The Government Fix for

Finances

[00:00:01] Linda Garcia: I was terrified to come out as a Latina that was invested in Wall Street and believed in the opportunity that capitalism provides. Honestly, I was terrified, and I still wrestle with that today.

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[00:00:22] Amanda Renteria: Welcome to The Government Fix. I’m your host, Amanda Renteria. I’ve worked on Capitol Hill, in the classroom, on Wall Street, and now I’m the CEO of Code for America, an organization focused on using tech to improve public services and make government work well for everyone. This week, we’re talking about The Government Fix for finances. When people are struggling with the cost of gas or groceries, hearing numbers in the millions, and yes, billions, it all feels intangible.

Today, I’m joined by Linda Garcia, someone who has a foot in both worlds of government and finance. She’s a Democrat in the Texas House of Representatives and a financial educator. Growing up in a low-income household, finances were scary, almost out of reach, especially more complex financial instruments, things like how do you leverage stocks, assess credit card debt, and understand earnings calls?

This isn’t something you talk about in low-income communities, but after she got a glimpse of what that investing world looked like, she started to see the possibility of what someone can do with just a little bit of investment money. Now she uses her lived experience to bring others along, to help craft an ecosystem where anyone can gain the knowledge they need to manage their money without fear and build wealth for their future.

Most recently, she has co-authored and championed House Bill 2451, which requires financial literacy courses in Texas public schools. She’s the author of Wealth Warrior: 8 Steps for Communities of Color to Conquer the Stock Market, and host of the Investies Podcast. I found that Linda and I have a lot in common, and I’m really excited for you to hear from her.

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I love that you are in the finance space. I think about just reading your story, what you’ve done over time, and how important, for everyone really in this country, understanding finances, and you’re right at the center of it. I’d love to just start off by how did you decide, “This is the thing I’m going to try to help people understand”?

[00:02:37] Linda: For sure. It definitely was nowhere near my goals at all. I grew up extremely poor, immigrant parents; my mom cleaned houses, my dad was a dishwasher, moved up through the ranks of the restaurant industry. I was in complete scarcity mindset. Although my mother did have a really good gut when it came to money, she was notorious for saving. At 27 years old, she bought her first condo in California with cleaning houses, which was incredible. I do think that there was a little bit of that in me, but I was still just deeply in scarcity. I was a teen mom.

I stopped living with my parents at 12, grew up with a lot of trauma, and decided I want to be wealthy one day. I don’t want to be like my parents. I don’t want to have to work four jobs just to put food on the table. I tried to move towards that by working and going into corporate America, and really quickly realized that gaining wealth in this country is not necessarily working for someone else; it is by investing, whether that’s investing in real estate, investing in the stock market, or investing into yourself. I just became enamored with the stock market.

[00:04:10] Amanda: When did that happen for you? When were you like, “Wait a second, how did I find this, and what is this world that I have nothing or don’t know about but want to enter”? When did that happen for you?

[00:04:19] Linda: It was 2012. I had just landed a job at Netflix, and I was making $100,000 a year, which was a really big deal for me. I had been just praying about being able to maintain the money that I was making for the first time ever, and I was scared to squander it. The entire time, I was like, “Oh, just please, God, help me understand how to save this money.” I had a colleague that was coming to my cubicle, what felt like almost at least once a week, and he was hounding me on, “Have you purchased Netflix stock?” I was so intimidated by the conversation.

I didn’t know anybody that had invested in stock. It was such a foreign conversation. He just continued to come to my cubicle, and after earnings calls, he would say, did you see how much the stock rose after the earnings call? I’m like, “What is this guy talking about? Why won’t he leave me alone?” Meanwhile, I’m really praying for this solution of how I can save the money that is coming in and make something out of it. Then he finally gets frustrated with me, I guess, and shows me his portfolio. It was incredible. I’m like, “Why didn’t you start there? We’ve wasted all this time.”

[00:05:48] Amanda: “Let me see the numbers.” You’re like, “Come on, man, I don’t have messaging. I want to see the real numbers and what this actually means.”

[00:05:57] Linda: Yes. I immediately committed to $200 a month of buying Netflix stock, which was a significant amount to me. I moved through that commitment for one year, and my money doubled. I was in shock that there was this place where we could purchase a piece of a company, and I didn’t have to work or execute. No one micro-managed me; there was no expectations on my part other than to just maintain the investment and not sell out. That was the only goal.

After a year, I decided that I would double down, and I would put $400 a month. Halfway through the year, I got a little squeamish because it started to feel like this is a car note. I was just deep in scarcity and having to work through those emotions. That year, my investment didn’t grow a lot, actually, at all. It really taught me about being patient and that it’s not always a win. I learned so many lessons.

Eventually, I invested a total of $9,000 throughout the course of three years. Eight years later, those $9,000 turned into half a million. I thought to myself, there has to be information that people can access that’s digestible for them to access. I just became enamored with earnings calls and understanding Wall Street and the economy. I’m obsessed with it to this day.

[00:07:37] Amanda: We have a connection there because my first job out of undergrad was actually on Wall Street, working at Goldman Sachs. I, too, fell in love with the markets, recognizing what it meant. My dad, also an immigrant from Mexico, would always say, “Mija, just follow the money,” on anything I would do, no matter what it was, playing sports or now being in policy, or politics or tech. “Follow the money, Mija, and it’ll all make sense.”

When I started working on Wall Street as my first job, even though nothing made sense, like wearing a suit every day, I didn’t grow up like that. Going to nice cloth table restaurants was all new to me. I think what really occurred to me was, he was right. When I got to the markets and when I started to put math together, it made sense. It made sense that you could put something in, it grows, and then something comes out, or it doesn’t, and that’s the consequence of your investment.

It’s funny to hear you say, “If you just showed me the numbers, I would have understood it,” because I lived those early years of my working life trying to understand numbers because that’s where it made sense to me. There was all the earnings and stuff, but at the end of the day, there’s a number attached to that earnings report. It also is what made it easier to enter a world I didn’t understand because I am skeptical. I think being from immigrant or low-income communities, you are skeptical of that bigger world out there because it doesn’t feel like it’s really meant for you.

I appreciate hearing that feeling of, here are the numbers. Now I find myself, and I know your book was an important part of this. Going through that experience and that journey, and then trying to link it back to the places you’re from to help folks understand it or to tell them what this world looks like, how did you do that? What were the first early days before the book that you were like, “I can do this, I can bridge this?”

[00:09:47] Linda: It was December of 2019, and I was paying attention to financial markets across the board. Then I had heard about this obscure virus in China, and I was watching it. As soon as it hit Italy, I’m like, “That’s it. This is going to be the financial crisis. The stock market is going to tank.” I called my cousins, my sister, my uncles, my aunts, everybody that would listen, and I’m like, “Look, you need to open a stock portfolio right now.”

[00:10:22] Amanda: There’s now information flows, and if you’re paying attention to them, and you’ve been doing it for a while, pattern matching is– I can imagine the conviction you had, because you’re like, “I can see it. I’ve been waiting for this. I know these things happen. I understand these dynamics, and here it is.”

[00:10:38] Linda: That’s exactly it. It’s pattern recognition in the market. We talk about this on Investies all the time, where I’m starting to see new patterns in the market continuously, and I unpack them with our listeners. That’s what it was. It was a pattern recognition. I had so much conviction. Only one person in my family took action, and I was so frustrated. I remembered the frustration that my colleague had as he was trying to move me through the process.

[00:11:08] Amanda: You remembered him coming to your cubicle.

[00:11:14] Linda: I was like, “Okay, I get it. There’s money scarcity issues that’s taking place right now. They have an inability to see this potential opportunity that is at hand. I decided to take to my social platforms. I decided to open up on my podcast. I had an episode about it, and the response was incredible. I was terrified to come out as a Latina that was invested in Wall Street and believed in the opportunity that capitalism provides. Honestly, I was terrified, and I still wrestle with that today.

[00:11:58] Amanda: I do too. I wrestle with it. I did my business school degree. That’s how much I think this capitalism is a really interesting space and place to be. I also wonder about the guardrails we have in our generation, or what kind of guardrails they are now, and what that means as capitalism moves forward. How do you do it in a way that allows people to grow wealth while also not harming the environment, creating more inequality, et cetera? How do you wrestle with that, and where are you now in that balance?

[00:12:34] Linda: Sure. So layered, right? There isn’t a clear answer, but here is what I understand and what I know for certain. Publicly-traded companies only care about their investors, and I believe that to be 1,000% true. I think the disconnect is us not understanding that while Elon Musk may be the CEO of the company, he is still not the investors, and 15% of Americans hold direct ownership of stocks. I’m not talking about being invested with your 401k via exposure.

To me, that is not ownership. You’re invested in a huge conglomerate that owns a big percentage of the market, but you are not a direct owner. As a direct owner, we have voting rights. There are things that we can control. The problem here is that the 15% of America is who controls and who votes, and it is the top 10% that owns 90% of all of the shares that are publicly traded.

[00:13:45] Amanda: Yes. When you think about systems of power, whether you’re talking about government, the stock market, those are two big systems of power, and how do we connect or bridge people who aren’t engaged? I think about that in Latino communities as one of the big, growing, and young populations that it is important to bridge because how do you build an understanding of these wealth-creating and power-creating systems so that not only you can help shape it, but that those systems can help these communities who haven’t been engaged?

We have no idea what the potential of markets were if more people were engaged in those markets, and people were deciding to say, “You know what? I want this company to act in this way, and I’m going to exercise not just my consumer power, but my ownership power,” which is what you’re talking about. The same thing in government, which is how do we connect with folks about real things that affect them? Because it does.

How do we connect them? When I think about what you have done in that bridging to people, what has been the special sauce in finally bringing more of your family along, or in finally, in Texas, bringing people along, the legislature along with financial literacy in the way that you do it?

[00:15:16] Linda: I started to really develop a frustration with my party, I would say, six years ago, where I just felt like my party was not addressing economic issues. I felt like I wasn’t being spoken to. I was falling through the cracks. I also didn’t want to be part of a party where I would lose rights as a woman. I just felt really lost in the space. I would argue to myself or the television, because I couldn’t really unpack these types of feelings.

When I was asked to consider running for Texas state representative, I thought to myself– a part of me thought, “This is it. This is the opportunity to show up in the way that I show up with my understanding of the financial markets and the economy as a whole, and be able to speak from that perspective.” These are things that I was wrestling with five, six years ago. Now, as we watch politics unfold, we understand that I wasn’t the only one wrestling with this; we all were. I’m obviously excited to be a part of politics and able to implement this.

[00:16:46] Amanda: I love hearing. I’m excited to be a part of politics. It’s rare that you hear that comment, but we need people who are excited about politics because that really does drive how government works. Whether we like it or not, it really does drive what the conversations are in legislatures, in the federal government, all around the country, and then what actually gets implemented.

I think one of the mistakes of the last decade is that there hasn’t been more of that link. The links that you’re creating with financial literacy, the links that people who are experiencing tough moments on the ground, it’s not connected to people who are necessarily in Washington, DC, or in state capitals across the country. One of the conversations today that is front and center is the safety net.

I know that for many of us who have been around communities that have experienced why the safety net is so important, not the whole world hasn’t, and even people who are utilizing the safety net sometimes don’t realize that it’s a government program. How have you navigated that kind of space of teaching folks in your Texas legislative role, the full breadth of the complexity of government, but how it actually affects people’s lives every day on the ground?

[00:18:10] Linda: It has been an easier conversation than I anticipated for it to be. Obviously, in the Texas legislature, we have extreme far right, which includes more folks. Then we do have a smaller pocket of extreme far left. I do sit somewhere closer to the middle. Again, I think this comes from my understanding of capitalism, but also to your point, my understanding of resources that are absolutely necessary in order to make sure that we are taking care of our folks that sit on the lower end of our communities.

Being someone that was able to benefit, utilize these resources, and then move on, what I found really interesting is that the far right, and even the more moderate right, were extremely surprised and sometimes in shock to hear me talk about the economy, and hear me talk about things that I felt were important that we needed to protect, but also how we needed to make sure that we are protecting.

I think that really helped me build strong relationships on the right that I think is crucial, especially in the state, like the state that I’m living in right now, where the right is the majority and I need to be able to negotiate in order to get certain things passed. It’s this interesting dance that I’m currently learning how to unpack is uncharted territory in my space. I think that a lot of the legislature expected me to be extremely far left. I think they were a little surprised, some maybe pleasantly surprised, some not so pleasantly surprised.

[00:20:10] Amanda: One thing that I think is hard for folks to understand who aren’t in government is finding those champions inside can be those bridge builders inside for practical policy that really does affect real people. Part of why I’m so excited that you are where you are is because you’ve been bridging since you were 12. I think government does need more of what people are really going through. I think government does need people who speak a lot of different languages.

I don’t mean just Spanish and English, but Wall Street and politics. Those kinds of translators, I think, are more important now than ever because of the myths and disinformation that is out there. Because I think the lack of connection of real language and explaining things, breaking it down for people, we haven’t been doing that for decades now. It’s so much easier to shift information if people don’t have a grounding in what we are talking about.

I see that you in the legislature, you’re doing that through financial literacy, but also you’re bringing that to the conversation and how important that is for any successful policy going forward. I’d love to hear about the work that if you’re now there, what is the thing you’re most excited about getting through, and how and why is that your thing to try and really get through the legislature right now?

[00:21:42] Linda: I want to first paint the picture of the difficulty of what I’ve currently wrapped myself in so that folks can really understand. In the state of Texas, the legislature is part-time, which means that we are allowed to have jobs outside. What that also means, to be completely frank, is it’s not part-time because I have 200,000 constituents that I’m taking care of. Even on my off time when I’m not in Austin legislating, I am here trying to service and attend the spaces and make sure that I am consistently engaged with the community.

Now, a Texas legislator gets paid $7,000 a year. I really want us to think about that. That’s $600 a month of work. Sometimes I honestly do not know how I’m juggling everything because most of the people, most of my colleagues, have extreme wealth. They drive planes to work. It’s insane. I really quickly understood why there are people like me here in this state that don’t reflect my values and don’t sound like me.

It’s because, as you said, we need voices that actually reflect us. Most of my colleagues are lawyers. The majority of them are lawyers. There are few that are not, and that can break things down and talk in layman’s terms. I also have to say, “Explain that to me again, and make it simple.” Just to give you an idea, this is what I’m up against in terms of balancing my own personal life, trying to bring revenue into my home, and still trying to serve, which is the ultimate thing I want to do always.

I am working, as you mentioned, on financial literacy. We just passed a bill, House Bill 27, that was implemented in September, where now it is mandatory for seniors in high school to learn about financial literacy. Obviously, I would love to drive that down even further and make it mandatory to have students learn about the stock market specifically. I think there needs to be a curriculum on that. I have folks in my community that are finance majors and they come to my community to still learn specifically about the stock market.

[00:24:18] Amanda: Linda, you are speaking to my heart because I was a high school teacher. It was actually my first public sector job. I taught economics and math and civics. I had to ask special permission to actually teach people about credit cards and what it meant because it was a time where every 17, 18-year-old would get something in the mail to be like, “Open your credit card.” I used two of my classes to teach what does credit card mean, how much does it cost to have a family, and rent.

Unfortunately, I broke all of my hearts in my classroom because people were like, “What? What does this all mean?” All of a sudden, real world was affecting them. I know that teaching folks that made a real, actual impact on their lives. I think about that. I wish I would have done the same, and I didn’t. I wish I would have broken down government in the same way to people to be able to say, “This is how government works.” It was easier for me, like you, with numbers to be like, “This is how credit cards work. Sounds interesting. You can get $2,000 to put the down payment on a car, but then here’s the interest.”

At one point, everyone’s like, “How do these credit cards exist? This is so unfair.” You’re like, “I’ve done my job,” because now you’ll know how that money part works. You’re adding a key component to it, which is not just talking about debt, but then how do you do the other side of it, which is to say, why do you invest in the stock market? Why do you invest in a house? Why do you invest in an education or trade school? I’m fired up because I want to now go back.

[00:26:01] Linda: Oh, my gosh. Amanda, I love that. There’s a chapter in my book where I talk about getting to college, and there was these people with their little clipboards, young people that look like college students themselves, signing us up for credit cards. I fell into that predatory space. I accumulated not a lot of debt, but for me, it was a lot. It was $5,000. I was struggling, and I had to make decisions on paying my phone bill or paying my credit card. I just let the credit cards go.

I went into complete debt, and I open up about this in the book. A lot of the times, I have young students before they go to college that read the book, and they’re like, “I am not going to get a credit card and fall into a predatory space. I’m going to get a credit card and utilize it the way we should be utilizing it for points and as leverage.” I think that that component is so crucial. The fact that we aren’t taught this blows my mind. It’s exciting to hear that you did that. I’m sure that you impacted all of your students because nobody warned me about that pitfall.

[00:27:17] Amanda: Yes, you never know. I hope so. I’d love to move a little to– I think about government having a role in financial opportunity and stability. We also know that people don’t generally trust government. I think one of those fixes in order to bring back trust is really explaining to people in real terms what government is, what it means, what it can be. Listening to what it should be from the people who are impacted by it, one way or another, for opportunity or when you have one of those tough times and government is the only thing there for you.

So much of what you’ve been doing over the course of your career is doing that with financial literacy. I’m excited to see how you bring that into your role and already are bringing that into your role in government and rebuilding the trust just by explaining things in real terms. I have one last question for you that we always end with, which is if you had a magic wand to change one thing about how government works, not policy, but how it actually functions and serves people, what would you fix first?

[00:28:37] Linda: Our debt. The debt that we have accumulated as a country. We’re also dealing with the biggest wealth divide, obviously, that we’ve seen in ages. I feel that both of these things are related. I worry for the future of our country.

[00:28:59] Amanda: I appreciate this so much because, I just feel it, your perspective on that is knowing how the numbers work. When you’re at home or when you were in college and you can feel the pressure of, what am I going to pay? One or the other, that’s a real understanding of what debt actually does for decision-making. It makes sense that your perspective on bringing your perspective here, because people might not imagine you’d say debt as a Democrat.

When you live with understanding budgets at home, you can look at it and say, “I got to figure out how to do this. We as a country are going to have to figure out how to do this.” Then, how you do it comes with the same lived experience that is also important in how we unwind this as a country or as a next generation of leaders in government to fix that ballooning debt that we all see on the horizon. Linda, I’m so excited to have had this time with you. Really appreciate you joining us, and look forward to seeing how you’ll continue to shape this space and fix what’s broken.

[00:30:06] Linda: Thank you, Amanda. Thank you for having me.

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[00:30:14] Amanda: It was really invigorating to talk with Linda, who, like me, understands that it can be alienating to be an outsider looking in. We didn’t grow up talking about Wall Street or having an investment mindset. The leap from just getting by to getting ahead is the journey Linda shared with us. Hearing from her how to get to a place where you can finally breathe and take that next step of investing. The act of investing isn’t just for people on one side of the political aisle or another.

Financial literacy isn’t just for folks who work on Wall Street or for people who grew up from a certain background. People like Linda inspire us all to be curious, to learn, to be brave. If you figure it out yourself, help others, look out for those folks who may feel disenfranchised, left out, or simply don’t know how investing works. Because at the end of the day, an understanding of money and how to invest isn’t just about numbers; it’s about building a better economic future for everyone.

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[00:31:20] Amanda: This podcast is brought to you by Code for America, the country’s leading civic tech nonprofit for over 15 years. We believe that government can work for the people, by the people, in the new digital age. We work with government at all levels across the country to make the delivery of public service better with technology. We partner with community organizations and governments to build digital tools, change policy, and improve programs. Our goal? A resilient government that works well for everyone. Learn more at codeforamerica.org.

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