Delyanne Barros on what most of us get wrong when it comes to investing

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💵 She went from $150k in debt to millionaire

Delyanne Barros is the host of CNN's new personal finance podcast, "Diversifying." (Photo credit: DelyanneTheMoneyCoach.com)

Like a lot of people, the only financial advice Delyanne Barros got from her parents was to get a good education and to make sure she had good credit.

She followed that advice, graduating from college, putting herself through law school and getting a prestigious job as an attorney in New York City. Despite her success, she struggled to pay off $150,000 in student loan debt.

“We grow up without knowing much about personal finance,” said Barros, host of CNN’s “Diversifying” personal finance podcast. “To me, college was literally the way I was going to lift myself out of poverty.”

Higher education played a key role in her financial success – but it was just the starting point. Barros’ journey to become debt free would take her on a path that changed her life and her career.

Today, Barros is known to her hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok, where she shares investing and career tips in short viral snippets, as Delyanne The Money Coach.

Now Barros is demystifying the financial system on her new CNN podcast, where she shares how people can learn to manage their money and get closer to financial independence – especially for people of color, women, single households and others who have traditionally been left out of conversations around personal finance.

We recently caught up with Barros and she shared some of the biggest lessons that she teaches as a money coach:

You don’t have to be rich to start investing

A lot of people think they need to be earning more before they decide how to handle their money. They think, ‘Oh, when I make more I’ll invest or I’ll save.’ And I think that’s the biggest mistake - if you don’t know how to manage $30,000 or $40,000 a year, you’re not going to be able to manage $100,000 a year. Your behaviors don’t change just because of the amount of money you’re making.

You have to build those habits and those patterns before the money arrives.

If I could take a time machine and go back and tell my 20-year-old self what I know now, I would probably be retired already.

Barros' popular TikTok posts reach a younger audience.

Investing is a powerful way to solve racial and gender income disparities

I was an employment attorney for 14 years; I witnessed the gender wage gap every day at work. I saw the payrolls that people had at companies. It was clear: Women were getting underpaid for working the same jobs as men. And if we’re going to be waiting around for these corporations to close the gender wage gap, we’re going to be waiting forever.

With investing, the stock market is one of the few places where you can build wealth and it’s completely gender- and race- and disability-blind. My share of Apple is worth just as much as anybody else’s share. That’s not the case with work or if you go to buy a home.

It’s more important to give your kids good financial knowledge than millions of dollars

What do we see with people who have a huge influx of cash? Most of the time, they lose it. In fact, 90% of people who get an inheritance, it’s completely gone by the third generation. So if we’re not passing along that knowledge with the money, there’s no point.

It’s really important at whatever income level you are for you to just understand your money and to just learn about investing, even if you can’t start yet. The money will come, and I want you to be ready for it.

I don’t blame parents for not knowing this stuff – nobody taught them, either! A lot of us are younger and we’re teaching our parents to do this.

The first person I shared everything I was learning with was my younger sister. And if you’ve ever had to convince a family member to do anything, you know how difficult it is. It took quite a while – she’s busy and she had the same idea that I did at first: that investing is really time-consuming and complicated.

But I told her it’s a set it and forget - and once I finally got her to understand, she completely switched her mindset overnight, and she’s approaching six figures in her investment account.

So not only did I change my path -- I’m the first millionaire in my family – but I passed that on to my sister. And that’s how you start building generational wealth.

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