we spend, earn, our attitude toward money – they are mainly because of what we were taught, what we observed from our parents, what we hated but imbibed anyway, whether consciously or unconsciously. That if we understand them, we understand ourselves.

I began to understand.I am a combination of my solid, stable father who loves to gamble every now and then and a mother who never quite forgot her less than humble beginnings that even with a million-dollar home, she still thinks she has not gotten away from being ankle-deep in the dirty flood waters of Sta. Cruz.

Half devil-may-care, half guilty for every little thing I spend my money on, I realized that unbeknownst to me, I am them, and like them, I will be safe and solid money-wise, but trapped.

I do not want to be trapped. Neither does my husband who has komunista parents turned kapitalista. He’s a nut case too when it comes to money – he’s a rogue painter in jeans and a wanna-be entrepreneur who cannot stand leaving a single centimo in his wallet. We are quite a pair.

So it is quite serendipitous that we found Salve Duplito, who, we are convinced, has a heart of pure gold, and Salve found Joe Ferreria, our financial planner, who was funny, genuine, asked questions that hit home and cared enough to go all the way to our house and bring his wife’s callos at this point in our lives when we were ready to conquer bigger things, like ourselves and our latte factors, and ready to step beyond our comfort zones.

We found friends that first night of our foray to living a better life. And suddenly – financial freedom, stability, being rich - is not so impossible anymore.

(Bianca is one of the volunteers for MoneyMakeover. In MoneyMakeover, two financial planners have committed for one year to help out a couple and a young urban professional to achieve their financial goals. We all don’t need another Sermon on the Mount on financial independence. It’s time to show readers how this can be done. Read previous articles here.)

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