Money advice that you can actually understand

So much money advice ignores who we are, our background, our values, and our emotions. I’ll show you how to be in better control of your money every week, even if you’re just starting out. 

Combines practical advice and empathy of systemic issues that plague majority of folks

Available anywhere books are sold!

Hi friend, I’m Paco, author and illustrator of Finance for the People. I also run a bookkeeping agency for creatives and I live in Los Angeles.

If you asked 15-year-old Paco what she’d be when she grew up, she’d have said a musician, an animator, or anything creative. But…I didn’t want my immigrant parents to worry about me, so I chose finance and economics. 

Having been in various financial service jobs – from debt collector to financial planner – I want to share three Truths about money I saw and learned over 16 years.

Truth #1: Knowledge is not enough

You can have a degree in finance and still be weird with money because we ignore one critical component: How we feel about money impacts our behavior with it. How do I know?

As an educated financial planner, I was flat broke. 

Here I was creating plans for folks with net worths over 8 figures. Meanwhile, I was riding my bike 15 miles a day to save $40 a week on gas and growing my own lettuce to save $2. I had access to so much financial information, yet I myself struggled financially. How? (I did not know the answer to this until much later. Which ties into…)

Truth #2: We are what we tell ourselves

I started to wonder: Why am I OK making so little money? Why couldn’t I negotiate my pay with my boss? Why did I put someone else’s needs before my own? How could I be this weird about money? 

I realized that my financial life wasn’t only impacted by a flawed system with rampant inequality but also that my upbringing and external messaging made me internalize a sense of unworthiness as a queer person. And it showed up in my relationship with money and in life. I knew I had to confront these narratives about worth and money to change my personal finances, but it took me a long time to recognize this and even more time to do the emotional labor.

Since this site’s inception in 2014, I’ve dedicated my life’s work to helping folks feel less weird about money, by having more frequent money conversations to exploring the benefits of facing our negative feelings about money. 

Through my dozens of articles, a weekly newsletter, and my book Finance for the People, my goal is to help people understand that money is more than just money.