Like most Americans, Yanely Espinal didn’t receive money management or financial literacy education during her public K-12 education in Brooklyn, New York. And, like a lot of Americans, she went on to college, opened a couple of credit cards and racked up a lot of debt.

Espinal found herself in more than $20,000 of high-interest credit card debt after graduating from college until she started reading books like Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control your Destiny by Suze Orman, which offered her a guide to financial freedom.

Now known as Miss Be Helpful, a viral financial educator across social media, Espinal saw how a lack of financial literacy at a young age impacted her life and now she serves as the director of educational outreach at Next Gen Personal Finance.

As a financial educator, she published her first book, Mind Your Money, in 2023 in which she strikes the balance between personal finance advice and the money lessons she’s been taught in her culture as a Dominican American daughter of immigrants.

Reckon spoke with Espinal about how she became Miss Be Helpful and why financial literacy is a pathway to freedom.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you think financial literacy classes can contribute to reducing the financial stress that many young adults face?

Young people face stress in the immediate future about money. Maybe it’s because they don’t know how to make money and they want to start generating income or they want to help out at home because they see that their parents are overwhelmed with all the financial responsibilities, but they don’t really know how to help out.

A financial literacy class is the biggest and best benefit to have early exposure to for young people.

It’s a social justice issue at this point to make sure that the people who need financial literacy are the ones who are going to be most likely to get it rather than least likely to get it because the reality is if you come from a wealthy family or if you attend a private school, you’re going to get this information one way or another.

For example, I can’t tell you how many times I have spoken at high schools or colleges and heard the students tell me, “When I graduate, I’m going to owe $15,000 in student loans.” I always interrupt and ask them to repeat the phrase but to say it in the present tense, “I currently owe $15,000 in student loans.”

Because we have to stop ourselves from enjoying the immediate benefits of financial choices that we make by delaying the financial consequences – that’s a psychological shift. When you take a personal finance course early in your life, you recognize the reality of your financial obligations in the present moment rather than postponing that acknowledgment to some future day.

That verbal shift and mental shift is what really ultimately leads to behavioral shifts that will make us much more likely to save for emergencies, spend more wisely, invest for our future and pursue opportunities that increase access to wealth.

How do the financial habits and behaviors of our families and past generations influence the financial decisions that we make today?

There’s a study that looked at the behavior of a bunch of college students when it came to credit card usage and credit card debt. What they saw was that the most predictive indicator of bad credit card usage or high credit card debt was growing up in a household with parents who did not talk to you about money at all.

So, not parents who showed you how to use a credit card in the wrong way, like maxing out their credit cards and buying everything on credit. The worst thing was actually avoiding talking about money completely.

For me, that was telling because I grew up in a home where my parents never talked about money and I ended up with a ton of credit card debt myself – that is literally the story of my life.

We either repeat cycles because we see examples modeled or there’s this void where we’re trying to figure it out through the school of hard knocks and that ends up being worse in many cases than seeing a negative example.

The only positive outcome is to have a family that openly and honestly talks about money consistently and frequently. Parents can do this by involving their children in everyday money things like, “Hey, we’re going to go to the grocery store and I’m going to try really hard to stick to a budget of $85. Do you want to help me try and stick to that budget?”

What role do you think parents, educators and policymakers should play in promoting financial literacy education?

As a parent, you have to think, “How can I impart the key, most important, lessons that I want them to have about money?” For me, that tends to look like values-based spending. If your family is a faith-based family, then you are going to look at a budget and add wiggle room for tithing because faith-based giving might really matter to your family.

In school, the educator’s role is to provide an unbiased source of education to compare and contrast things like the bank versus a credit union, a credit card versus a debit card and questioning certain financial decisions. As an educator, I’m not going to tell you what’s better because that’s a personal value judgment, but I can teach you the differences with facts-based information

A politician has never written a lesson plan and has never had to teach a lesson in front of 30 or 40 students. So when they are writing policy for financial education they need to be careful not to overprescribe the way that they are writing it; their job is to make the most flexible possible legislation that requires a financial literacy course in every high school and make it a graduation requirement.